Al-Ahram Weekly | 1952 - 2002 | A View from Paris

		18 - 24 July 2002 Issue No. 595 Special	Current issue Previous issue Site map
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A View from Paris
David Tresilian talks to veteran journalist Eric Rouleau in Paris about his memories of the 1952 Revolution and its leader

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Abdel-Nasser with Algerian Gamila Bou Hreid
"I left Egypt in 1951 to work for the Agence France Presse on the Middle East desk, so it was in Paris that I heard about the coup d'état," veteran journalist Eric Rouleau explains when asked for his recollections of the July 1952 Revolution that ended the Egyptian monarchy. However, "my reaction at first sight was very favourable because I disliked the monarchy intensely and had left Egypt because I could not bear the limitations on freedom, the persecutions and corruption any longer. I was very politicised and was well able to assess the old regime, so I was certainly not unhappy to hear of its fall. I thought it was a good thing for the Egyptian people to be freed from that type of system."
Like many others at the time, however, Rouleau, born in Egypt but leaving to pursue a career in France that took him from Chief Middle East Correspondent at Le Monde to French Ambassador to Tunisia and Turkey, had reservations both about the Free Officers' coup and about the nature of the new regime it had established in Egypt. French news reports initially focused on the failings of the monarchy, there being no hostility to the new government, but from the start "there was mistrust, since in any Western democratic country military coups are not appreciated, and I also had very mixed feelings because I was not in favour of military coups. Moreover, the Officers did not make any attempt to involve popular participation in the changeover, limiting this to the military.
"Things were very blurred. Ali Maher, who had a very bad reputation in my view as being on the right and a man of the old regime, had been appointed prime minister, and then came the news that two workers accused of being communists had been hanged.
"The media was full of rumours that Nasser was a CIA agent, and these were apparently reinforced when we learnt that Ali Sabri, one of the Free Officers, had met the American ambassador immediately after the coup to reassure the Americans, who, as far as I can remember, welcomed the change."
These developments meant that the word "fascist" swiftly came to be used in the French media to characterise the new regime, and Rouleau too had his doubts. What partly reassured him was the favourable attitude taken towards the Free Officers by several French left-wing intellectuals, as well as, surprisingly, by Henri Curiel, head of an Egyptian Communist splinter group in exile in Paris, the Mouvement démocratique pour la libération nationale (Democratic Movement for National Liberation).

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Abdel-Nasser with Kruschev
"Later on, I learned that Curiel had had contacts with some of the Free Officers, about whom public opinion knew nothing, not even their identities. Amongst them was Khaled Mohieddin [now president of the Egyptian Tagammu' Party], and I realised progressively that the Free Officers were a kind of 'national union' group, containing Muslim Brothers, Communists and Liberal Democrats, and that they were, at the bottom line, nationalists."
Two years later in 1954, during a conflict between Nasser and the head of the Free Officers, General Mohamed Naguib, Rouleau sympathised with the latter.
"Naguib represented what I considered to be the 'democratic trend' within the officer group, which wanted to establish some kind of pluralistic government. We then discovered that it was Nasser who had been behind the coup, and that he had played the central role. Naguib was supported by the leftists among the Free Officers, Khaled Mohieddin in particular, who paid dearly for his support for Naguib, having to go into exile in Switzerland."
Nevertheless, by now new features of the Free Officer regime were starting to emerge, and these to some extent calmed Rouleau's mistrust.
"Personally, I was in favour of a pluralistic government and some kind of a return to a democratic system, but at the same time there was the anti- imperialist character of the regime and Nasser's main objective to expel British troops from Egypt, which was a widespread aspiration among Egyptians and one that I had shared since my childhood. That same year, Nasser took a very hard stand against Britain's project to set up the Baghdad Pact, a so-called anti-Soviet coalition. Nasser appealed to other Arab states not to allow themselves to be fooled into joining an alliance whose real objective was to perpetuate Western hegemony in the region.
"Clearly, Nasser was a staunch believer in national sovereignty, and he started supporting several national liberation movements across the Third World, including the FLN in Algeria (the guerrillas struggling against French occupation). As a result, the French government and media demonised him, he became the number one enemy of Western values, and he was accused of being anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic.
"However, Nasser had shown very little interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict per se for at least the first couple of years following his accession to power. His references to the conflict were inspired by domestic considerations. He accused former King Farouk of having been responsible for the defeat of the Egyptian army in Palestine during the fighting in 1948 -- 1949 by delivering faulty armaments. The king, he used to repeat, had not even had the will to defeat the Israeli army, and this 'treason' on his part thus justified the overthrow of the monarchy."
However, Nasser's domestic policies continued to create confusion, even among those who might otherwise have supported him.
"Nasser used to say, and this was something he stated when he pushed Naguib aside, that political parties in Egypt represented the conservative classes of society, and that they were led by the financial elites, the landowners and the compradors, who were the agents of foreign corporations. I found this argument unconvincing. On the one hand, he was right in that if the old parties had been allowed to re-emerge as they had been in the past, then it would have been practically impossible to introduce reforms, and it would have been tantamount to returning to the old system, only without the king.
"But on the other hand, there were ways and means to democratise existing parties, as past experiences had demonstrated. This had been achieved, for example, in France after its liberation from the Nazi occupation, or in other countries that had got rid of autocratic regimes."

