24 - 30 January 2002
Issue No.570
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 January 2002 Issue No.570 |
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Buluk Nizam police in Ismailia before the attack; the barracks; the siege; dead policemen; the captives; after their release; funeral for dead policemen
Resistance at all costs
On the 50th anniversary of the "Ismailia incident," Michael Thornhill demonstrates why the British occupation was the number one question in Egyptian politics on the eve of the July revolution
Fifty years ago this week, British troops using armoured cars, bren gun carriers, and a state-of-the-art Centurion tank, launched an attack on Egyptian auxiliary police in their barracks in Ismailia. Fifty policemen lost their lives, and four British soldiers were also killed in the fierce exchange. It was a defining moment in the history of the British occupation of Egypt, which began in 1882. As such, the Ismailia incident stands ignominiously alongside the Dinshwai trials of 1906 (when the British administration treated an affray as a minor Muslim uprising) and the Abdin Palace ultimatum of 1942 (when King Farouk was threatened with abdication) in the annals of Egyptian nationalist history. Unlike 1906 and 1942, however, the 1952 incident was a turning point that actually managed to turn. Less than six months later, Egypt's armed forces staged a coup d'etat, so beginning Gamal Abdel- Nasser's revolution.
The British attack on the Ismailia police barracks on 25 January 1952 was prompted by a desire to end Egyptian guerrilla activities in the Suez Canal Zone Base. These activities had begun the previous October, following Egypt's unilateral abrogation of its treaty commitments with Britain. The principal target was the Defence Treaty of 1936, which legally permitted Britain to station 10,000 troops on Egyptian soil -- though the actual number in 1951 exceeded 60,000 -- until at least 1956.
The treaty had been signed at a time when Mussolini's Italy was threatening the Middle East. After the Second World War, successive Egyptian governments tried to secure the early evacuation of the garrison but Britain refused to give up its imperial stronghold, ostensibly because of the developing Cold War. It was, after all, the largest military base in the world. In truth, Britain's world power status relied upon control of the Suez Canal -- the so-called "jugular vein of empire."
With the backing of the Wafdist government, the largest political party of Egypt's "liberal" age, Liberation Battalions were formed to intimidate the occupation army. A favourite tactic of these guerrilla units was to ambush army vehicles along the Moascar-Abu Sueir-Tel El-Kebir road, using the adjacent banks of the Sweet Water Canal for cover. The dead bodies of British servicemen were often dumped in the water afterwards. Another strategy of intimidation entailed the 80,000-strong Egyptian workforce in the base boycotting their jobs. The image of the mighty Suez garrison being committed to menial labour and guard duties told the story of a power in decline. Britain's resort to overwhelming force at Ismailia was ultimately a sign of weakness.
At five o'clock that fateful Friday morning in January 1952, "Operation Eagle" began. Its tasks were to close down the Bureau Sanitaire (the temporary barracks of the auxiliary police), to disarm all the police inside and to maintain law and order in Ismailia. The immediate cause of the action was the death of an American nun caught in the crossfire and the explosion of a bomb that had killed several British servicemen a couple of days earlier.
Throughout the Abrogation crisis, however, Ismailia had been a running sore for the occupying forces. It was here a day after the abrogation laws were passed that anti-British rioting first occurred. The subsequent placement of nearly 1,000 additional police -- supposedly to maintain order -- exacerbated the tense situation because of their extra-curricular activities in the Liberation Battalions. As these men slept on the Muslim holy day, British troops moved into place. By first light, Brigadier Exham, commander of the operation, had positioned his forces around the Bureau Sanitaire. Meanwhile, an outer cordon around Ismailia was established by back-up troops.
At 6.20am, a British loudhailer van issued a message for the police to surrender. This demand was repeated twice before the clock struck seven. Unknown to Brigadier Exham, the Egyptian police used this time to telephone Cairo for instructions. The order came through from the very top -- Fouad Serageddin, the minister of the interior -- for the men to resist. The police took up sandbagged and fortified positions on the roofs of the buildings and in the yard. A few rounds were sporadically fired at the British forces without a response. Finally, at 7.00am, the Centurion tank came crashing through the main gate, demolishing some of the front wall in the process. The Battle of Ismailia had commenced. Five hours later, the last pockets of Egyptian resistance surrendered.
Soon afterwards a senior British diplomat came to survey the scene. "The corpses had been removed," he wrote, "but the blood and brains that were still scattered about the ruins were a sufficiently gruesome sight, vividly illustrating the nature of the sharp encounter. Yet what sickened me most was the conviction that something had gone wrong and that the bloodshed was unnecessary. The Egyptians had finally provoked our troops into a ham-handed operation." The diplomat, Sir Thomas Rapp, head of the British Middle East Office (a politico- military coordinating body based at Fayed), also questioned why the telephone line had been left uncut. Rapp's papers, deposited at Saint Antony's College, Oxford, provide a damning indictment of Operation Eagle.
