Nasser's Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt (2016) - full transcript
NASSER'S REPUBLIC: THE MAKING OF MODERN EGYPT is the first film for an American audience about Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the Arab world's most transformative leaders. In 1952, as an unknown young Egyptian colonel, Nasser led a coup that became a revolution. Over the next 18 years Nasser emerged as a titanic figure, and as a champion of Arab progress and African liberation. But what he could not offer was democracy; instead, he established the region's first and much emulated military authoritarian regime. A man of enormous charisma and ambition, Nasser became caught in the coils of his own power, dying at 52 with many dreams unrealized. The Arab Spring and its aftermath are his legacy. Director Michal Goldman (UMM KULTHUM, A VOICE LIKE EGYPT) filmed NASSER'S REPUBLIC in Egypt between 2011 and 2015. During this period of turmoil, Egyptians argued passionately about their history as a way to see what course to follow in the future. It is their voices-peasants and professors, secularists and Islamists-that drive this film.
(crowd cheering)
¶
In May, 1964, Gamal Abdel
Nasser, the President of Egypt,
came to Aswan in
the south of the country.
¶
He was celebrating the biggest
engineering project
of its kind in the world,
the High Dam.
It was the pride
of all Egyptians.
¶
¶
Nasser had freed his country
from colonial rule,
made Egypt leader
of the Arab world,
and brought millions
out of poverty.
(crowd cheering)
Egyptians called him
Father of the Poor.
But some say he offered us
bread in exchange for freedom.
(dynamite exploding)
During his
18 years in power,
Nasser unleashed forces
that not even he could control.
These forces continue to bring
people out to the streets,
to invoke his legacy
or protest against it.
(crowd roaring)
Many people would attribute
all Egyptian problems
to Nasser.
And many people will say,
"If only somebody like
Nasser would come back."
(crowd chanting)
¶
Ordinary Egyptians feel close
to Gamal Abdel Nasser
because of his humble origins.
¶
He was born in 1918 in a lower
middle class neighborhood
in Alexandria where his father
worked for the post office.
¶
When he was eight,
his mother died
and his father
quickly remarried,
leaving him without
a feeling of home.
¶
For the rest of his childhood,
he was shuttled from
relative to relative,
city to city.
¶
Egypt's big cities
were bustling.
There were the very rich,
the very poor,
and everyone in between.
There were European tourists
with Egyptians at their service.
There were Muslims,
Christians, Jews.
As a teenager,
Nasser lived for a while
in Cairo's old Jewish quarter
where rents were cheap.
But he found his true home
in Egypt's struggle
for independence.
(yelling in Arabic)
¶
In those years, he participated
in many demonstrations.
¶
Though King Farouk
was in his palace,
and Parliament was in session.
Though Egypt had
a semblance of democracy.
¶
And a long proud history.
¶
Egypt was not free.
It was part
of the British Empire.
¶
Egypt's cotton
fed Britain's mills.
¶
If there's one thing that can
sum up Egypt's nationalism
and its confrontation
with colonialism,
it is the Suez Canal.
¶
Connecting the Mediterranean
to the Red Sea,
the Canal was the lifeline
of the British Empire.
¶
The Suez Canal was
a symbol of humiliation
and exploitation of Egypt.
Since it was open in 1869.
Thousands of
peasants were dragged
from all over the country
to work with no money.
And literally thousands
dug with their bare hands,
digging it up
and thousands died.
The British controlled
the canal and all its revenue.
¶
Despite the fact that
it was dug by Egyptian hands,
passing through Egyptian soil,
its proceeds did not
end up in Egyptian pockets.
The British guarded the canal
with 70,000 troops.
The hope of everybody was to
evacuate the British soldiers
from the Suez Canal.
I found a piece of paper,
a speech by my father
when he was 17 years old.
"Egypt is in a state
of hopeless despair.
Who can remove this feeling?
Who can stop
the imperialists?"
He had become
an ardent nationalist,
placing Egypt above all
other political allegiances.
"Where is dignity?
Where is nationalism?
The nation sleeps
like men in a cave.
Who can awaken
these poor creatures
who do not even know
who they are?"
¶
I was really surprised that
he kept this piece of paper.
Don't you think so?
I mean, he kept it.
So, I believe that the political
incidents of his youth
were really very important
and had a big effect on him.
¶
In May, 1948, on Egypt's
northern border,
the new state of Israel
was declared
in what had been Palestine.
(crowd cheering)
For us, it was a
very euphoric moment.
Although everybody thought that
the Arab's would start a war
in order to undermine this
declaration of the state.
¶
To protect their new country,
the Israelis drove nearly
three quarters of a million
Palestinians into exile.
¶
In Cairo, non-Jews
rioted against Jews
in Nasser's old neighborhood.
There was an enormous
sense of Egyptian solidarity
with Palestinians.
Here we have the Egyptians
struggling to
achieve independence.
And we see what
is happening in Palestine
as a colonial movement.
Nasser had graduated from
Egypt's military academy
and was now a lieutenant colonel
in the Egyptian Army.
He had been
married for four years
and had a young daughter.
My father was very keen
to have a family.
This is something
which he really missed.
I remember my mother
used to clean his buttons
on his uniform
and I used to help her.
One morning I ran out of
the house carrying my kit
and leaving behind a newspaper
announcing the beginning
of military
operations in Palestine.
I was seized
with a strange feeling
as I raced down the steps,
thinking, "So I'm on
my way to the front."
I wanted to forget altogether
what I left behind.
All those tears
I knew were waiting
to fall from my wife's eyes.
(train whistle blowing)
The British had decided
that Egypt doesn't
really need an army.
So the army went in
with no combat experience
and it went in
with insufficient weapons.
Egypt and six other Arab nations
sent troops against Israel.
(gunfire)
At first,
the Arabs made gains.
But then the Israelis
surprised everyone
by routing the Arab armies.
In search of an explanation,
Egyptians blamed
their own government.
And then there came the
big scandal about the king
buying rotten weapons
for the Egyptian Army.
People accused their king and
his government of corruption.
¶
For four months,
Colonel Nasser's brigade
was besieged near Gaza.
They refused to surrender.
During those
long days under siege,
we started meeting
in trenches and posts.
Studying and searching.
Though we were in Palestine,
we thought only of Egypt
and how to deliver it.
This was not simply
a military defeat.
This was a structural
political defeat.
And that was the lesson
that Nasser deduced.
I became a revolutionary
over many years,
but 1948 was
the turning point.
(crowd yelling)
When the war ended,
Nasser came home to find
Egyptians taking to the streets
against a regime
they no longer believed in.
¶
Choosing to remain unnoticed,
a young officer
among many others,
Nasser began to think about
overthrowing the government.
In secret, he gathered
around him a small group
that called themselves
the Free Officers.
¶
My father actually trusted
all of the Free Officers.
This was a kind
of relationship of blood.
¶
They made alliances with groups
protesting on the streets.
The communists, nationalists,
even the fascists.
Though Nasser
was a nationalist,
he was close to
the Muslim Brotherhood.
(crowd chanting)
Formed in 1928, it had
millions in its membership
and was actively
fighting the British.
But unlike Nasser,
the Brotherhood believed
that only Islam
could save Egypt.
(yelling)
¶
In January, 1952,
a mob in downtown Cairo
destroyed some 750 buildings
associated with
Egypt's colonial elite.
It was a most unstable
political situation.
The king was
losing hold himself.
And it seems that the British
Embassy was ceasing to function.
¶
Egyptians were waiting
for a revolution,
but were unsure
who would start it.
¶
When I was a young officer,
the country was realizing that
something should happen
to the extent that when
we used to go in the streets
with our military uniform,
people telling us,
"Why don't you move?"
