Anwar el Sadat
Moḥamed Anwar al Sadat (Arabic: محمد أنور السادات, often transliterated as Anwar Sadat; Mit Abu l-Kum, December 25, 1918-Cairo, October 6, 1981) was an Egyptian politician and soldier who served as President and Prime Minister of Egypt since the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in September 1970, and was reelected in unopposed elections in 1974 and 1978, this being the last presidential election before the reintroduction of multipartyism in 1979 (also during his term), remaining in office until his assassination on October 6, 1981. He was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak, who would remain in power until his overthrow in 2011. On November 11, 1977, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin formally invited Al Sadat to visit Jerusalem. At nine o'clock on the night of November 19, 1977, Al Sadat arrived in Israel, becoming the first Arab leader to visit that country. Al Sadat was received in an official ceremony, although both countries were still formally at war. On November 20, 1977, President Al Sadat addressed the Knesset plenary acquiring a commitment to recognize the State of Israel under certain conditions. In 1978, he had a new meeting with the Israeli prime minister to prepare, through the mediation of US President Jimmy Carter, peace with Israel in the Camp David Peace Accords, signed jointly with Menachem Begin. In 1978, he was awarded along with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin the Nobel Peace Prize for the Camp David peace accords, which led to a negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel. He is remembered in his country as the hero of war and peace. In October 1981, during a military parade, he was assassinated by parade soldiers who deliberately machine-gunned him, although other versions say that a parade truck separated from the formation and six soldiers left it, throwing grenades towards the presidential box at the same time. They were firing their automatic weapons. Five other people were killed, including General Hassam Allan, and 38 more people were injured, including his future successor, Hosni Mubarak.
Biography
Early years and revolutionary activism
Anwar el-Sadat was born on December 25, 1918, in Mit Abu l-Kum, Menufia, in the then Sultanate of Egypt (a protectorate of the United Kingdom, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire), into a poor Nubian family, and had 13 brothers. One of them, Atef el-Sadat, later became a pilot and was killed in action during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. His father, Anwar el-Sadat Mohammed, was an ethnic Nubian., and his mother, Sit al-Berain, was Sudanese through his father's line. This would spark controversy during his tenure, with accusations that he was not "Egyptian enough" to exercise the position. His Sudanese ancestry and skin color would later earn him the nickname “Nasser's black poodle.” Sadat graduated from the Royal Military Academy in Cairo in 1938 and was appointed to the broadcasting service. He entered the army as a second lieutenant and was posted to Sudan (which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Egypt, being a condominium with the United Kingdom). There he met Gamal Abdel Nasser, and together with several lower-ranking officers they founded the Free Officers Movement, a revolutionary movement committed to ending British rule over Egypt and Sudan, as well as the government corruption that prevailed under King Faruq. II. During World War II, Sadat was imprisoned by the British, accused of collaborating with the Nazis to assassinate an officer, after having asked the Axis Powers for help to expel British troops, who had occupied Egypt under the threat of Fascist Italy in the region. However, Sadat was finally acquitted of all charges in 1946, the conflict over. Anwar el-Sadat was an active member of various political groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, before joining Nasser's Free Officers. Years later, on July 23, 1952, along with the other members of that movement, Sadat participated in the coup d'état (known as the Egyptian Revolution of 1952), which led to the end of the reign of Faruq II and, one year later, to the abolition of the Egyptian monarchy, with the proclamation of the Republic of Egypt, with Nasser as Prime Minister and Muhammad Naguib as President. Sadat was assigned the task of informing the Egyptian people of the triumph of the revolution by radio.
Nasser's government and coming to power
In 1954, during Naguib's rule, Sadat was appointed Minister of State, a position he held after the president's overthrow and Nasser's ascension to head of state. He was also appointed director of the newly founded daily Al Gomhuria .In 1959, he took up the post of Secretary of the National Union. Sadat was president of the National Assembly of Egypt between 1960 and 1968, and a member of the presidential council since 1964, also holding the position of Vice President of the United Arab Republic (official name of Egypt since 1958). He was re-elected vice president in 1969. President Gamal Abdel Nasser died of a heart attack in September 1970 after ruling Egypt for more than 14 years, and he was succeeded by Sadat as vice president.
