Memories of high tide
Khamsoun A'm min al-Awasef (Fifty Tempestuous Years), Amin Howeidi, Al-Ahram Centre for Translation and Publication, Cairo: 2003. pp500
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Clockwise from above: Amin Howeidi; Iraqi delegation to Cairo, led by Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr, received by Nasser in April 1963; Former Iraqi president Abdel-Karim Qasem; Former Iraqi president Abdel-Salam Aref; Nasser and Aref signing Egyptian-Iraqi agreement in May 1964
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Amin Howeidi occupied sensitive key positions in decision-making circles in the Nasserist period. However, as one reads his memoirs of this period, one cannot help but feel that he is holding back, not quite telling us all that he knows about this crucial epoch in Egyptian and Arab history, which he helped to shape.
Howeidi served as Egypt's ambassador to Iraq for almost three years (1963-1965) during one of the richest high tides in the drive for Arab unity. He was minister of war and chief of General Intelligence following the defeat in the June 1967 War, in which capacity he contributed both to overhauling this formidable bureau and to exposing many of its weak points and shortcomings in handling the conflict with Israel. Fifty Tempestuous Years contains over 100 pages -- almost a quarter of the whole book -- of documents revealing aspects of the mismanagement of domestic and foreign policy before 1967. Yet, one suspects that this represents only the tip of the iceberg of what Howeidi's capacious memory must contain, a suspicion that is not allayed by his argument that Intelligence seized his personal files upon his arrest on 16 May 1971, along with other opponents of the new president, Anwar El-Sadat, such as Ali Sabri, Shaarawi Gomaa and Sami Sharaf.
One is pleasantly surprised, as one reads the opening chapters, by a refreshing spontaneity, candor and unaffected modesty in Howeidi's account of his upbringing and early youth. This is not the story of a prodigy, all auspicious signs and calls to glory, but of an ordinary boy growing up in the Egypt of the 1940s. It is a story that makes you smile both at and along with one caught up in the ironies and contradictions of the times. Although Howeidi was recruited to the Free Officers movement in 1951, he has no tales of heroism to recount. Indeed, he confesses that on the evening of the revolution of 23 July 1952, he was not even present in Cairo, but with his unit in Rafah, 300 kilometres away. Moreover, after the revolution he moved from one military posting to another and from one training college to another, making no particular military or political mark in any of these positions.
The change came in January 1958, when he was transferred from the department of military planning to the mysterious world of intelligence. At 35 he was appointed to the sensitive position of deputy chief of General Intelligence, and soon afterwards he began to represent this agency in the Daily Work Committee of the office of the president, chaired by Ali Sabri. The function of this committee was to solicit input from major government ministries and departments (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of war, and national intelligence) and draft a daily update to be presented to the president.
From this point, too, the author abandons his initial spontaneity and adopts a more sober and didactic tone in recounting developments. This is not to say that he remains entirely without bias, however. Take, for example, his claim that the number one man of the Iraqi revolution of 1958 was Abdel-Salam Aref, thus undermining the role of Abdel-Karim Qasem, who personally led the tank squadron that seized control of the general command base in Al-Rashid and then the royal palace in Baghdad.
The anti-Qasem bias is no more than a reflection of the attitudes of the Nasserist regime that did so much to trigger and fuel the inter- Arab rivalries that led to the fragmentation of progressive forces in the Arab world at the time. This phenomenon would repeat itself with the coup in Iraq against Qasem in 1963, as well as elsewhere in the Arab world. Such was the Nasserist obsession with domination over the Arab world that it worked as a centrifugal rather than as a centripetal force. The more this regime attempted to bring other Arab countries more tightly under its control, to the extent of abolishing existing political parties in those countries, the more it jeopardised experiments at unification during this exhilarating period of pan-Arab nationalist history. This certainly applied to Syria, at whose doorstep Nasserist officials placed the blame for the collapse of the union between Egypt and Syria (1958-1961). Or, as Howeidi describes the secessionist movement in Syria in 1961, "The resignation of the Ba'ath Party ministers from the unity government was a resignation from unity itself."
This same blinkered perception prevented both Egyptians and Syrians from rectifying the enormous mistakes Egyptian and Syrian leaders had made during the period of unity. As a result, virtually the same mistakes were repeated during the tripartite talks between Egypt, Syria and Iraq following the fall of Qasem on 8 February 1963 and the separatist government in Syria on 8 March 1963.
That there should have been discrepancies in opinion and rivalries between the nationalist and unionist forces in these three countries is only natural. However, a degree of prudence and acumen would have allowed the greater strategic good to prevail over petty disputes and personal aversions between their leaders. Yet this did not occur, and within a month of the signing of the Cairo Charter, Egyptian intelligence forces began to manoeuver against the ruling Ba'ath Party in Iraq and Syria, in coordination with pro-Nasserist forces in those countries. In Syria, in April 1963, the conspiracy led by Colonel Jasem Adwan was exposed, and several days later another Nasserist- led coup attempt was thwarted in Iraq. Not surprisingly, Syria and Iraq quickly backed out of the proposed federation with Egypt.