¶
In the early hours
of July 23, 1952,
Nasser took an enormous risk.
¶
Realizing the Free Officers
were on the verge
of being arrested,
he gave orders to move
immediately against the king.
He and his friends had only
a few hours to plan their move.
(tank rumbling)
I was charged with going
to the palace of the king
and if there's any resistance,
I deal with it.
Fortunately, the royal guard
gave up immediately
when we go, so it
was done very peacefully.
We were all taken by surprise.
We switched on the radio,
we learned that there is a coup.
That the army has taken over--
how marvelous.
There was almost no bloodshed.
The Free Officers allowed the
king to go safely into exile.
And promised to restore order.
For these reasons, the British
agreed not to intervene.
They recognized
the new government
and withdrew to their barracks
near the Suez Canal.
Nasser was 34--
no one even knew his name.
Overnight, he and his comrades
had become responsible
for their country.
To gain the peoples confidence,
they presented a famous general,
Muhammad Naguib,
as Egypt's first president.
There were two things Nasser
was very much keen to realize.
First, complete independence.
The second thing is the dignity
of the country.
The American Embassy in Cairo
was in favor
of the new government.
Ambassador Caffrey
dealt with General Naguib
while his young assistant
got to know the younger men.
I served in the embassy
as a fairly junior
foreign service officer.
My connection
told me that Nasser
and several of the other
leading members of the group
would be happy to come
and have hot dogs with us
at our apartment.
This was an occasion to just
kind of get to know "the boys"
as we tended to call them.
These boys would
work together for years.
Zakaria Mohieddine
set up Egypt's
new state security service.
¶
Anwar Sadat became Egypt's
president after Nasser's death.
Abdel Hakim Amer,
Nasser's closest friend,
was put in charge
of the armed forces.
We found Nasser
and his close associates
to be very attractive,
congenial, intelligent,
and dedicated human beings.
Nasser wanted to bring Egypt
into the modern world.
(cheering)
We have to work twice as fast.
Once to make up for a hundred
years of backwardness.
And once to provide work
for the 350,000 people
born to us each year.
¶
Britain had left Egypt with an
economy that was nearly feudal.
With peasants working
the agricultural estates
owned by the aristocracy.
Poverty, illiteracy,
and disease,
which was a good summary
of what was the situation.
¶
The first thing
the Free Officers did
was reform the ownership
of agricultural land.
¶
They took some acreage away from
the owners of the great estates
and gave it to the peasants,
who actually farmed it.
¶
Those who had
their land taken,
they hated him
with a vengeance.
And, and one of the things I
remember them complaining about
is how he had
made these peasants
be able to talk
back to their masters.
(cheering)
The wealthy land owners
opposed land reform
and they controlled
the political parties.
We needed unity,
but found dissention.
The word "I"
was on every tongue.
We had to improvise.
They marginalized
the aristocracy
by convicting some
of them of corruption.
And they set up a single party
controlled by the state.
They were determined
to protect their revolution.
¶
The Free Officers had panicked
at the threat of disorder.
But their crackdown set
a pattern for their regime.
Change, no matter how
progressive,
had to come from the top.
¶
In 1954, Nasser sidelined
Muhammad Naguib
and took control
of the presidency,
consolidating power
in his own hands.
As Egypt's new leader,
Nasser moved into a modern house
on an army compound
where he would live
for the rest of his life.
When we moved from our flat,
I was only six,
but I still remember.
Of course, for us
this house was very big.
There was a lot of light
in the house.
Inside and outside
in the garden.
Of course now I understand
this is for security,
but still, for us this
was something fascinating.
A big change.
¶
For the first time,
Nasser was in the spotlight.
His first goal was to
remove all British troops
from the Suez Canal.
If no satisfactory
solution appears possible,
what will be your next step?
Well, as for our next step,
is a secret which
I can not reveal.
¶
In negotiations, he let the
British keep the revenue
from the canal.
In exchange, the British
evacuated all their troops
from Egyptian soil.
For the first time
in 70 years,
the British were gone.
¶
Two weeks after signing
the treaty with the British,
there was a plot
to assassinate him
in Manshia Square
in Alexandria.
(gunshots)
Eight shots were fired.
A member of
the secret military wing
of the Muslim Brotherhood
was quickly arrested
and sentenced to death.
The Brotherhood had realized
that Nasser, the nationalist,
would never agree
to an Islamic state.
¶
¶
For the rest of his life,
Nasser tried
to break the Brotherhood.
He closed their businesses
and sent them to prison,
where many were tortured.
Among those imprisoned
for many years,
was Sayyid Qutb a prominent
Muslim intellectual.
¶
The Muslim Brotherhood
came out of decades in prison
with a deep sense of mistrust,
not only of the Egyptian state,
but of politics.
It was clear to all
that the nationalist agenda
and the Islamist one
were irreconcilable.
¶
(street noises)
Nasser had a vision and approach
which was about modernity.
And Nasser delivered.
He delivered land,
he delivered factories,
he delivered free education,
he delivered this so
called popular housing.
Nearly 80 percent
of Egyptians were illiterate.
Nasser built a school a day.
Nasser came and built
schools to such an extent
he reached the smallest village.
He educated girls.
He made education free
through university.
And he guaranteed
government employment
for all graduates.
He gave women the vote.
He was very conscious and very
sensitive to peoples sense
that they were part
of this revolution
and they were part of this
important moment in change.
¶
Nasser was a
very ambitious man.
He had great hopes
for a new Egypt.
He wanted Egypt to
become self-sufficient
in all kinds of goods.
From the needle to the rocket.
¶
His greatest ambition
was to build
a new hydroelectric dam
in Aswan.
¶
A dam so monumental it could
control the ebb and flow
of the Nile all through Egypt,
opening up millions
of new acres to cultivation,
providing light to thousands
of villages still in darkness,
and industrializing Egypt.
¶
The High Dam would be the
grandest project of its kind
in the world.
A symbol of the new Egypt.
And a source of pride
for every Egyptian.
¶
To develop Egypt,
Nasser needed foreign aid.
He turned first to
the United States.
I believe that the well-being of
the peoples of the Middle East
requires the nations
of that region
to build up and
strengthen their economies
and their institutions.
But the United States was
engaged in a much bigger game,
the cold war
against the Soviet Union.
¶
The two super powers saw
themselves as global enemies.
¶
John Foster Dulles,
the American Secretary of State
wasn't going
to give Nasser aid
without getting
something in return.
¶
As the super powers
divided up the world,
Dulles was determined
to keep the Soviets
out of the Middle East.
He wanted Egypt to join
a regional alliance
that would block the Soviet
Union from Saudi oil fields
and the Suez Canal.
¶
People described Dulles
as having something
called pactomania.
We'll have an alliance here
and an alliance here
and an alliance here.
And the Soviet Union
would be contained.
(propellers whirring)
Nasser read
the map differently.
He saw Egypt surrounded
by Arab and African nations
struggling to free themselves
from the colonial powers
with a hostile Israel
to his north.
For him, the Soviet Union
was not the threat.
And he refused
to sign Dulles's pact.
Egypt is doing its best
to protect its interests
from the cold war which is going
now between East and West.
He needed another way.
He traveled to Indonesia
to explore the possibilities
of neutrality.
The Bandung Conference
opened a new world to him.
Nasser was meeting with Nehru
and Tito and Zhou Enlai,
all the great leaders
and saying we are neither with
the West nor with the East.
Marvelous.
They were all wrestling
with the same problem,
how to get money for development
from the super powers
without becoming
the pawn of either one.
He would attempt
to remain neutral
by obtaining aid
from both sides.
He was able to get loans from
the Russians to build his army.
And he turned to the Americans
for aid to build the High Dam.