Presidency
Consolidation of his mandate
While Sadat served as president on an interim basis, prior to the call for elections, his rule was expected to be short. Sadat's presidency was confirmed in a referendum on October 15, 1970, in which he was elected. only candidate and "won" with 90% of the votes in favor and 10% against, with an 85% turnout of the electorate.Seeing him as little more than a puppet of the former president, Nasser's supporters thought he would be easy to manipulate. Sadat surprised other officials with a series of shrewd political moves with which he was able to maintain his presidency and emerge as a leader in his own right. These reforms began with the announcement of the Corrective Revolution on May 15, 1971, which sought to cut the power of the Nasserists, and make a radical change in foreign policy, economic policies and the state's own ideology. On September 2, Sadat changed the official name of the country, until then the United Arab Republic for the Arab Republic of Egypt, a name that it retains to this day. The new president encouraged the rise of Islamist movements in the region, which had been repressed by Nasser. Confident that the Islamists would be socially conservative, he gave them, "great cultural and ideological autonomy"; in exchange for his political support. The same year as the start of these reforms, three years of the War of Attrition in the Suez Canal zone having passed, Sadat confirmed in writing the peace proposals of United Nations negotiator Gunnar Jarring., which seemed to lead Egypt to a lasting peace with the State of Israel on the basis of Israel's withdrawal to its borders before the Six-Day War. This initiative failed, since neither Israel nor its main ally, the United States of America, accepted the terms proposed by Sadat.
Corrective Revolution
Shortly after taking office, Sadat shocked many Egyptians by firing and imprisoning two of the most powerful figures in the Nasserist regime, hitherto branded as communist and pro-Soviet, his own vice president Ali Sabri, who had close ties to officials in the Soviet Union, and Sharawy Gomaa, the interior minister, who previously controlled Nasser's secret police. Sadat's local popularity grew enormously when the president curtailed the powers of the organization, which was widely hated among the Egyptian people. In the economic arena, Sadat encouraged reforms that relaxed Nasser's stance on socialist control and encouraged private investment. Although this increased its popularity, it also earned it various criticisms and protests from the lower and middle classes, because it collaterally meant the end of subsidies on basic food products, and began the increase in a level of corruption. that would spread beyond Sadat's mandate, and that would later characterize the long Mubarak government. He launches the Infitah (opening) policy that aims, by reducing the role of the State, to attract foreign investment and promote relations with the United States. A class of nouveau riche is developing rapidly. In 1975, there were more than 500 millionaires in Egypt, but more than 40% of the population lived below the poverty line and slums were developing around the capital. Furthermore, the country racked up monumental debt during the Infitah years. To restructure it, the IMF called for the abolition of all subsidies to basic products, which led to riots in January 1977. The government involves the army, creating an unknown number of victims. The reorientation of the economy led Sadat to seek the support of traditional rural elites, whose influence had diminished under Nasserism. Farmers are evicted from disputed land. In the cities, to thwart Nasserian and Marxist organizations, Sadat has freed thousands of Islamist prisoners and granted them political freedoms. In 1972, the authorities had Islamist militants transported in state vehicles to violently regain control of the universities and arrested left-wing student leaders. Strengthened by this alliance with the government, Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya won. Egyptian influence and society became Islamized, also due to the strengthening of relations with Saudi Arabia. Finally, Gamaa al-Islamiy is divided into two factions: one in favor of the Sadat government, which wants to continue this Islamization through reforms, and another oriented towards terrorism. In the 1980s, the government encouraged the departure of the militants of this second faction to Afghanistan, with the financial support of Saudi Arabia. Finally, in an act that gave a special turn to his government, Sadat expelled the advisers from Egypt. members of the Red Army, present in the country since 1967, after they refused to give it greater military support in a new confrontation with Israel, and began a series of reforms to renew the armed forces and start another war against the Jewish state on their own. Sadat's corrective Revolution, while bringing greater religious freedom, also included the imprisonment of other political forces in Egypt, such as liberals and extreme Islamists. The imprisonment of the extremists had a strong effect in the Middle East later on, since most of them were members of the Takfir Wal Hijra movement and the Sadat government's repression of it caused its inevitable expansion throughout the rest of the Arab world and Europe., which translates into the spread of political Islam in these two regions, and which would also be one of the many triggers, although not the main one, for the subsequent assassination of the President in 1981.