'When I arrived at Qubba Palace, I found him moody and apparently depressed. This, he said, was not going to be an interview, but an off-the-record man-to-man conversation. He recalled events and trials he had experienced since the Revolution.

"I said at the end, 'Mr President, it's a great pity for me as a journalist that I haven't taken any notes. You've said very interesting things, and it's all been lost.' He responded with a smile and led me to a room next door. The room was full of large machines, which turned out to be tape-recorders with officers in uniform standing around them. To one of them Nasser gave the order, 'Give this gentleman a tape. It's a gift."

It was in 1955 at the time of the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Countries that Rouleau really "changed his mind about Nasser". Bandung, he says, "appeared at the time as something extremely positive, being an attempt by major Third World countries, whether Communist, like China and Yugoslavia, or liberal, like India, to find a 'third way' by which the Third World could protect itself from both superpowers."
By then, Nasser had also introduced the agrarian reform laws, "which were very positive, since obviously the Egyptian peasantry could not prosper so long as they were exploited by a few big landowners."
During this period, in 1955, Rouleau left AFP (Agence France Presse) to join Le Monde as the newspaper's senior Middle East correspondent. Still controlled by its founder and first editor, Hubert Beuve-Méry, the newspaper, like the French press as a whole, took an extremely hostile stand against Nasser for his support of what it called the Algerian "terrorists."
"A journalist has to take into account the mood of the readers, as well as his editor's views, and it was extremely difficult for a young beginner, as I then was, to write anything that was balanced on Nasser -- it just could not be done." Haunted by memories of Hitler's war against France, Beuve- Méry described Nasser in his articles as a new Hitler, French hostility to the Egyptian regime reaching its height at the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956 and continuing until the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962.
"If it was not calling Nasser Hitler, then part of the French press was accusing him of being a secret member of the Communist Party, one newspaper even publishing what it alleged was a copy of Nasser's Party card, complete with photograph and everything. I did not believe in any of this, because I understood very well that this was an organised campaign to demonise Nasser."
"There was the tragi-comedy of the Tri-Partite Aggression, Britain and France agreeing with Israel to attack Egypt and then pretending to intervene in order to stop the war. It is hard to imagine now the amount of hostility caused in France and the West by Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. This was the first big Western corporation to be taken over by a Third World country. There had been an attempt in Iran some years earlier to nationalise the oil industry, but that had failed miserably. This one succeeded, and I remember how the Western elites perceived it as an 'aggression', even though it was not illegal to nationalise a company if compensation was paid, and Nasser did offer compensation."
"The atmosphere in France at the time was such that I was unable even to argue in my newspaper that it was the Company and not the Canal that Nasser was nationalising."
Eric Rouleau's later fame as a journalist rests on the warm personal relations he was able to establish as Le Monde's correspondent with many Middle Eastern and Arab leaders, including Nasser, and conversation turns to the nature of that relationship. Nasser, he says, was a "great charmer, a bit like Mitterand."
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rouleau covered African affairs for Le Monde, reporting on the Congo crisis and the fall of Lumumba in 1961, and in 1962 he was asked to go to Yemen to write about the overthrow of the country's ruling Imam and the establishment of a republic. France at that time did not have diplomatic relations with either Yemen or Egypt, but in order to get a visa for Yemen Egyptian intervention was required. Rouleau was obliged to travel to Geneva to see the Egyptian Chargé d'affaires, who arranged the necessary papers, and he later traveled to Yemen and wrote a series of articles favourable to the new Yemen Arab Republic.