But for Dulles,
neutrality was a suspect stance.
He wanted countries to line up
with the United States
and if they didn't,
he increasingly as time went on,
saw them as adversaries.
So Dulles rejected Nasser's
request for aid
to build the High Dam.
And does it fairly abruptly.
He calls the Egyptian
ambassador in and he said,
the offer is off the table.
It was a kind of
confrontational American move
towards the Egyptians
and Nasser responds in kind.
"You think you can
push me around,
I can push back."
Shelving the project
was impossible.
So the funds had to be raised.
¶
As he had done
the night of the coup,
he decided to
make a bold move.
He would nationalize
the Suez Canal Company
on to buy Britain and France.
Egypt would keep the canal's
massive revenue for itself.
¶
Nationalizing the Suez Canal
took us all by surprise.
(crowd cheering)
In July, 1956, on the fourth
anniversary of the revolution,
he made the announcement.
He said, "While I'm
talking to you now..."
Honestly,
until today when I hear,
"In the name of the nation,
I declare the nationalization
of the Suez Canal,"
as an Egyptian,
still my, you know,
the hairs can
feel them standing.
All Egyptians knew that
nationalizing the canal
was dangerous.
A direct challenge to Britain.
But they were
behind Nasser anyway.
(cheering)
It meant
expression of dignity.
Settling old accounts
and starting to be free.
Britain's prime minister,
Anthony Eden,
took the nationalization
as a cause for war.
We all know this is how
fascist governments behave.
And we all remember only too
well what the cost can be
in giving in to fascism.
I was waiting for
reaction from Britain,
but I was surprised by
the amount of reaction.
¶
Over the next months,
there was intensive diplomacy
to stave off war.
Nasser was willing
to guarantee passage
for ships of all nations.
But he was not willing to give
up control of the canal.
¶
They started training
us for fighting.
And the volunteers were immense.
Nasser was optimistic.
His closest friend,
Abdel Hakim Amer
was building the Egyptian Army
with Soviet weapons.
And as the months passed
and no attack came,
Nasser thought he had
managed to avoid war.
But what nobody knew was that
Britain, France, and Israel
had made a secret plan.
The idea sprang from French and
Israelis with the British
that they can create a coalition
to you know, to undermine
not only the revolution regime
but Nasser, to topple Nasser.
On October 29, 1956,
the Israelis took
the Egyptians by surprise.
(bomb exploding)
Their army quickly
overran the Sinai.
A few days later,
the British and
the French invaded.
The Suez War happened
when I was only ten.
We realized the attack
of the British and the French
through planes
just at the back
of our house, and our father
went up to see, "What's this?"
And then, he knew that
the attack started.
The British and the French
occupied the Canal Zone.
In Cairo, Nasser
remained defiant.
Our slogan is, "We will fight."
We will fight and we
will not surrender.
Then, with Egypt occupied
and its army defeated,
the Cold War itself
came to Nasser's rescue.
The nightmare of the Cold War
was that a local conflict
might escalate and would
draw in intervention
from one superpower,
which would draw in
the other, and that,
at some point, somebody
would say that the only way
we can dominate is to resort
to nuclear weapons.
In Moscow, Premier Khrushchev
threatened to intervene on
Egypt's behalf.
At this moment, the
situation is somber.
In Washington,
President Eisenhower
stepped in and forced
the French and British
to withdraw.
We believe these actions
to have been taken in error,
for we do not accept
the use of force as
a wise or proper instrument
of the settlement
of international disputes.
¶
With the Suez War,
Nasser had turned
a military defeat into
a huge diplomatic victory.
He got rid of the
British once and for all.
I wish my successor
all good fortune,
and Godspeed to you all.
Goodbye.
One should not minimize it.
He was the first leader
to defeat...defeat Britain
since Britain
occupied Egypt in 1882.
Nobody did it.
¶
The whole Arab would
had watched Nasser take
on Britain, France,
and Israel, and win.
All this allowed
third world countries
like us to play.
¶
And we played
and Nasser played.
¶
¶
Sometimes, they called him,
"The Lion of Africa,"
because he's the one who
faced that colonialists.
We were able to give offices
to all the liberation
movements in Cairo,
so we were held
all over Africa.
During his years in power,
Nasser aided and inspired
Arabs and Africans who rose
up against colonialism.
Suez gave confidence
to many countries
and I think Suez helped many
of the African countries to
be sure of themselves and
insist about independence.
¶
Very vivid memory
of my childhood
is us standing in the balcony
waiting for Nasser's motorcade
to pass, and then having
the sense that he's looking
right at you because
he would be, you know,
looking at the balconies,
looking at the
people in the street.
¶
Unlike these days,
it was always an open car.
¶
It was really an Egypt
that was, more or less,
defined by Nasser,
from Abdel Halim Hafez...
(singing in foreign language)
...to Umm Kulthum...
(singing in foreign language)
...to the cinema of the time,
the music of the time.
And the whole
panorama of our heroes,
Tito and Nehru
and Kwame Nkrumah,
this pantheon to which
Nasser was central in
our childhood imagination.
¶
Nasser reclaimed Egypt
for the Egyptians.
¶
To do so, he purged it
of its European influence.
¶
From '56 onwards,
Nasser nationalized
the foreign companies,
which meant that many
foreigners had to leave.
Many of these so-called
foreigners were really
Egyptians of European origin.
¶
Ultimately, it emptied
Egypt of, what I think,
was a very precious part
of Egyptian culture,
which is the Jews,
the Greeks, the Armenians,
that had lived
here for centuries.
¶
At the time, we welcomed
all these mergers as a natural
reaction to a long
period of colonialists.
We have to get things
back into our own hands.
¶
When Arabs looked at the map,
they saw a world that had been
united for more
than six centuries
defeated and carved
up by Europeans.
¶
When they looked at Nasser,
they saw a leader
who could reunite them.
¶
The Kuwaitis,
the Lebanese, the Jordanians,
the city officials,
they thought,
"How marvelous it would be
if we unite in
one single state?
What a great nation
we would become in
a matter of years!"
¶
At the beginning of 1958,
Shukri al-Quwatli,
the President of Syria,
came to Cairo with an
enormous request:
To save Syria from impending
civil war, Syria and Egypt
must become one nation
under Nasser's leadership.
¶
But Nasser was afraid that
this was coming too early.
We should take some time
before they know each
other more and so on.
The pressure was so
strong from the Syrians.
¶
So, Nasser took the risk
and agreed to union with Syria.
¶
The concept of
Pan-Arab is aroused.
Immense emotion.
Really great emotions.
We were all fresh, optimistic.
The world was different
and what seems impossible now
seemed very possible then.
¶
The United Arab Republic
was the largest republic
in the Middle East.
Nasser was now someone
neither superpower could ignore.
The Americans
gave him food aid:
Wheat and edible oil
and tea and loans at
very low interest rate.
And the Soviet Union
financed the High Dam
as well as many industries.
In 1960, with his prestige
at an all-time high, Nasser
was, at last, able
to begin work on
the project for which
he had risked war:
The High Dam at Aswan.
The High Dam signaled
Egypt's daring and ambition.
For the next four years,
30,000 men worked around
the clock to build the dam
and dig a bed for one of
the largest manmade
lakes in the world.
¶
I remember the songs
from my childhood.
We used to sing that
while the High Dam
and the country's efforts
were building the High Dam.
It said, "We are
going to build,"
and we did build.
¶
On May 14th, 1964,
Nasser brought Premier
Nikita Khrushchev
to Aswan to celebrate
the moment that Soviet
funds had paid for.
In a triumph of engineering,
modern Egypt became possible.
As water filled
the new Lake Nasser,
ancient farmlands of the
Nubians were drowned forever.