Howeidi draws a stark picture of the vengefulness that prevailed in Iraq following the coup of 8 February 1963. "Hundreds of members of the Iraqi Communist Party were put to death in vicious purges, and thousands of others were incarcerated in Iraq's many internment camps, where they suffered the various forms of torture they had inflicted upon others when they were in power, or more precisely, close to the centres of power." In fact, the communists, under Abdel-Karim Qasem (1958-1963), were not so much in power as they were the allies of Qasem against the many conspiracies that were then being hatched against him by both Ba'athist and Nasserist forces with the aid of Egyptian intelligence, as recently declassified documents confirm. Moreover, there is no denying that Qasem was much more lenient towards his adversaries than they were towards him: the gory mutilation of Qasem's body following the bloody coup of February 1963 is not easily forgotten.
At all events, by the end of 1963 the Arabs were at each others' throats. As Arab nationalist and progressive forces in Egypt, Syria and Iraq fell into increasing disarray, reactionary forces prevailed elsewhere in the Arab world and soon the scene was set for Israel and the US, with the support of reactionaries in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to deliver, in June 1967, the fatal blow to the drive for pan-Arab unification.
Howeidi himself was not far from these developments. As Egyptian ambassador to Iraq (March 1963 -- November 1965) Howeidi had a virtually unrestricted mandate in Iraq, and Nasser almost always accepted his recommendations with regard to the situation there. To be fair, First Vice-President and Deputy Commander-in-Chief Abdel-Hakim Amer also actively meddled in the situation, working to bring to power those whom he imagined to be "his men" in Iraq. A notorious example of this was the case of Aref Abdel-Razeq who fled to Cairo aboard an Egyptian military aircraft following the abortive coup he had engineered against Abdel- Salam Aref without the knowledge of President Nasser. Later, following Aref's mysterious death in an airplane crash in 1966, Amer wanted Abdel-Razeq to return to Iraq. However, Howeidi felt that such a move would be unwise and telegraphed to Nasser to prevail upon him to prevent Abdel-Razeq's return.
Turning to the June 1967 War, Howeidi relates how events unfolded in the theatre of operations in the Sinai, and then concludes that the overwhelming defeat Egypt suffered in that war was not so much the result of the element of surprise on the Israelis' side as of "a betrayal of trust" on the part of Egyptian military command, and by Abdel-Hakim Amer in particular. Indeed, one is sobered to read how unprepared Arab forces were on the eve of war, whether on the Egyptian, Syrian or Jordanian fronts. In the run up to the war, training and equipment came a distant second to trumped-up reports that grossly inflated levels of military preparedness. To make matters worse, the monopoly held by Amer and his men over military command positions, for which many of them were unqualified, worked to exclude those with actual qualifications and expertise. A case in point was that of the chief of staff, General Fawzi, who, in the investigations that followed the June 1967 defeat complained that he had been treated like a spare piece of luggage. However, Howeidi maintains that Fawzi himself gravely overestimated the strength of the Egyptian army. In his memoirs, The Three-Year War: 1967-70, Fawzi claimed that the Egyptian armed forces on the eve of Abdel-Nasser's death on 28 September 1970 were ready to engage in a war to liberate the Sinai.
In July 1967, at one of the bleakest hours in Egyptian and Arab history, Howeidi became minister of war. Although he occupied this sensitive position for no more than six months -- returning afterwards to Gentral Intelligence -- he succeeded in instituting a thorough overhaul of the armed forces. As he wrote in a memorandum to Nasser at the time, "We did not have a Ministry of War in the accepted sense of the term before June 1967." His account of the disaster-ridden military establishment in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world and his attempts to rectify the situation make one of the most compelling chapters in the book. But it is precisely this chapter that most leaves one with the sense that there is much more the author could have told us about his contributions during this period.
Nevertheless, the book as a whole does not disappoint, for one of the major characteristics of Fifty Tempestuous Years is the author's willingness to tell things as he saw them. Following the death of Abdel-Nasser, the fierce power struggle that erupted between Ali Sabri, Shaarawi Gomaa and Sami Sharaf made it easy for Sadat to play the one off against the other. Howeidi has no small admiration for the political acumen of Nasser's successor. He writes: "Of us all, Sadat was the most on top of things. He knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he moved towards his goal slowly but surely." Whether or not this admiration has coloured Howeidi's version of events, one cannot help but appreciate the counterpoint it strikes to other accounts of this period, notably that by Mohamed Hassanein Heikal. Somewhere between the two the truth must lie.
Finally, as one contemplates such matters one can appreciate Howeidi's amusing anecdotes from this period. He relates, for example, a story about Dr Labib Shouqir, professor of political economy and then speaker of the National Assembly, who had originally supported Sadat but later ended up in prison. Shouqir acquired a reputation in prison for his skill at making salads. Whenever Howeidi visited him, he would jest, "See what has happened to me, Amin. Sadat has made me peel onions."
Reviewed by
Abdel-Khaliq Farouk
