TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.32

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 13KB | 248 lines

                                                                                October 19, 1981

He Changed the Tide of History

Anwar Sadat:  1918-1981


His life was a skein of contradictions. Long a bitter foe of
the Jewish state, he became Israel's only declared friend in a
hostile region. A self-styled defender of the Palestinians, he
was cursed as a traitor by the leaders of their cause. He
preached the unity of Arab nations, but his policies shattered
such fragile fraternity as existed, and isolated his country.
A onetime revolutionary firebrand and career military man, he
died in a hail of bullets--yet history will remember Anwar
Sadat, above all, as a man of peace.

It was the search for peace that led the Egyptian President, in
November 1977, to travel to Jerusalem and embrace his former
enemies. Not only did he break a 29-year Arab ban on direct
dealings with the Israelis, he went straight to the rostrum of
the Knesset to proclaim his willingness "to live with you in
permanent peace and justice." More dramatically than any event
since the birth of Israel in 1948, that courageous gesture
transformed the political realities of a region bloodied and
embittered by continual hate, war and violence. As it is given
to few individuals, with a single, personal stroke he altered
the landscape of history.

Until Sadat's pilgrimage, no leader on either side of the
Arab-Israeli blood feud had shown the courage, vision and
flexibility to seek a radical solution to the festering problem.
His hosts were at first surprised, then exalted, by his
unexpected overture. As Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin
then put it:  "We, the Jews know how to appreciate such
courage."  So did the tens of thousands of Egyptians who, upon
his return, greeted their smiling President with chants of
"Sadat!  The man of peace" as his open limousine slowly made its
way from the airport to his home in Giza.

The peace process initiated by Sadat ultimately bore fruit at
Camp David the next year. Over a period of 13 days, Sadat,
Begin and Jimmy Carter remained cloistered in that Maryland
mountain retreat while they hammered out their historic
"framework for peace."  (Their joint efforts brought Sadat and
Begin the Nobel Peace Prize for 1978.)  The Camp David
principles were embodied in a formal treaty that was signed by
the three leaders in an emotional White House ceremony on March
26, 1979. For the first time in 31 years, Egypt and Israel were
no longer in a state of war.

Sadat could not know it, but that day also marked the pinnacle
of his career, the closest he would come in his lifetime to
realizing what he called his "sacred mission" for peace in the
Middle East. Said he: "This is certainly one of the happiest
moments of my life. In all the steps I took, I was merely
expressing the will of the nation. I am proud of my people and
belonging to them."

That sense of belonging was one of the guiding forces of Sadat's
life. "I can never lose my way because I know that I have living
roots in the soil of my village," he wrote in his 1978
autobiography, In Search of Identity. One of 13 children, Sadat
was born on Christmas Day, 1918, in the Nile Delta village of
Mit Abu el Kom. His father was a military hospital clerk, his
mother an illiterate Sudanese. He spent his early years working
in the fields and attending the village kuttab, an Islamic
school where he learned to read and write and studied the Koran.
It was the beginning of the lifelong religious faith that, in
later years, left the familiar Muslim mark on his forehead from
touching the floor in frequent prayer.

Sadat grew up with a hatred of Egypt's colonial British rulers
and an almost fanatical admiration for Mahatma Gandhi. Confides
Sadat's sister Sekeena:  "When he was a little boy, he used to
dress like Gandhi and pretend to be him."  But if Sadat showed
something resembling Gandhi's spiritual dimension in his later
years, his early attempts to bring political change to Egypt
were anything nut nonviolent.

Sadat was admitted in 1936 to the Royal Military Academy, where
he first learned the value of bold, decisive action along with
the uses of power and force. After graduating in 1938, he
joined a group of young officers, including Gamal Abdel Nasser,
who plotted an armed revolt against the British presence. At
that time, Sadat was the hothead talking of blowing up British
installations; the cooler Nasser dissuaded him.

During World War II, Captain Sadat collaborated with the Germans
in several anti-British plots, which landed him in jail in
1942. Arrested again two years later in connection with the
assassination of a pro-British Egyptian aristocrat, Sadat
remained in prison until his trial and acquittal in 1948.
Shortly after his release, he divorced his first wife and
married Jehan Raouf, a beautiful Anglo-Egyptian girl who
eventually gave him four children (he had three by his first
marriage).

Reinstated in the army in 1950, Sadat joined Nasser in the coup
that toppled King Farouk two years later, Sadat held a variety
of posts under Nasser, distinguishing himself mainly by a
slavish obedience that led colleagues to dub him "Nasser's
poodle."  Nasser apparently appreciated his docile loyalty and
named him Vice President in 1969. A year later, Nasser was dead
of a heart attack and the little-known Sadat became President.

Most observers then saw Sadat as a feckless transitional figure.
He soon proved them wrong by warding off an attempted coup,
jailing its instigators and consolidating his power. At the
same time, he boosted his popularity by abandoning the most
repressive trappings of Nasser's socialist state, although he
would never give the country more than a semblance of democracy
under his own effective dictatorship. He also turned away from
his predecessor's obsessive pan-Arabism in favor of a more
nationalistic concern with Egypt's welfare. In his most
significant break with Nasser's policies, Sadat in 1972
abruptly abandoned Egypt's longstanding alliance with Moscow and
expelled some 17,000 Soviet military advisers from his country.
The way was now clear for Sadat's new course; a strategic
rapprochement with Washington that could help Egypt end its
wasteful confrontation with Israel.