¶
Nasser was building an
Arab world for all to see,
but there were cracks
in its foundation.
The first cost was
the union with Syria.
¶
Syria was a poor country and
Nasser wanted to develop it.
As he had done in Egypt,
he controlled the
process himself.
¶
He left his friend,
Abdel-Hakim Amer,
in Damascus to
carry out his agenda.
¶
In 1961, after only
three years of union,
a group of business
and army leaders rebelled.
¶
Amer was not aware of
what's happening around him.
There was a sort
of a coup d'état.
And it was planned by Syrians
who are wealthy in his office.
¶
My father did not spend
a lot of time with us,
but we had always
lunched together.
He never talked to us about
politics during lunch,
except if something
happens at the moment;
a piece of paper is brought
to him and he...
something happens.
Syria withdrew from
the union with Egypt.
He called Amer home
but did not dismiss him.
By now, Amer had established
his own power base
within the army.
Nasser concluded it would be
too dangerous to challenge him.
Amer was able to isolate Nasser
from the army completely.
The Syrian coup
revealed something else:
A deep division among the Arabs.
The coup had been
bankrolled by Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi monarchy
was challenging Nasser's
leadership of the Arab world.
¶
Their challenge
played out in Yemen.
¶
Bordering on Saudi Arabia,
it was locked in civil war.
¶
Yemen's king,
backed by the Saudis,
was fighting a group
of colonels who wanted
to set up a Nasserist republic.
¶
The colonels asked
Nasser for aid.
¶
¶
Over the next six years,
Nasser sent as many as
70,000 troops to Yemen.
¶
¶
The Yemen War also affected
our economy because it cost
Egypt a lot of money.
As Nasser's economic needs
grew, so did his need for funds.
He nationalized many companies,
which, I believe, was a very,
very big mistake he did.
The Egyptian state was
now more responsible
than ever for the economy.
Nasser had promised employment
and he kept his promise.
The ministries started
to interfere in the
management of the companies.
To fight unemployment, the
government gave instructions
to appoint a certain number
of workers in the company.
So, as the public sector
companies became overloaded
with workers they don't need,
this led them to make
losses, of course.
¶
¶
¶
Nasser got quite
worried and frightened.
He started to tighten his grip.
The police state started
to grow very obvious.
¶
Censorship, surveillance,
and imprisonment increased.
¶
¶
Outwardly, Nasser projected
an image of strength.
His large army was
now well-equipped
with Soviet weapons.
By 1967, the Palestinians
and the Syrians thought
Nasser was ready
to take on Israel.
The border between Israel
and Egypt was 11
years quiet, no walls,
but the Syrian border
was hot all the '60s.
Trouble and death
in the Middle East;
a ground and air battle
heavily damages Tiberius
on the Israeli-Syrian border.
Syria intensified
its border attacks,
intending to draw Nasser in.
The fighting erupted quickly
when Syrians allegedly fired
on Israeli farmers
operating tractors.
Israel retaliated
against Syria with force,
threatening to
topple the regime.
Nasser could not avoid
coming to Syria's aid.
So, Nasser did
everything short of war.
He moved troops
into the Sinai,
he closed the Gulf of
Aqaba to Israeli ships.
The Israelis saw this escalation
as a threat to their nation.
Nasser was gambling
that the superpowers
would once again intervene.
But the Americans were not
as focused on the region
as they had been
during the Suez War;
President Johnson
was as mired in his own war
as Nasser was in Yemen.
Johnson was very,
very preoccupied
with Vietnam, and,
by the time he noticed
the Middle East was
getting very dangerous,
he was already beginning
to spiral toward the point
of no return.
And this time,
the Soviet Union
would not intervene
on his behalf either.
I believe that Nasser
overestimated how much
he was manipulating
international politics
and that was really
the killing of Nasser.
On June 5th, 1967,
Israel attacked Egypt,
then Jordan and Syria.
¶
As Israel took more territory,
hundreds of thousands of
displaced Palestinians fled
into neighboring countries.
¶
Israel's territorial
gain was the Arabs' loss.
The region was
reconfigured and destabilized.
¶
Nobody expected that he's
going to be destroyed in
such a massive quick,
rapid, instant way.
Nobody, nobody.
¶
Israelis call it
The Six Day War.
For Arabs, it was
a catastrophe.
¶
The defeat of June '67
was the formative experience
of my generation.
It's very difficult
to describe it now
because it just came out of--
It was...it was...
lightning in a blue sky.
You get something that's
settled in not six days,
but six hours.
Egyptian soldiers
are running away.
They're not fighting,
they're running,
without their weapons,
without their helmets.
You had Israeli soldiers
swimming in the Suez Canal.
The depth of the
humiliation was massive.
It really was...was massive.
People, young and old,
people were crying
on the streets.
It meant that all what we had
been hearing over the years
about building military
power in Egypt is false.
You were deceiving us.
On the night of June 9th,
Nasser addressed the nation.
This is not popularity
or political support.
This is, "For goodness sake,
find a way out for us,
since you have led
us to this mess!"
¶
His country was defeated,
his people had been humiliated,
and, with Israeli troops
in the Sinai, Egypt was
once again occupied
by foreigners.
¶
Nasser decided to stay on
and rebuild his country.
¶
Amer wanted to return back
to being head of the army.
My father refused.
And then, there was
a clash between them.
¶
Nasser's men were able
to place Amer under
house arrest...where
he took poison.
¶
I saw President Nasser
after Amer committed suicide.
Still, at this time,
he was still having
the affection for Amer.
¶
"I'm like a man walking
in a desert, surrounded
by shifting sands.
With each new step,
I have no idea whether
I'll be swallowed up
or find the right path."
¶
My father, after the defeat,
for two or three months,
he didn't smile.
I never saw him smile.
¶
The defeat inspired
a new generation
to demand a role in the
direction of their country.
This is the time where I became,
and a lot of my
generation became,
politically active.
It was no so much deny the
Nasserist project as feeling
that the Nasserist project
was betrayed, that it
was let down, that it
was up to us to complete
and to take it further than
even Nasser had envisaged.
When he first took power,
Nasser had chosen
revolution over democracy.
Now, he promised
democracy as well.
He reaffirmed his promise
in the factory town
of Kafr el-Dawwar.
¶
It was here, in the first
weeks of the revolution,
that three officers
had punished workers
for their spontaneous strike.
¶
But that is not what the people
of Kafr el-Dawwar cared about.
¶
¶
The newsreel captured
Nasser's ecstatic reception
in Kafr el-Dawwar,
but there would be no coverage
of the angry demonstrations
months later when young people
realized that they
still had no voice.
¶
¶
He did not deliver
on the promise,
not because he didn't want to,
but because he couldn't.
The system he put in
place for so many years,
the erosion of politics,
not only institutionally,
but psychologically,
was so deep that it
was very difficult
to have this U-turn.
When Nasser realized
this in 1967-68,
it was just too late for him.
¶
My father had his first heart
attack in September, 1969.
¶
Almost exactly a year later,
he was called from his vacation
to negotiate an end
to a bloody civil war
between the Palestinians
and the Jordanians.
¶
It was very difficult,
and this effort,
his heart could not stand.
¶
That afternoon, he had
another heart attack.
¶
It was a major heart attack
and he didn't survive.
He was only 52 years old.
¶
My father never said anything
about his accomplishments.
¶
I believe he left our world
without accomplishing what
he really wanted.
¶
¶
Peasants came in
from the countryside.
More than five million people
were on the streets
of Cairo that day.
For me, it was a
very conflicted feeling
because, ideologically
and politically you felt
you have to reject Abdel Nasser,
but, somehow, emotionally,
there was this tie.
