Ghassan Tueni Conducts an Anatomy of Nasserism

Ghassan Tueni on Monday took the 50th anniversary of Gamal Abdel Nasser's rebellion against Egypt's monarchy in 1952 to show the role it played in introducing police state systems across the Arab world. The writer takes the Nasserite revolution to reckoning from the angle of the 1967 six-day war debacle, when Nasser went live on the air on June 9 to announce his resignation for his battlefield defeat at Israel's hands. "He resigned in the spirit of a hero, setting a self-criticism example for the Arabs that defeat, or failure to make victory, is automatically punishable by resignation. So he resigned and called for an election of a successor," Tueni wrote in an An Nahar editorial. "But the masses were in a rage. They rejected his resignation, which was said at the time that the resignation was stage-managed so that the secret service would infiltrate the masses to agitate for keeping Nasser in power," Tueni wrote. He reasoned that the intelligence apparatus rushed to maintain Nasser in office to avoid accountability for its failure to carry out its duty in preparing for the war by assessing the enemy's might and how to go about confronting it. Tueni argued that the Nasserite revolution had largely set the stage for militarized regimes in many Arab countries, including Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. "It is no wonder, consequently, to see the countries that copied the Nasserite revolution end up as monarchal republics relying on armies that excel only in snuffing out public freedoms in order to establish intelligence terror states," Tueni added. "This tragic example is manifested by the chain of coup d'Etats that led the latest coup leader to plead with Nasser for an Egyptian-Syrian merger even though the Cairo regime was not prepared for such a drastic move," Tueni recalled. In a nutshell, Tueni went on, it should be noted on the 50th anniversary celebrations that Nasserism had mothered the "intelligence regime that built its survivability at the expense of human and public freedoms."

Beirut, Updated 26 Jul 02, 14:00

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