Mid-May: This weekend Yasser Arafat received an urgent message from Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. During the week, the British ambassador paid an unusual visit to the PLO political department offices in the Arab University area. On Saturday afternoon, Arafat sent a message to all PLO offices in Lebanon and abroad, stating that an Israeli invasion was expected within the next 48 hours. The Israeli attack would be on a scale greater than the invasion of southern Lebanon in March 1978, or the Palestinian-Israeli war of the summer of 1981 when Beirut itself was bombed.
On Sunday morning, June 6, 1982, 40,000 Israeli troops, with hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers, rolled across the 33-mile border with southern Lebanon. Israeli seaborne troops landed on the Lebanese coast at Sidon and near the mouth of the Zahrani River, while the Israeli air force continued the intense bombing of Palestinian camps in the south and around Beirut begun two days earlier.
It may never be possible to know who killed Bashir Gemayel. No one had more blood on their hands from the last eight years of civil war than the president-elect; his many enemies cut across the range of political and sectarian divisions in Lebanon. The circumstances and scale of the attack suggest that it involved at least the cooperation of some elements within his Phalange Party.
J. S. Birks and C. A. Sinclair, Arab Manpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).
Edward W. Said, Covering Islam (London: Routledge & Regan Paul, 1981).
Edward Said’s Covering Islam is one part of his project to analyze aspects of the Western view of Islam and the Middle East. Orientalism, the first and most substantial of these books, traced the evolution of European attitudes to the cultures of the Middle East from medieval times to the present. It examined specifically how US academics and policymakers adapted the legacy of European orientalism to the needs of US imperialism in the post-1945 era.
Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil, The Political Economy of Nasserism: A Study in Employment and Income Distribution Policies in Urban Egypt, 1952-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
David Hirst and Irene Beeson, Sadat (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).
Ghali Shoukri, Egypte, la contre-revolution (Paris: Editions Le Sycomore, 1979).
These two assessments of the past decade in Egypt pose the question of approach: Can we most conveniently comprehend the period by studying the role Anwar al-Sadat played in it? Do this one man’s thoughts and deeds provide the lens for viewing the post-Nasser era as a whole? The two books give vastly different answers, reflecting the varying backgrounds of the authors no less than their own senses of purpose.
Osman Ahmed Osman, Egypt’s entrepreneurial tycoon, enjoyed a privileged status that cannot be attributed solely to his role as Sadat’s closest confidant, or even to his kinship by marriage with the president. Many Egyptians came to see him as Sadat’s alter ego, minus the latter’s presidential immunity.
Until shortly before his death, Sadat had denounced every attack on Osman as being directed at him personally, but the uproar occasioned by Osman’s recently published autobiography, My Experience, made this full endorsement no longer possible. Sadat had to accept Osman’s resignation as deputy prime minister.
According to data gathered by the UN Center on Transnational Corporations, the overwhelming majority of foreign investment in Egypt has been from the United States, with the exception of the banking sector. There has been very little European investment, and virtually no Japanese presence. The UN data, covering the period from 1978 through early 1982, is incomplete, as it relies on public sources. It reflects mainly Western corporate investments and understates Arab investment concentrated in tourism and real estate. It does not provide the sums invested, but does break down the investments by parent company, country of origin, and line of business.
Egypt’s armed forces number well over 300,000 men, the largest in the Arab world or in Africa. Some two thirds are in the army, and most of the rest in the air force. Since 1952, the top political leadership has been drawn from the armed forces. Since 1968, there has been a “demilitarization” of the top political structures. A recent study calculates that the proportion of cabinet posts held by military officers declined from 35 percent under Nasser to 15 percent under Sadat.
Egypt’s external debt—the sums owed to other governments, private multinational banks and multilateral agencies like the World Bank—increased on an average of 28 percent per year under Anwar al-Sadat, compared to 13 percent over the previous ten years. Sadat’s decade also witnessed important shifts in the origin and structure of this debt, in a manner that paralleled—and to a large extent financed—Egypt’s political reorientation.