Relationship with Muammar el-Gadhafi
Like the previous Nasser regime, the Sadat government maintained good relations with the recently created Libyan Arab Republic, of Arab socialist lines, ruled by Muammar Gaddafi since the overthrow of King Idris of Libya in 1969, and since Nasser's death began negotiations to create a pan-Arab state by merging Egypt, Libya and Hafez al-Assad's Syria. On April 18, the three rulers signed a pact to create the Confederation, and the plebiscites in each country held on September 1, 1971 were approved, creating the Federation of Arab Republics. There were also attempts or attempts to unite Jaafar al-Numeiry's then Democratic Republic of Sudan, and Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr's Ba'athist Iraq. However, the actual merger never took place, the result of government disagreements over the specific terms of the merger. The union was maintained de jure from January 1, 1972, the date of its official declaration, until the proclamation of Gaddafi's new government, the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, in March 1977, leaving to formally exist in November of that same year.
Relationship with Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
The relationship between Egypt and Iran had descended into open hostility during the Nasser regime. After his death, Sadat changed his policy towards the Persian country and began friendly relations with the government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1971, Sadat addressed the Iranian parliament in Tehran in fluent Persian, giving a speech in which he described the 2,500-year historical connection between the two lands. Overnight, the Egyptian and Iranian governments turned from bitter enemies to fast friends. The relationship between Cairo and Tehran became so friendly that the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would later refer to Sadat as his "dear brother." After the 1973 war with Israel, Iran took a leading role in clearing up and reviving the blocked Suez Canal with heavy investment. The country also facilitated Israel's withdrawal from the occupied Sinai Peninsula by promising to replace the Israelis' loss of oil with Iranian oil if they withdrew from oil wells in Egypt's West Sinai. After his overthrow, the deposed Shah spent the last months of his life in exile in Egypt. When the Shah died, Sadat ordered that he be given a state funeral and buried in the Al-Rifai Mosque in Cairo, the resting place of the late Khedive Ismail Pasha, his mother Khushyar Hanim, and numerous other members of the royal family of Egypt and Sudan.
Arab-Israeli conflict
Yom Kippur War
On October 6, 1973, together with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Sadat launched the "October War," also known as the Yom Kippur War (since it took place during the same Jewish holiday) and less commonly as the "Ramadan War," a surprise attack on Israeli forces occupying the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, in an attempt to recapture the territories of Syria and Egypt they had lost during the 6-Day War in 1967. The performance of Egypt and Syria in the early stages of the war surprised both Israel and the Arab world. The most striking achievement, Operation Badr, also known as The Crossing, was the advance of the Egyptian army 15km into the Sinai, largely occupying it after penetrating and destroying the Bar Lev Line, popularly considered previously as an impregnable defensive chain. As the war progressed, 3 IDF divisions led by Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez Canal, trying to encircle the Egyptian Second Division first. Although they succeeded, they failed with the third division. Pushing for a quick deal between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 338 on October 22, demanding an immediate ceasefire and compliance with Resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal. occupied territories. Although agreed, the ceasefire was broken almost immediately. Alekséi Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, canceled an official meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anker Jørgensen in order to travel to Egypt and negotiate an end to hostilities with Sadat. It is not really known if during the 3 days Kosygin spent in Egypt he actually arranged a personal meeting with the president The Israeli army continued its campaign to encircle the Egyptian army. The encirclement was broken on October 24, three days after the brief ceasefire ended. This development led to tension between the two superpowers, but a second ceasefire was finally imposed on October 25, 1973, ending the war. At the end of hostilities, the Israeli army was 40 km from Damascus and 101 km from Cairo.