The next day, demonstrators gathered in Cairo to protest against the slaughter. The absence of police control of any sort (which was hardly surprising) allowed the crowd to quickly develop into a rampaging mob. Led by extremists, the rioters set about systematically torching foreign-owned interests -- bars, cinemas, hotels. In one attack nine members of the Turf Club -- a name synonymous with British imperialism in Egypt -- were killed. They were stripped and beaten to death before their bodies were consigned to the flames of the burning building. In total, 26 foreigners were killed on what became known as "Black Saturday." Several hours of anarchy elapsed before the Wafd government sent in the Egyptian army to restore peace. Even then it was mainly out of fear that the British would reoccupy Cairo if they did not do so. A day later, King Farouk dismissed the Wafd for failing to maintain order.
Between 27 January and 23 July 1952, four Palace-appointed governments attempted to breathe life into Egypt's rapidly ailing parliamentary system. With each failure it became more apparent that the only source of internal authority left was the Egyptian army. In March, the second-in-charge at the British embassy in Cairo predicted "a military dictatorship rather than an immediate outbreak of revolution," should there be another rift with Egypt. Similarly, the highest-ranking British soldier in Egypt, General Sir Brian Robertson, regarded the relative calm after "Black Saturday" as the "eye of the storm." The July coup d'etat did not come as much of a surprise.
British soldiers in IsmailiaBritish officials knew well enough that the type of military action conducted at Ismailia might easily cause the collapse of the whole constitutional framework. While they wanted to avoid this, the political aim of Operation Eagle -- to topple the Wafd -- was still considered a risk worth taking. Making and breaking Egyptian governments had been the mainstay of British imperial policy since the occupation began. Late President Anwar El-Sadat likened pre-revolution Egyptian politics to a pendulum regulated by Britain with an oscillation between the Palace and the Wafd. After 1945, Britain tried to distance itself from Egypt's domestic struggles, the feeling being that intervention had been counter-productive. But the onset of the Abrogation crisis resulted in the return of interventionist practices.
In their efforts to topple the Wafd, the British initially relied on covert political methods. Embassy officials -- many of whom were actually intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover -- attempted to collude with Egypt's opposition parties and King Farouk, who was no friend of the Wafd. Indeed, Farouk's decline from popular, fresh-faced boy-king to unpopular, overweight, womanising gambler can be traced back to the incident of February 1942, when Britain surrounded his palace and insisted that he appoint a Wafd government or lose his throne.
But by 1951, Britain's loosening grip on Egypt's internal political situation was such that Farouk and the opposition leaders were reluctant to discuss the possible composition of an anti-Wafd coalition. As the weeks passed and the backstairs methods showed no sign of producing a new government, the likelihood increased that a military incident would upset the apple cart altogether. And so it proved.
The idea of disarming the Ismailia police had first been broached in December 1951. Official documents at the Public Record Office in London show that the British Ambassador to Egypt at the time, Sir Ralph Stevenson, warned his government that such measures could "hardly fail to bring the situation to a head." Views similar to this had already brought him into conflict with Britain's senior soldiers in Egypt. Early on in the crisis the soldiers had wanted to cut the flow of oil to Cairo (a pipeline ran through the Canal Zone) in order to "apply a stranglehold on the Egyptian economy." Stevenson argued against this, saying that an immediate showdown with the Wafd government would result in it leaving office in a blaze of glory, so adding to Britain's long-term problems. Although General Robertson sent a private telegram to the War Office in London asserting that "we should not be detained by the bleats of any ambassadors," the subsequent policy was to use oil sanctions on an intermittent basis only. The stated aim was "to make the shoe pinch without actually setting up gangrene."
The evening before Operation Eagle was launched Britain's foreign secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, convened a special meeting of the heads of the British armed forces. Discussion centred on the top-secret plans to take over the whole Nile Delta -- from Alexandria in the west, to Port Said in the east, and down to Cairo in the south. Planning centred on two operations. The first -- "Rodeo Bernard" -- envisaged moving forces from the Canal Zone to the Almaza airfield near Cairo, where there were options to proceed on to key strategic areas around the city. The second plan was called "Rodeo Flail" and focused on Alexandria. It involved the deployment of troops from Libya, along with naval and air support from Cyprus. Both plans were primarily aimed at restoring order should disturbances break out and threaten foreign lives. The possibility of the forces staying on and setting up a military government was not, however, ruled out. At the meeting on Thursday, 24 January 1952, there was a real concern that the Rodeo operations might have to be implemented as a result of the Ismailia action. Major rioting was clearly expected.