We now know that the execution-style death of Anwar al-Sadat on the anniversary of the October war crossing was the prelude to neither a coup d’etat nor a popular uprising. Government institutions continued to function within the established legal framework and internal stability reigned. The trial of Khalid al-Islambuli and his accomplices also made clear that the assassination was not the work of an isolated or demented individual. It was carried out by a group with clear religious motivation; they sought to eliminate the leader but not to overthrow the regime itself.
Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, the fifteenth anniversary of the June war of 1967. Then, Egypt was the main Arab combatant state in a war that redrew the geopolitical map of the Middle East. Today, Israel is again redrawing the map, with Palestinian and Lebanese blood. This time Egypt has filed a formal diplomatic protest through its ambassador in Tel Aviv—the first such protest since the peace treaty of March 1979.
Events since early June, and specifically the Reagan administration’s complete support for and identification with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, accentuates the long-standing need to mobilize popular opposition to US policy in the Middle East. The possibilities for such efforts now exist to a greater degree than ever before. Polls show a majority of Americans oppose the invasion. Public attitudes at this moment are far ahead of the politicians and the media.
To the editors: This letter is in regard to your most recent issue on Iran, “Khomeini and the Opposition” (MERIP Reports 104). It includes interviews with representatives of the right opposition (Bakhtiar) as well as the left opposition. The latter, we learn, includes the Islamic left (Mojahedin’s Rajavi), independent socialists (Hezarkani) and liberals (Bani-Sadr and Nobari) — all of whom, we know, are affiliated with the National Council of Resistance. Are MERIP readers to assume that Khomeini’s left-wing opposition consists solely of the above? Or is MERIP suggesting that the above comprise the only “significant” opposition?
Bereket Habte Selassie, Conflict and Intervention in the Horn of Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980).
Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution (London: Verso, 1982).
Most Western commentators sharply criticize the current Ethiopian regime and the process that brought it to power. They argue that there has been no genuine revolution in Ethiopia, but rather a military coup followed by terror against civilian opponents, repression of the workers’ movement and refusal of self-determination to the national minorities. For critics on the right, such developments prove the turpitude of “Soviet surrogates.” For critics on the left, they show yet another military clique subverting a progressive mass movement.
February 27, 1982
On February 16 the Ethiopian armed forces launched Operation Red Star, a military offensive aimed at isolating the Eritrean opposition and rebuilding the war-torn territory. Ethiopian troops in Eritrea number 120,000, and they are backed by MiG 23 jet fighters, MI-24 helicopter gunships, T-54 tanks and heavy artillery supplied by the USSR. The government in Addis Ababa has made few comments on the war since the original announcement of the campaign on January 25. Mohammed Siad Barre, the spokesman hereof the Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (EPLF), asserts that the Ethiopians have suffered almost 11,000 killed or wounded in the three-week old war.
In April 1976, more than 18 months after taking power, Ethiopia’s ruling Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC) finally provided an elaborated ideological basis for the Ethiopian revolution. The National Democratic Revolution Program, published that month, included many of the changes demanded by the radical civilian left: widespread nationalizations; rural and urban land reform; establishment of peasant and urban (kebele) neighborhood associations; a mass army; reorganized trade unions and other mass organizations. [1] The document also allowed for considerable devolution of authority and responsibility to the elected leadership of these new organizations.
I traveled into Ogaden with the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) for five days in August 1980. We drove about 230 miles across open savanna in broad daylight, crossing the main road between the Ethiopian garrisons in Degabur and Gebredarre. On the third day we reached a town of over 10,000, a trading center bombed by the Ethiopians a year earlier. The merchants who catered to the nomadic population had set up shops under bushes and trees. A village committee, instigated by the WSLF, consisted of merchants, elders and WSLF militants. The committee, I was told, regulated prices and adjudicated local disputes. The WSLF Youth League had set up a school for boys and girls.