You were always kind of
fighting against yourself.
¶
¶
Egyptians confront Nasser's
legacy at every turn.
¶
They have risen up
against authoritarian rule,
but the military has remained
fundamentally in power.
¶
The Muslim Brotherhood and
the State remain unreconciled.
¶
But no Egyptian leader
since Gamal Abdel Nasser
has seriously addressed
the needs of the poor...
and protesters' chants
still echo his words.
¶
I thought we had buried him.
It turns out he's still alive.
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶
In May, 1964, Gamal Abdel
Nasser, the President of Egypt,
came to Aswan in
the south of the country.
¶
He was celebrating the biggest
engineering project
of its kind in the world,
the High Dam.
It was the pride
of all Egyptians.
¶
¶
Nasser had freed his country
from colonial rule,
made Egypt leader
of the Arab world,
and brought millions
out of poverty.
(crowd cheering)
Egyptians called him
Father of the Poor.
But some say he offered us
bread in exchange for freedom.
(dynamite exploding)
During his
18 years in power,
Nasser unleashed forces
that not even he could control.
These forces continue to bring
people out to the streets,
to invoke his legacy
or protest against it.
(crowd roaring)
Many people would attribute
all Egyptian problems
to Nasser.
And many people will say,
"If only somebody like
Nasser would come back."
(crowd chanting)
¶
Ordinary Egyptians feel close
to Gamal Abdel Nasser
because of his humble origins.
¶
He was born in 1918 in a lower
middle class neighborhood
in Alexandria where his father
worked for the post office.
¶
When he was eight,
his mother died
and his father
quickly remarried,
leaving him without
a feeling of home.
¶
For the rest of his childhood,
he was shuttled from
relative to relative,
city to city.
¶
Egypt's big cities
were bustling.
There were the very rich,
the very poor,
and everyone in between.
There were European tourists
with Egyptians at their service.
There were Muslims,
Christians, Jews.
As a teenager,
Nasser lived for a while
in Cairo's old Jewish quarter
where rents were cheap.
But he found his true home
in Egypt's struggle
for independence.
(yelling in Arabic)
¶
In those years, he participated
in many demonstrations.
¶
Though King Farouk
was in his palace,
and Parliament was in session.
Though Egypt had
a semblance of democracy.
¶
And a long proud history.
¶
Egypt was not free.
It was part
of the British Empire.
¶
Egypt's cotton
fed Britain's mills.
¶
If there's one thing that can
sum up Egypt's nationalism
and its confrontation
with colonialism,
it is the Suez Canal.
¶
Connecting the Mediterranean
to the Red Sea,
the Canal was the lifeline
of the British Empire.
¶
The Suez Canal was
a symbol of humiliation
and exploitation of Egypt.
Since it was open in 1869.
Thousands of
peasants were dragged
from all over the country
to work with no money.
And literally thousands
dug with their bare hands,
digging it up
and thousands died.
The British controlled
the canal and all its revenue.
¶
Despite the fact that
it was dug by Egyptian hands,
passing through Egyptian soil,
its proceeds did not
end up in Egyptian pockets.
The British guarded the canal
with 70,000 troops.
The hope of everybody was to
evacuate the British soldiers
from the Suez Canal.
I found a piece of paper,
a speech by my father
when he was 17 years old.
"Egypt is in a state
of hopeless despair.
Who can remove this feeling?
Who can stop
the imperialists?"
He had become
an ardent nationalist,
placing Egypt above all
other political allegiances.
"Where is dignity?
Where is nationalism?
The nation sleeps
like men in a cave.
Who can awaken
these poor creatures
who do not even know
who they are?"
¶
I was really surprised that
he kept this piece of paper.
Don't you think so?
I mean, he kept it.
So, I believe that the political
incidents of his youth
were really very important
and had a big effect on him.
¶
In May, 1948, on Egypt's
northern border,
the new state of Israel
was declared
in what had been Palestine.
(crowd cheering)
For us, it was a
very euphoric moment.
Although everybody thought that
the Arab's would start a war
in order to undermine this
declaration of the state.
¶
To protect their new country,
the Israelis drove nearly
three quarters of a million
Palestinians into exile.
¶
In Cairo, non-Jews
rioted against Jews
in Nasser's old neighborhood.
There was an enormous
sense of Egyptian solidarity
with Palestinians.
Here we have the Egyptians
struggling to
achieve independence.
And we see what
is happening in Palestine
as a colonial movement.
Nasser had graduated from
Egypt's military academy
and was now a lieutenant colonel
in the Egyptian Army.
He had been
married for four years
and had a young daughter.
My father was very keen
to have a family.
This is something
which he really missed.
I remember my mother
used to clean his buttons
on his uniform
and I used to help her.
One morning I ran out of
the house carrying my kit
and leaving behind a newspaper
announcing the beginning
of military
operations in Palestine.
I was seized
with a strange feeling
as I raced down the steps,
thinking, "So I'm on
my way to the front."
I wanted to forget altogether
what I left behind.
All those tears
I knew were waiting
to fall from my wife's eyes.
(train whistle blowing)
The British had decided
that Egypt doesn't
really need an army.
So the army went in
with no combat experience
and it went in
with insufficient weapons.
Egypt and six other Arab nations
sent troops against Israel.
(gunfire)
At first,
the Arabs made gains.
But then the Israelis
surprised everyone
by routing the Arab armies.
In search of an explanation,
Egyptians blamed
their own government.
And then there came the
big scandal about the king
buying rotten weapons
for the Egyptian Army.
People accused their king and
his government of corruption.
¶
For four months,
Colonel Nasser's brigade
was besieged near Gaza.
They refused to surrender.
During those
long days under siege,
we started meeting
in trenches and posts.
Studying and searching.
Though we were in Palestine,
we thought only of Egypt
and how to deliver it.
This was not simply
a military defeat.
This was a structural
political defeat.
And that was the lesson
that Nasser deduced.
I became a revolutionary
over many years,
but 1948 was
the turning point.
(crowd yelling)
When the war ended,
Nasser came home to find
Egyptians taking to the streets
against a regime
they no longer believed in.
¶
Choosing to remain unnoticed,
a young officer
among many others,
Nasser began to think about
overthrowing the government.
In secret, he gathered
around him a small group
that called themselves
the Free Officers.
¶
My father actually trusted
all of the Free Officers.
This was a kind
of relationship of blood.
¶
They made alliances with groups
protesting on the streets.
The communists, nationalists,
even the fascists.
Though Nasser
was a nationalist,
he was close to
the Muslim Brotherhood.
(crowd chanting)
Formed in 1928, it had
millions in its membership
and was actively
fighting the British.
But unlike Nasser,
the Brotherhood believed
that only Islam
could save Egypt.
(yelling)
¶
In January, 1952,
a mob in downtown Cairo
destroyed some 750 buildings
associated with
Egypt's colonial elite.
It was a most unstable
political situation.
The king was
losing hold himself.
And it seems that the British
Embassy was ceasing to function.
¶
Egyptians were waiting
for a revolution,
but were unsure
who would start it.
¶
When I was a young officer,
the country was realizing that
something should happen
to the extent that when
we used to go in the streets
with our military uniform,
people telling us,
"Why don't you move?"
¶
In the early hours
of July 23, 1952,
Nasser took an enormous risk.
¶
Realizing the Free Officers
were on the verge
of being arrested,
he gave orders to move
immediately against the king.
He and his friends had only
a few hours to plan their move.
(tank rumbling)
I was charged with going
to the palace of the king
and if there's any resistance,
I deal with it.
Fortunately, the royal guard
gave up immediately
when we go, so it
was done very peacefully.
We were all taken by surprise.
We switched on the radio,
we learned that there is a coup.
