from the conflict, the imbalance would be such that Israel would no longer be willing to cede anything at all; not only would the Arabs no longer be able to make war, but they could not even secure an honourable peace. By choosing the path of a separate peace, Sadat made a true regional peace impossible and consigned the Arab world to a permanent state of instability.
It will take historians several more decades to determine with certainty whether the bold initiative by Nasser’s successor when he went to Jerusalem, shook hands with Menachim Begin and Moshe Dayan, and addressed the Knesset marked the beginning of a bumpy ride towards a real peace between Israelis and Arabs, or rather the burial of all hope of it.
Abandoned by Sadat, Nasser’s pan-Arabic heritage was coveted by many others, especially those to whom the new oil wealth had given the means to realise grand ambitions. Among them were men such as the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, who came up with numerous projects for union before getting tired of Arab quarrels and turning resolutely to Africa. And men such as the militant Ba’athist Saddam Hussein, who managed to make himself leader of a country that had a large population, great natural riches and a historical stature comparable with that of Egypt, since it was the cradle of several ancient civilisations — the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian — and seat of the most prestigious of the Arab empires, that of the Abbasids. He too nurtured the ambition to replace Nasser — but he failed, and we know the disastrous ending to that story.
Both these candidates for the role of pan-Arabic leader had come to power in the wake of the 1967 debacle. The Libyan ‘Free Officer’ presented himself as the Egyptian Free Officer’s spiritual heir and promised to help repair the affront; the Iraqi activist meanwhile mocked Nasser and his army’s failures, promising to eclipse him with his own military exploits.
Saddam, however, was never viewed by the Arabs as a new Nasser and he never benefited from genuine popular support, either in his own country or in the wider region. And even if many rallied to his support on the two occasions when he was at war with the United States, it was not because they had confidence in him but because they did not want to witness another Arab defeat or experience yet again the shame, humiliation and destruction, nor suffer the whole world’s mockery.
The consequence of Saddam Hussein’s two defeats was to seal the fate of the political ideology which had dominated the Middle East for almost a century: pan-Arabic nationalism.
It is true that this doctrine had for a time already been holed below the water line. Nasser had taken it to its zenith, and his defeat could only discredit the idea. Sadat was not alone in decreeing that henceforth his own country’s national interests would come before those of the wider Arab world. Other leaders — of the Iraqis, Palestinians, Syrians, Jordanians or whoever — who criticised him nonetheless acted in the same way. Each of them had their own country’s interests at heart, or those of their regime, clan or simply themselves. In any case, all attempts at union had failed; all that remained of the pan-Arabic idea were hollow slogans which some politicians still used and some die-hards believed in, but they had little influence on real behaviour.
For a time, after the defeat of 1967, salvation was sought in Marxism. This was the time of Che Guevara, the Vietnam War and the export version of Maoism. The Arabs drew comparisons and blamed themselves. One story which did the rounds following the 1967 disaster was about a senior Egyptian official who was furious about what had happened and exploded in front of the Soviet ambassador: ‘All the arms you sold us were worthless!’ The diplomat simply replied: ‘They were the same as we gave to the Vietnamese.’
Whether it is apocryphal or not, the joke sums up the problem well. How come that, with similar arms, one people managed to stand up to the most powerful army in the world, while another was beaten by its tiny neighbour? For some people, the answer was blindingly obvious: traditional nationalism, whether bourgeois or petit-bourgeois, had to be got rid of and replaced with a ‘coherent’ revolutionary ideology, that of peoples who came out on top. The Arab Nationalist Movement, led by Dr George Habash, officially adopted Marxist-Leninism and the armed struggle, and went on to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a name which contains neither the adjective ‘Arab’ nor any explicit reference to nationalism. A branch of the same movement managed to gain power in Yemen in 1969 and declare a ‘popular democracy’. Almost everywhere throughout the Arab world, from the Gulf to Morocco, intellectuals and political organisations ‘Leninised’ their credos, their alliances and sometimes simply their language. Some did it out of opportunism, others from sincere conviction because they saw in it a response to Arab defeat and progress in thought beyond social conformism and narrow nationalism. They also saw an alternative future — at least as it was imagined at that time. In fact this brief flirtation with Marxist- Leninism would just be a transitory stage between the era of nationalism and that of the Islamists, a historical parenthesis whose end would leave a bitter after-taste and for many people would contribute to increasing their feelings of discouragement, rage and impotence.
If Communism had simply been defeated by the forces it was fighting, it would probably have secretly spread thereafter as a powerful form of secular messianism. Of course, that was not how things turned out. Before it could be struck down by the ‘class enemy’, it was already widely discredited. Its approach to the arts was one of severe censorship, its concept of freedom of thought resembled that of the Inquisition, and its exercise of power sometimes brought to mind those Ottoman sultans who, on coming to power, assiduously massacred their brothers and nephews for fear that they might think of challenging them for the throne.
The examples I have in mind are not just of Stalinist purges. I have much more recent memories from the only two countries to have been governed by explicitly Marxist-Leninist movements: South Yemen from 1969 to 1990 and Afghanistan from 1978 to 1992. In both cases, scores were settled between rival factions with sub- machine guns in the middle of politburo meetings. Was this just a coincidence? Similar events happened in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, not just in Moscow but also in Prague, Belgrade, Tirana, and in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and later in Addis Ababa when Ethiopia was ruled by a communist military junta known as the Derg — not to mention the Khmer Rouge. So was it a coincidence? No, it was routine, a modus operandi, a way of doing things.
I write this with sadness, as in these movements, good people lost their way, people who sincerely wanted to modernise their societies, who advocated the spread of knowledge, education of girls, equality of opportunity, liberation of minds, weakening of tribalism and the end of feudal privileges. Among the ruins of their betrayed hopes in Kabul and elsewhere, plants of quite a different sort were soon to take root.
Chapter 11
The desire to be fair and concern for historical truth oblige me to add to these charges some others, with different accused.
The Soviets bear the main responsibility for Afghanistan’s descent into disorder, but it was the Americans who organised the massacre of the modernising elite in Indonesia. Until the mid-1960s, the world’s most populous Muslim nation was home to a Communist Party whose membership numbered nearly one and a half million and which participated in government under the aegis of the nationalist president, Ahmed Sukarno, the architect of independence. Sukarno had established a regime which was secular and authoritarian without being brutal, and he played a prominent role on the international stage; in April 1955, he hosted the Bandung Conference for African and Asian nations, which was the start of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Angered by the nationalisation of Indonesia’s mines and Jakarta’s links with Beijing and Moscow, the US, which was beginning to get bogged down in the Vietnam War, decided to resort to drastic measures. Its success was total. As a result of a remarkable operation, the details of which only became known decades later, the Communists and the left-wing nationalists were outlawed, rounded up and massacred in large numbers in the universities, civil service, in districts of the capital and even in the remotest villages. The most serious estimates talk of 600,000 deaths between October 1965 and summer 1966. Power was then given to General Suharto, who for over twenty years maintained a dictatorship which was corrupt and obscurantist — but resolutely anti-Communist. When the country emerged from that tunnel, the Indonesian vision of Islam, once reputed to be the most tolerant in the world, was tolerant no longer. The prospects of secularising society had been destroyed — collateral damage in the struggle against the Communist peril.