Towards peace with Israel
The initial Egyptian and Syrian victories in the war restored popular morale across Egypt and the Arab world and, for many years afterward, Sadat was known as the "Hero of the Crossing". Israel recognized Egypt as a formidable enemy, and with Egypt's renewed political importance, the country recovered and reopened the Suez Canal. The new peace policy led to the conclusion of two agreements on the separation of forces with the Israeli government. The first of these agreements was signed on January 18, 1974, and the second on December 4, 1975. An important aspect of Sadat's peaceful policy was that he gained some religious support for his efforts. In addition to building good relations with evangelical Christians in the United States, Sadat had some cooperation with the Holy See. On April 8, 1976, Sadat visited the Vatican for the first time and received a message of support from Pope Paul VI regarding peace with Israel, including that they should seek a just solution to the Palestinian situation. Sadat, for his part, issued the Pope a public invitation to visit Cairo. Sadat also used the media to promote his purposes. In an interview he gave to the Lebanese daily El Hawadeth in early February 1976, he stated that he had a secret commitment to the United States so that the United States would force Israel to return the Sinai to Egypt and the Heights of Golan to Syria. Such a claim was quickly refuted by Henry Kissinger, in the face of complaints from the Israeli government. socialist subsidies. Hundreds of thousands of people took part in the riots in Cairo for two days. 120 buses and several buildings were destroyed in the capital alone. The riots ended with the deployment of the Armed Forces and the reinstatement, at least momentarily, of subsidies. However, it was already evident that Sadat had abandoned the socialist government and began to strengthen relations with the West. The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to a convention in Geneva on the Middle East on October 1, 1977. Syria resisted the conference. Not wanting Syria or the Soviet Union to intervene in the peace process, Sadat decided to take a progressive stance in order to reach a decisive and final agreement with Israel. On November 19 of that same year, Sadat became the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel when he met Israel's then Prime Minister Menachem Begin and gave a speech before the Knesset in Jerusalem about his views on the time to seek a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, including full compliance with resolutions 242 and 338, stating that he hoped: "may God guide the steps of Premier Begin and the Knesset, because it is necessary to make this tough decision and drastic".
Camp David Accords
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The first treaty between the State of Israel and the Arab Republic of Egypt aimed at achieving total peace was formally signed during the Camp David Accords on September 17, 1978, a series of meetings between the Israeli government and the Egyptian government provided by United States President Jimmy Carter, precisely at Camp David, Washington D.C. Both Sadat and Begin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for those agreements that same year, making Sadat the first Muslim to win said prize. Finally, on March 26, 1979, the Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt was signed, through which Egypt officially recognized the Israeli state and put an end to the declaration of war in force since 1948, while Israel recognized Egyptian sovereignty over the peninsula of Egypt. Sinai and agreed to withdraw its troops from the occupied zone as soon as possible. The agreement also provided for Israel's right to use the Suez Canal and the internationalization of the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba. Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize Israel. The peace treaty has remained in force to this day. The deal, however, was immensely unpopular in the Arab world, and the Muslim world in general. Sadat's predecessor, Nasser, had made Egypt a symbol of Arab nationalism, an ideology that seemed out of Egyptian orientation after the war. Yom Kippur War in 1973. Arab countries saw Sadat as having put Egypt's interests ahead of Arab unity, ultimately completely betraying the ideology of Nasser's socialist government, in which all Arab states united in support for the Palestinians against the "Zionist Entity." However, Sadat decided that the only right path for his country was peace. The alliance with the United States only fueled hatred of Sadat among Arab countries, which still hoped for the removal of the &# 34;Zionist Entity". This triggered the expulsion of Egypt from the Arab League in 1979, and the transfer of its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis, not being readmitted again until 1989, when the organization's headquarters returned again to the Egyptian capital. For its part, Egypt regained sovereignty over Sinai in April 1982, except for the city of Taba, which it would not recover until 1989. Good relations with the West kept Egypt's economy on the rise, but the rupture and subsequent tension with the countries Arabs, coupled with the corruption of the Mubarak government, would result, throughout the 1980s, in rapid inflation.