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Abdel-Nasser with Tito and Nehru
Rouleau believes that it was the stance he took in favour of both Lumumba and General Sallal's regime in the Yemen that first drew Nasser's attention. The Egyptian writer Lutfi El-Khouli, at that time holding a senior position at Al-Ahram, invited Rouleau to visit Egypt as the newspaper's guest, but Rouleau "turned down the invitation and traveled to Egypt at the expense of my newspaper. I received a warm welcome from Al- Ashram's then Editor-in-Chief, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, who asked me whether I would like an interview with Nasser. Of course I said yes. But I added that I couldn't guarantee that I would write a favourable article for Le Monde as a result.
"At that time, thousands of people were in prison in Egypt, Muslim Brothers, Communists and Liberal Democrats, several of whom I knew personally. This was totally repulsive to me, to my newspaper and to Western public opinion. I warned Heikal that I intended to ask hard questions of Nasser on this sensitive issue if he granted me an interview. Heikal smiled and said nothing.
"The meeting with the president was anything but predictable. Nasser received me casually dressed at his home, a modest house in Manshiat Al-Bakri. He launched the conversation by saying that he was pleased to receive visitors, as he was feeling lonely because his wife and children were on summer vacation in Alexandria. The conversation that followed was informal and relaxed. Nasser seemed to appreciate the fact that I spoke Egyptian colloquial Arabic, though I would turn to English when I could not find the right word in Arabic.
"He spoke of his favourite hobbies, such as playing chess or tennis. To my surprise, he then proceeded 'to interview' me. When he heard that I had been born and raised in Heliopolis close to the neighbourhood in which he lived, he laughed and said, 'well, in fact we are both baladiyat'.
"He wanted to know more about me, though I suspected that he had been given a substantial file. When did I leave Egypt? Did I enjoy life in Paris? What kind of apartment did I have, and what was the rent? He suddenly seemed very interested when I told him that I had bought it on a long- term credit programme, a system he had never heard of. While taking notes, he wondered whether such a system could be successfully introduced in Egypt. He finally allowed me to start the formal interview.
"Following non-controversial questions, I asked him bluntly why there were thousands of detainees in concentration camps. He started by explaining the political reasons, before revealing that he was about to free all political prisoners.
"I felt that the scoop was the greatest gift he could offer any journalist. It was, of course, a calculated and smart move on his part. He had probably taken the decision a long time before, but he chose to announce it to the most influential publication in Europe, a French daily, at a time when he wanted to renew diplomatic ties with France."
Rouleau is far from being uncritical of Nasser or of the regime he headed, but clearly he also appreciates many of the things it achieved, and he also admires, if not uncritically, the man himself.
"One feature of Nasser that everyone recognises is his personal integrity, although he allowed -- for political reasons -- corruption to flourish amongst his unconditional supporters. He would not accept any present that had any value, but, since he loved ties, everyone who came to see him would bring him a tie as a present. He probably had the largest and the most eclectic collections of ties in the world. He was extremely intelligent and perceptive. A pragmatist, he was quick in picking up new ideas and turning them into practical projects. Although he was an enlightened, progress-oriented leader, as well as a shrewd political strategist, he did not believe in the merits of democracy, which, amongst other consequences, would have prevented him from committing the mistakes that led to the collapse of his regime."
Rouleau remembers the last interview he had with Nasser in 1970 some months before he died.
"I was in Cairo, and I got a call from the presidency telling me that Nasser wanted to see me. When I arrived at Qubba Palace, I found him moody and apparently depressed. While I was producing my tape-recorder and a notebook, he asked me to put them away. This, he said, was not going to be an interview, but an off-the-record man-to-man conversation. For more than two hours, responding to my questions or otherwise, he recalled events and trials he had experienced since the Revolution, and how foreign powers had acted to thwart his policies, weakening the Egyptian Republic. It was absurd to claim that he wanted to destroy the State of Israel. He had always been for the implementation of UN Resolutions as a way to solve the conflict.
"I said at the end, 'Mr President, it's a great pity for me as a journalist that I haven't taken any notes. You've said very interesting things, and it's all been lost.' He responded with a smile, and, taking me by the hand, he led me to a room next door to the lounge we were sitting in. The sight was startling. The room was full of large machines, which turned out to be tape-recorders with officers in uniform standing around them. To one of them Nasser gave the order, 'Give this gentleman a tape. It's a gift.'"
Looking back, Rouleau feels that Nasser "will go down in history in spite of his failings. He was a great statesman who showed Third World countries the way to liberation from foreign hegemony. A champion of Arab unity, he was first and foremost an Egyptian patriot who gave his people a feeling of dignity and pride to be Egyptians. He loved his countrymen and cared about their welfare. His fatal weakness was that he did not trust them enough to allow them to be responsible citizens of a democratic state. Had he done so, his legacy would have survived him."

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