That the army has taken over--
how marvelous.
There was almost no bloodshed.
The Free Officers allowed the
king to go safely into exile.
And promised to restore order.
For these reasons, the British
agreed not to intervene.
They recognized
the new government
and withdrew to their barracks
near the Suez Canal.
Nasser was 34--
no one even knew his name.
Overnight, he and his comrades
had become responsible
for their country.
To gain the peoples confidence,
they presented a famous general,
Muhammad Naguib,
as Egypt's first president.
There were two things Nasser
was very much keen to realize.
First, complete independence.
The second thing is the dignity
of the country.
The American Embassy in Cairo
was in favor
of the new government.
Ambassador Caffrey
dealt with General Naguib
while his young assistant
got to know the younger men.
I served in the embassy
as a fairly junior
foreign service officer.
My connection
told me that Nasser
and several of the other
leading members of the group
would be happy to come
and have hot dogs with us
at our apartment.
This was an occasion to just
kind of get to know "the boys"
as we tended to call them.
These boys would
work together for years.
Zakaria Mohieddine
set up Egypt's
new state security service.
¶
Anwar Sadat became Egypt's
president after Nasser's death.
Abdel Hakim Amer,
Nasser's closest friend,
was put in charge
of the armed forces.
We found Nasser
and his close associates
to be very attractive,
congenial, intelligent,
and dedicated human beings.
Nasser wanted to bring Egypt
into the modern world.
(cheering)
We have to work twice as fast.
Once to make up for a hundred
years of backwardness.
And once to provide work
for the 350,000 people
born to us each year.
¶
Britain had left Egypt with an
economy that was nearly feudal.
With peasants working
the agricultural estates
owned by the aristocracy.
Poverty, illiteracy,
and disease,
which was a good summary
of what was the situation.
¶
The first thing
the Free Officers did
was reform the ownership
of agricultural land.
¶
They took some acreage away from
the owners of the great estates
and gave it to the peasants,
who actually farmed it.
¶
Those who had
their land taken,
they hated him
with a vengeance.
And, and one of the things I
remember them complaining about
is how he had
made these peasants
be able to talk
back to their masters.
(cheering)
The wealthy land owners
opposed land reform
and they controlled
the political parties.
We needed unity,
but found dissention.
The word "I"
was on every tongue.
We had to improvise.
They marginalized
the aristocracy
by convicting some
of them of corruption.
And they set up a single party
controlled by the state.
They were determined
to protect their revolution.
¶
The Free Officers had panicked
at the threat of disorder.
But their crackdown set
a pattern for their regime.
Change, no matter how
progressive,
had to come from the top.
¶
In 1954, Nasser sidelined
Muhammad Naguib
and took control
of the presidency,
consolidating power
in his own hands.
As Egypt's new leader,
Nasser moved into a modern house
on an army compound
where he would live
for the rest of his life.
When we moved from our flat,
I was only six,
but I still remember.
Of course, for us
this house was very big.
There was a lot of light
in the house.
Inside and outside
in the garden.
Of course now I understand
this is for security,
but still, for us this
was something fascinating.
A big change.
¶
For the first time,
Nasser was in the spotlight.
His first goal was to
remove all British troops
from the Suez Canal.
If no satisfactory
solution appears possible,
what will be your next step?
Well, as for our next step,
is a secret which
I can not reveal.
¶
In negotiations, he let the
British keep the revenue
from the canal.
In exchange, the British
evacuated all their troops
from Egyptian soil.
For the first time
in 70 years,
the British were gone.
¶
Two weeks after signing
the treaty with the British,
there was a plot
to assassinate him
in Manshia Square
in Alexandria.
(gunshots)
Eight shots were fired.
A member of
the secret military wing
of the Muslim Brotherhood
was quickly arrested
and sentenced to death.
The Brotherhood had realized
that Nasser, the nationalist,
would never agree
to an Islamic state.
¶
¶
For the rest of his life,
Nasser tried
to break the Brotherhood.
He closed their businesses
and sent them to prison,
where many were tortured.
Among those imprisoned
for many years,
was Sayyid Qutb a prominent
Muslim intellectual.
¶
The Muslim Brotherhood
came out of decades in prison
with a deep sense of mistrust,
not only of the Egyptian state,
but of politics.
It was clear to all
that the nationalist agenda
and the Islamist one
were irreconcilable.
¶
(street noises)
Nasser had a vision and approach
which was about modernity.
And Nasser delivered.
He delivered land,
he delivered factories,
he delivered free education,
he delivered this so
called popular housing.
Nearly 80 percent
of Egyptians were illiterate.
Nasser built a school a day.
Nasser came and built
schools to such an extent
he reached the smallest village.
He educated girls.
He made education free
through university.
And he guaranteed
government employment
for all graduates.
He gave women the vote.
He was very conscious and very
sensitive to peoples sense
that they were part
of this revolution
and they were part of this
important moment in change.
¶
Nasser was a
very ambitious man.
He had great hopes
for a new Egypt.
He wanted Egypt to
become self-sufficient
in all kinds of goods.
From the needle to the rocket.
¶
His greatest ambition
was to build
a new hydroelectric dam
in Aswan.
¶
A dam so monumental it could
control the ebb and flow
of the Nile all through Egypt,
opening up millions
of new acres to cultivation,
providing light to thousands
of villages still in darkness,
and industrializing Egypt.
¶
The High Dam would be the
grandest project of its kind
in the world.
A symbol of the new Egypt.
And a source of pride
for every Egyptian.
¶
To develop Egypt,
Nasser needed foreign aid.
He turned first to
the United States.
I believe that the well-being of
the peoples of the Middle East
requires the nations
of that region
to build up and
strengthen their economies
and their institutions.
But the United States was
engaged in a much bigger game,
the cold war
against the Soviet Union.
¶
The two super powers saw
themselves as global enemies.
¶
John Foster Dulles,
the American Secretary of State
wasn't going
to give Nasser aid
without getting
something in return.
¶
As the super powers
divided up the world,
Dulles was determined
to keep the Soviets
out of the Middle East.
He wanted Egypt to join
a regional alliance
that would block the Soviet
Union from Saudi oil fields
and the Suez Canal.
¶
People described Dulles
as having something
called pactomania.
We'll have an alliance here
and an alliance here
and an alliance here.
And the Soviet Union
would be contained.
(propellers whirring)
Nasser read
the map differently.
He saw Egypt surrounded
by Arab and African nations
struggling to free themselves
from the colonial powers
with a hostile Israel
to his north.
For him, the Soviet Union
was not the threat.
And he refused
to sign Dulles's pact.
Egypt is doing its best
to protect its interests
from the cold war which is going
now between East and West.
He needed another way.
He traveled to Indonesia
to explore the possibilities
of neutrality.
The Bandung Conference
opened a new world to him.
Nasser was meeting with Nehru
and Tito and Zhou Enlai,
all the great leaders
and saying we are neither with
the West nor with the East.
Marvelous.
They were all wrestling
with the same problem,
how to get money for development
from the super powers
without becoming
the pawn of either one.
He would attempt
to remain neutral
by obtaining aid
from both sides.
He was able to get loans from
the Russians to build his army.
And he turned to the Americans
for aid to build the High Dam.
But for Dulles,
neutrality was a suspect stance.
He wanted countries to line up
with the United States
and if they didn't,
he increasingly as time went on,
saw them as adversaries.
So Dulles rejected Nasser's
request for aid
to build the High Dam.
And does it fairly abruptly.
He calls the Egyptian
ambassador in and he said,
the offer is off the table.
It was a kind of
confrontational American move
towards the Egyptians
and Nasser responds in kind.
"You think you can
push me around,
I can push back."