Decrease in popularity
Sadat had promoted in 1979, while organizing the peace treaty with Israel, a constitutional referendum, which included various changes, including the reincorporation of the multi-party system and the opening of a bicameral parliament, which was approved with 99.7% of the votes, in a participation of 90.0% of the electorate. On the occasion of the peace treaty, the year 1981 was characterized by a series of internal confrontations in Egypt, due to the Islamist disagreement with Sadat, although the president ruled out that it was domestic affairs, considering that the Soviet Union was conspiring with the governments of Libya and Syria to overthrow him. Despite the return of the democratic system, in June 1981, there was a failed coup attempt that forced Sadat to declare a state of emergency, and imprison several opposition political figures. Although Sadat was still very popular with the public at the time of his death, it was later said that he was assassinated "at the height of his unpopularity". The treaty with Israel particularly angered the Islamists of the Islamic Jihad group. Egyptian, which was in charge of recruiting officers and accumulating weapons, according to information collected by the journalist Lawrence Wright, were preparing to destroy the prevailing order in Egypt. The head of El-Jihad was Abbud al-Zumar, a strategist whose objective was to assassinate the main leaders, capture the State Security building, the telephone exchanges, inciting a popular uprising against the secular government. The authorities were alerted of El-Jihad's plans in February 1981. In September, Sadat ordered the unpopular arrest of more than 1,500 people, including not only many members of the Jihad, but also the leader of the Coptic Church, and other clerics from said religious organization, intellectuals and militants of all ideological persuasions. To avoid negative press, all non-governmental newspapers and channels were banned. The round inadvertently allowed a Jihad cell led by Khalid al-Islambuli to pass through, who he would succeed in assassinating President Sadat just a month later. According to Tal'at Fu'ad Qasim, it would not be El-Jihad who organized the attack on Sadat, but rather a An Islambuli-led group known as the "Islamic Group".
Murder
On October 6, 1981, the annual Victory Parade was organized in Cairo to commemorate the eighth anniversary since Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal in the Yom Kippur War. Both Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, their vice president since 1975, they were protected by 4 layers of security and 8 bodyguards, and the parade should have been safe due to the new rules on the purchase of ammunition recently imposed. When Mirage 5 planes from the Armed Forces flew over the parade to distract the crowd, several Egyptian army soldiers and artillery trailer trucks paraded through the area. One of these trucks contained a death squad, led by Khaled al Islambuli, along with Abdul Salaam Abdelhameed, Ata Tayel Hameeda Raheel, and Abbas Hussein. As they passed the rostrum where Sadat and Mubarak were standing, Islambuli forced the driver to stop at gunpoint. The assassins got out of the vehicle, with Islambuli in the lead, and ran towards Sadat with 3 hand grenades hidden under his helmet. Believing that this was part of the show, the president stood up to salute the soldiers, whereupon Islambuli threw the grenades. Only one of them actually exploded, but it did so prematurely, and a group of additional assassins climbed out of the back of the truck and fired their AK-47 assault rifles into the stands, exhausting their ammunition and then trying to flee. Sadat fell to the ground, wounded, and people around him threw chairs in an attempt to protect him from the hail of bullets. The attack lasted only about 2 minutes. About 10 people were killed outright or fatally injured, including Sadat, Cuba's ambassador to Egypt, an Omani general and a Coptic Orthodox bishop. Twenty-eight were wounded, including Vice President Mubarak, Irish Defense Minister James Tully, and four US military liaison officers. The commando chief who organized his assassination, Khaled al Islambuli, an Egyptian, was honored to have a street in Tehran named after him.The security forces present were momentarily stunned, but reacted before a minute had passed. and they fired. One of the attackers was killed in combat, and the other 3 were wounded and detained alive. Sadat was transferred to a military hospital, where 11 doctors tried to operate on him. However, the president died 2 hours after arriving at the hospital. Sadat's death was attributed to "violent nervous shock and internal bleeding into the chest cavity, where the left lung and major blood vessels beneath it were damaged. In conjunction with Sadat's assassination, an insurrection military was organized in Upper Egypt, in Asiut. The rebels took control of the city for a couple of days and 68 soldiers and policemen were killed in clashes. Government control was not restored until the paratroopers from Cairo arrived. The murderers were sentenced to death. Most of the militants involved in that rebellion received sentences of less than 3 years in jail. Sufi Abu Taleb succeeded Sadat for 8 days as interim President until Mubarak was fit to take office. Mubarak would rule for nearly 30 years until his forced resignation in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Personal life
Sadat was married twice. She first married Ehsan Madi at age 22, and divorced years later, just 17 days after the birth of her third daughter, Camelia. She later married Jehan Raouf (known as Jehan Sadat) on May 29, 1949. They had a son, Gamal, and 3 daughters: Lobna, Noha, and Jehan. It was Gamal who represented her father when she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.
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