The history of British policy towards Egypt in the last years of the occupation is only partly revealed in the national archives in London. There are many papers that are not released for public inspection. The phrase used in the files is "retained in department of origin." Secret documents on the subject of meddling in the domestic affairs of foreign countries are specifically targeted for retention under the Official Secrets Act. Another problem is that many Cairo embassy files were deliberately destroyed during the Suez War of 1956. Soon after the fighting started, the embassy burnt all its sensitive papers, fearing that it would be overrun. There was so much material to burn that the embassy furnace had to be supplemented by fires in steel cages on the lawn outside. The same procedure had taken place in July 1942, when it was feared that German forces had broken the line at Al-Alamein. (The film The English Patient depicted the chaos of the Second World War incident.)
It is a little known fact of the Anglo-Egyptian crisis in the winter of 1951-52 that the embassy prepared to enact these emergency administrative measures. A telegram was sent to the British Foreign Office in December 1951 seeking advice on obtaining the services of a protecting power, disposing of archives and cipher equipment, and securing a period of grace for diplomatic staff to leave the country.
Despite these gaps in the official record, there remains a wealth of material on Egypt's internal affairs in the British archives. While the perspective is obviously "foreign," Britain's intimate involvement in these matters makes its official papers a unique resource -- one not matched by the release of Egypt's official papers. Of particular interest in connection with the Ismailia incident is the role of key ministers in the Wafd government. Before the Abrogation crisis began, Britain's bête noir was the Foreign Minister Mohamed Salaheddin. His policies were blamed for starting the crisis. He was suspected of using an anti-British policy to further his claims for leadership of the Wafd.
Cairo on fire
The prime minister, Mustafa El-Nahhas, was in his seventies and he was not expected to stay much longer in his post. By the summer of 1951, the Wafd government was staggering on, amidst allegations of ministers rigging cotton prices for personal gain. In addition, Madame El-Nahhas was implicated in a scandal involving the purchase of cheap, defective arms during the Palestine War of 1948. Despairing of these scandals, Salaheddin admitted to the British Ambassador in July 1951 that El-Nahhas's government was seeking a clash with Britain as a distraction from its internal shortcomings.
The foreign minister's openness, however, counted for nothing in British eyes because of his opposition to the occupation of the Suez base. Instead, Britain began to investigate means of securing his dismissal from the government. Removing Salaheddin from office thus preceded the later policy of toppling the whole government. Ironically, during the Suez Crisis of 1956, his anti-British reputation made him a key figure in Britain's planning to form an alternative government to Nasser -- by this stage, anything was better than the upstart "Colonel."
Once the Abrogation crisis began, the main foe of British officials shifted from the foreign minister to the minister of the interior, Serageddin (or as one memo described him -- "the principal gangster in the Wafd"). The shift was all the more marked because earlier in the year they referred to him jokingly as "the big boyfriend." This nickname had a dual parentage. In part, it was because of his positive stance on the base-rights question. It was also due to his habit of being far more tactile during negotiations than British officials were accustomed to.
With the onset of the crisis, Serageddin was obliged to prove his nationalist credentials. As the rising star in the Wafd (he also held the finance portfolio and was party general secretary), he had to fend off the challenge from Salaheddin in the leadership battle. As interior minister, he was responsible for the auxiliary police reinforcements at Ismailia. He also oversaw government aid to the Liberation Battalions.
It was Serageddin who gave the order for the Ismailia police to resist the British ultimatum on 25 January 1952. The personal context for this decision can be traced back to another showdown with the British, this time in early December 1951. The occupying forces had decided to demolish over a hundred buildings in the Suez suburb of Kafr Abdou -- too much sniper fire had been coming from the area. Serageddin was informed of the impending action by the British and he publicly called for popular resistance. When none was forthcoming, his political stock fell as a consequence. A similar humiliation could not happen again. After the revolution, he received a 15- year prison sentence by a military tribunal for his culpability in these events. He was released early and was the leading figure in the Wafd's brief renaissance in the late 1970s.
A couple of years ago, I sent one of my scholarly articles to the British Embassy in Cairo. The article concerned Britain's search for a successor government to that of President Abdel- Nasser in 1956. I thought it might be of interest for the embassy's library. I subsequently received a thank-you letter from the ambassador, in which he went on to assure me that the nature of an ambassador's work had changed a great deal since the 1950s: the promotion of trade and investment now occupies most of his time.
Dr Michael T. Thornhill is research coordinator and reference editor at Oxford University Press.
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