Shelving the project
was impossible.
So the funds had to be raised.
¶
As he had done
the night of the coup,
he decided to
make a bold move.
He would nationalize
the Suez Canal Company
on to buy Britain and France.
Egypt would keep the canal's
massive revenue for itself.
¶
Nationalizing the Suez Canal
took us all by surprise.
(crowd cheering)
In July, 1956, on the fourth
anniversary of the revolution,
he made the announcement.
He said, "While I'm
talking to you now..."
Honestly,
until today when I hear,
"In the name of the nation,
I declare the nationalization
of the Suez Canal,"
as an Egyptian,
still my, you know,
the hairs can
feel them standing.
All Egyptians knew that
nationalizing the canal
was dangerous.
A direct challenge to Britain.
But they were
behind Nasser anyway.
(cheering)
It meant
expression of dignity.
Settling old accounts
and starting to be free.
Britain's prime minister,
Anthony Eden,
took the nationalization
as a cause for war.
We all know this is how
fascist governments behave.
And we all remember only too
well what the cost can be
in giving in to fascism.
I was waiting for
reaction from Britain,
but I was surprised by
the amount of reaction.
¶
Over the next months,
there was intensive diplomacy
to stave off war.
Nasser was willing
to guarantee passage
for ships of all nations.
But he was not willing to give
up control of the canal.
¶
They started training
us for fighting.
And the volunteers were immense.
Nasser was optimistic.
His closest friend,
Abdel Hakim Amer
was building the Egyptian Army
with Soviet weapons.
And as the months passed
and no attack came,
Nasser thought he had
managed to avoid war.
But what nobody knew was that
Britain, France, and Israel
had made a secret plan.
The idea sprang from French and
Israelis with the British
that they can create a coalition
to you know, to undermine
not only the revolution regime
but Nasser, to topple Nasser.
On October 29, 1956,
the Israelis took
the Egyptians by surprise.
(bomb exploding)
Their army quickly
overran the Sinai.
A few days later,
the British and
the French invaded.
The Suez War happened
when I was only ten.
We realized the attack
of the British and the French
through planes
just at the back
of our house, and our father
went up to see, "What's this?"
And then, he knew that
the attack started.
The British and the French
occupied the Canal Zone.
In Cairo, Nasser
remained defiant.
Our slogan is, "We will fight."
We will fight and we
will not surrender.
Then, with Egypt occupied
and its army defeated,
the Cold War itself
came to Nasser's rescue.
The nightmare of the Cold War
was that a local conflict
might escalate and would
draw in intervention
from one superpower,
which would draw in
the other, and that,
at some point, somebody
would say that the only way
we can dominate is to resort
to nuclear weapons.
In Moscow, Premier Khrushchev
threatened to intervene on
Egypt's behalf.
At this moment, the
situation is somber.
In Washington,
President Eisenhower
stepped in and forced
the French and British
to withdraw.
We believe these actions
to have been taken in error,
for we do not accept
the use of force as
a wise or proper instrument
of the settlement
of international disputes.
¶
With the Suez War,
Nasser had turned
a military defeat into
a huge diplomatic victory.
He got rid of the
British once and for all.
I wish my successor
all good fortune,
and Godspeed to you all.
Goodbye.
One should not minimize it.
He was the first leader
to defeat...defeat Britain
since Britain
occupied Egypt in 1882.
Nobody did it.
¶
The whole Arab would
had watched Nasser take
on Britain, France,
and Israel, and win.
All this allowed
third world countries
like us to play.
¶
And we played
and Nasser played.
¶
¶
Sometimes, they called him,
"The Lion of Africa,"
because he's the one who
faced that colonialists.
We were able to give offices
to all the liberation
movements in Cairo,
so we were held
all over Africa.
During his years in power,
Nasser aided and inspired
Arabs and Africans who rose
up against colonialism.
Suez gave confidence
to many countries
and I think Suez helped many
of the African countries to
be sure of themselves and
insist about independence.
¶
Very vivid memory
of my childhood
is us standing in the balcony
waiting for Nasser's motorcade
to pass, and then having
the sense that he's looking
right at you because
he would be, you know,
looking at the balconies,
looking at the
people in the street.
¶
Unlike these days,
it was always an open car.
¶
It was really an Egypt
that was, more or less,
defined by Nasser,
from Abdel Halim Hafez...
(singing in foreign language)
...to Umm Kulthum...
(singing in foreign language)
...to the cinema of the time,
the music of the time.
And the whole
panorama of our heroes,
Tito and Nehru
and Kwame Nkrumah,
this pantheon to which
Nasser was central in
our childhood imagination.
¶
Nasser reclaimed Egypt
for the Egyptians.
¶
To do so, he purged it
of its European influence.
¶
From '56 onwards,
Nasser nationalized
the foreign companies,
which meant that many
foreigners had to leave.
Many of these so-called
foreigners were really
Egyptians of European origin.
¶
Ultimately, it emptied
Egypt of, what I think,
was a very precious part
of Egyptian culture,
which is the Jews,
the Greeks, the Armenians,
that had lived
here for centuries.
¶
At the time, we welcomed
all these mergers as a natural
reaction to a long
period of colonialists.
We have to get things
back into our own hands.
¶
When Arabs looked at the map,
they saw a world that had been
united for more
than six centuries
defeated and carved
up by Europeans.
¶
When they looked at Nasser,
they saw a leader
who could reunite them.
¶
The Kuwaitis,
the Lebanese, the Jordanians,
the city officials,
they thought,
"How marvelous it would be
if we unite in
one single state?
What a great nation
we would become in
a matter of years!"
¶
At the beginning of 1958,
Shukri al-Quwatli,
the President of Syria,
came to Cairo with an
enormous request:
To save Syria from impending
civil war, Syria and Egypt
must become one nation
under Nasser's leadership.
¶
But Nasser was afraid that
this was coming too early.
We should take some time
before they know each
other more and so on.
The pressure was so
strong from the Syrians.
¶
So, Nasser took the risk
and agreed to union with Syria.
¶
The concept of
Pan-Arab is aroused.
Immense emotion.
Really great emotions.
We were all fresh, optimistic.
The world was different
and what seems impossible now
seemed very possible then.
¶
The United Arab Republic
was the largest republic
in the Middle East.
Nasser was now someone
neither superpower could ignore.
The Americans
gave him food aid:
Wheat and edible oil
and tea and loans at
very low interest rate.
And the Soviet Union
financed the High Dam
as well as many industries.
In 1960, with his prestige
at an all-time high, Nasser
was, at last, able
to begin work on
the project for which
he had risked war:
The High Dam at Aswan.
The High Dam signaled
Egypt's daring and ambition.
For the next four years,
30,000 men worked around
the clock to build the dam
and dig a bed for one of
the largest manmade
lakes in the world.
¶
I remember the songs
from my childhood.
We used to sing that
while the High Dam
and the country's efforts
were building the High Dam.
It said, "We are
going to build,"
and we did build.
¶
On May 14th, 1964,
Nasser brought Premier
Nikita Khrushchev
to Aswan to celebrate
the moment that Soviet
funds had paid for.
In a triumph of engineering,
modern Egypt became possible.
As water filled
the new Lake Nasser,
ancient farmlands of the
Nubians were drowned forever.
¶
Nasser was building an
Arab world for all to see,
but there were cracks
in its foundation.
The first cost was
the union with Syria.
¶
Syria was a poor country and
Nasser wanted to develop it.
As he had done in Egypt,
he controlled the
process himself.
¶
He left his friend,
Abdel-Hakim Amer,
in Damascus to
carry out his agenda.
¶
In 1961, after only
three years of union,
a group of business
and army leaders rebelled.
¶
Amer was not aware of
what's happening around him.
There was a sort
of a coup d'état.
And it was planned by Syrians
who are wealthy in his office.
¶
My father did not spend
a lot of time with us,
but we had always
lunched together.
He never talked to us about
politics during lunch,
except if something
happens at the moment;
a piece of paper is brought
to him and he...
something happens.
Syria withdrew from
the union with Egypt.
He called Amer home
but did not dismiss him.
By now, Amer had established
his own power base
within the army.
Nasser concluded it would be
too dangerous to challenge him.
Amer was able to isolate Nasser
from the army completely.
The Syrian coup
revealed something else:
A deep division among the Arabs.
The coup had been
bankrolled by Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi monarchy
was challenging Nasser's
leadership of the Arab world.
¶
Their challenge
played out in Yemen.
¶
Bordering on Saudi Arabia,
it was locked in civil war.
¶
Yemen's king,
backed by the Saudis,
was fighting a group
of colonels who wanted
to set up a Nasserist republic.
¶
The colonels asked
Nasser for aid.
¶
¶
Over the next six years,
Nasser sent as many as
70,000 troops to Yemen.
¶
¶
The Yemen War also affected
our economy because it cost
Egypt a lot of money.
As Nasser's economic needs
grew, so did his need for funds.
He nationalized many companies,
which, I believe, was a very,
very big mistake he did.
The Egyptian state was
now more responsible
than ever for the economy.
Nasser had promised employment
and he kept his promise.
The ministries started
to interfere in the
management of the companies.
To fight unemployment, the
government gave instructions
to appoint a certain number
of workers in the company.
So, as the public sector
companies became overloaded
with workers they don't need,
this led them to make
losses, of course.
¶
¶
¶
Nasser got quite
worried and frightened.
He started to tighten his grip.
The police state started
to grow very obvious.
¶
Censorship, surveillance,
and imprisonment increased.
¶
¶
Outwardly, Nasser projected
an image of strength.
His large army was
now well-equipped
with Soviet weapons.
By 1967, the Palestinians
and the Syrians thought
Nasser was ready
to take on Israel.
The border between Israel
and Egypt was 11
years quiet, no walls,
but the Syrian border
was hot all the '60s.
Trouble and death
in the Middle East;
a ground and air battle
heavily damages Tiberius
on the Israeli-Syrian border.
Syria intensified
its border attacks,
intending to draw Nasser in.
The fighting erupted quickly
when Syrians allegedly fired
on Israeli farmers
operating tractors.
Israel retaliated
against Syria with force,
threatening to
topple the regime.
Nasser could not avoid
coming to Syria's aid.
So, Nasser did
everything short of war.
He moved troops
into the Sinai,
he closed the Gulf of
Aqaba to Israeli ships.
The Israelis saw this escalation
as a threat to their nation.
Nasser was gambling
that the superpowers
would once again intervene.
But the Americans were not
as focused on the region
as they had been
during the Suez War;
President Johnson
was as mired in his own war
as Nasser was in Yemen.
Johnson was very,
very preoccupied
with Vietnam, and,
by the time he noticed
the Middle East was
getting very dangerous,
he was already beginning
to spiral toward the point
of no return.
And this time,
the Soviet Union
would not intervene
on his behalf either.
I believe that Nasser
overestimated how much
he was manipulating
international politics
and that was really
the killing of Nasser.
On June 5th, 1967,
Israel attacked Egypt,
then Jordan and Syria.
¶
As Israel took more territory,
hundreds of thousands of
displaced Palestinians fled
into neighboring countries.
¶
Israel's territorial
gain was the Arabs' loss.
The region was
reconfigured and destabilized.
¶
Nobody expected that he's
going to be destroyed in
such a massive quick,
rapid, instant way.
Nobody, nobody.
¶
Israelis call it
The Six Day War.
For Arabs, it was
a catastrophe.
¶
The defeat of June '67
was the formative experience
of my generation.
It's very difficult
to describe it now
because it just came out of--
It was...it was...
lightning in a blue sky.
You get something that's
settled in not six days,
but six hours.
Egyptian soldiers
are running away.
They're not fighting,
they're running,
without their weapons,
without their helmets.
You had Israeli soldiers
swimming in the Suez Canal.
The depth of the
humiliation was massive.
It really was...was massive.
People, young and old,
people were crying
on the streets.
It meant that all what we had
been hearing over the years
about building military
power in Egypt is false.
You were deceiving us.
On the night of June 9th,
Nasser addressed the nation.
This is not popularity
or political support.
This is, "For goodness sake,
find a way out for us,
since you have led
us to this mess!"
¶
His country was defeated,
his people had been humiliated,
and, with Israeli troops
in the Sinai, Egypt was
once again occupied
by foreigners.
¶
Nasser decided to stay on
and rebuild his country.
¶
Amer wanted to return back
to being head of the army.
My father refused.
And then, there was
a clash between them.
¶
Nasser's men were able
to place Amer under
house arrest...where
he took poison.
¶
I saw President Nasser
after Amer committed suicide.
Still, at this time,
he was still having
the affection for Amer.
¶
"I'm like a man walking
in a desert, surrounded
by shifting sands.
With each new step,
I have no idea whether
I'll be swallowed up
or find the right path."
¶
My father, after the defeat,
for two or three months,
he didn't smile.
I never saw him smile.
¶
The defeat inspired
a new generation
to demand a role in the
direction of their country.
This is the time where I became,
and a lot of my
generation became,
politically active.
It was no so much deny the
Nasserist project as feeling
that the Nasserist project
was betrayed, that it
was let down, that it
was up to us to complete
and to take it further than
even Nasser had envisaged.
When he first took power,
Nasser had chosen
revolution over democracy.
Now, he promised
democracy as well.
He reaffirmed his promise
in the factory town
of Kafr el-Dawwar.
¶
It was here, in the first
weeks of the revolution,
that three officers
had punished workers
for their spontaneous strike.
¶
But that is not what the people
of Kafr el-Dawwar cared about.
¶
¶
The newsreel captured
Nasser's ecstatic reception
in Kafr el-Dawwar,
but there would be no coverage
of the angry demonstrations
months later when young people
realized that they
still had no voice.
¶
¶
He did not deliver
on the promise,
not because he didn't want to,
but because he couldn't.
The system he put in
place for so many years,
the erosion of politics,
not only institutionally,
but psychologically,
was so deep that it
was very difficult
to have this U-turn.
When Nasser realized
this in 1967-68,
it was just too late for him.
¶
My father had his first heart
attack in September, 1969.
¶
Almost exactly a year later,
he was called from his vacation
to negotiate an end
to a bloody civil war
between the Palestinians
and the Jordanians.
¶
It was very difficult,
and this effort,
his heart could not stand.
¶
That afternoon, he had
another heart attack.
¶
It was a major heart attack
and he didn't survive.
He was only 52 years old.
¶
My father never said anything
about his accomplishments.
¶
I believe he left our world
without accomplishing what
he really wanted.
¶
¶
Peasants came in
from the countryside.
More than five million people
were on the streets
of Cairo that day.
For me, it was a
very conflicted feeling
because, ideologically
and politically you felt
you have to reject Abdel Nasser,
but, somehow, emotionally,
there was this tie.
You were always kind of
fighting against yourself.
¶
¶
Egyptians confront Nasser's
legacy at every turn.
¶
They have risen up
against authoritarian rule,
but the military has remained
fundamentally in power.
¶
The Muslim Brotherhood and
the State remain unreconciled.
¶
But no Egyptian leader
since Gamal Abdel Nasser
has seriously addressed
the needs of the poor...
and protesters' chants
still echo his words.
¶
I thought we had buried him.
It turns out he's still alive.
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶
¶