Paradoxically, the key step in Sadat's peace plan was a new war.
With all diplomatic channels to peace apparently blocked, Sadat
launched a surprise attack across the Suez Canal into the
Israeli-occupied Sinai on Oct.6, 1973. His goal: to bolster
Egyptian morale, prove that Israel was not invincible and force
Jerusalem to return the lands seized in the Six-Day War of 1967.
Stunned and driven back at first, the Israelis counterattacked
strongly and reversed the tide. But it was enough for Sadat to
claim a moral victory. With the restoration of Egyptian
self-respect, he began a series of peace initiatives.

Enter Henry Kissinger, whom Sadat greeted as his "dear friend
Henry," and whose painstaking shuttle diplomacy produced two
Sinai disengagement agreements by 1975. But that was as far as
Kissinger could take the peace process.

In January 1977, just as the new Carter Administration was
taking office, violent food-price riots in Cairo and Alexandria
put new pressures on Sadat to channel Egypt's resources into
peaceful priorities. From that seeming dead end, Sadat made the
historic leap of imagination that sent him to Jerusalem with an
olive branch--and ultimately produced the 1979 peace treaty.

The pact brought gradual but dramatic changes in the Middle
East equation. For the first time, the two countries exchanged
ambassadors and opened their borders; Israel promised to return
the occupied Sinai to Egypt, a process due to be completed by
next April; and talks were begun on the thorniest of
question--Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank and Gaza. But
autonomy continued to remain the most formidable obstacle to a
broader Middle East peace, with the Begin government defining
the concept with excessive narrowness and the Palestinians
boycotting the process altogether. The treaty enraged other
Arab leaders, who accused Sadat of treachery for abandoning the
struggle against Israel. Eighteen Arab nations imposed economic
and political sanctions against Cairo. Meanwhile, Egypt was
becoming more and more dependent on U.S. support.

Sadat was also faced with increasing sectarian opposition within
Egypt during the last months of his life. In September he
cracked down hard, jailing 1,600 opponents, mostly Islamic
militants, in the wake of bloody rioting between Muslims and
Coptic Christians. The mosques were "nationalized," police
details were bolstered on university campuses and an
investigation of the state bureaucracy began. Following these
moves, Sadat declared in a tough speech that "lack of discipline
in any way or form" had ended in his country. This time,
however, the visionary statesman and consummate strategist had
fatally misjudged the situation:  his killers emerged form a
cauldron of seething unrest and fanaticism.

"In Egypt," Sadat once wrote, "personalities are more important
than programs."  Nothing illustrated that point better than his
own career. If his programs changed markedly over the years, he
always pursued them with the relentless force of his own
personality. Those who met him were usually dazzled by the
charm, grace and warmth of his manner. Recalls former Israeli
Deputy Prime Minister Yegael Yadin:  "He immediately created a
relationship of sincerity, friendship, frankness and warmth, and
in this way he was like a member of the family."

Yet the ready embrace and winning smile could also mask his
inner thoughts. Says William Quandt, a former Middle East
expert on the National Security Council:  "Sadat was a hard man
to read. He didn't always communicate what was on his mind so
he could catch you by surprise."  He could be intentionally
devious on occasion. At the first Camp David session, Sadat
read a list of hard-line demands that almost broke up the talks
on the spot. His strategy, Quandt later concluded, "was to
manufacture a crisis that would force the U.S. to step in and
start offering proposals."  The gambit worked:  while Sadat
retired to virtual seclusion in his cabin. Carter began
suggesting compromise positions to both sides.

In spite of his seeming amiability, Sadat was not a gregarious
man and had few intimate friends. One of them, wealthy Egyptian
contractor Osman Ahmed Osman, recalls that Sadat would remain
with him "for two or three hours without saying a word, just
chewing his pipe and thinking."  A favorite Sadat pastime was
a contemplative afternoon walk along the Nile near one of his
ten residences.

Sadat enjoyed the comforts and perquisites of his rank, but
hardly to excess. Apart from a weakness for fine English suits
and imported Dunhill pipe tobacco, his tastes and habits were
simple. He usually ate only one light meal each day. A devout
Muslim, he never drank wine or liquor. He liked to spend quiet
evenings at home watching private movie screenings, usually of
American westerns.

No workaholic, Sadat slept eight hours a night, rarely awoke
before 9 a.m. and insisted on a three-hour nap each afternoon.
He avoided paperwork, preferring to deal with the broad picture
and leave the details to his subordinates. He was so averse to
reading official documents that when Cyrus Vance brought him
Jimmy Carter's invitation to Camp David, Sadat asked Vance to
read it to him aloud.

But what some might call a lazy man's schedule gave Sadat a
chance to think and that made an enormous difference to the
world. It took a lot of patient walking and pipe chewing to
reach his crucial decisions. His longtime counselor Sayed
Marei, who was wounded in last week's shooting, once observed
that, "he takes a long time to make up his mind, but once he
makes it up, it never changes."

That quality of decisiveness, followed up by action, is what
distinguished Sadat from his peers. "A leader of the Arab
world usually waits for something to happen, then he
counterpunches," says L. Carl Brown, director of Near East
studies at Princeton University. "What was fascinating about
Sadat was that he took initiatives. That's not the usual Arab
style. Sadat was in a class by himself." Says Harvard
University Professor Nadav Safran, a Cairo-born Jew: "Sadat
broke away in order to lead. He broke away in order to explore
the road ahead, at great risk to himself. He proved that his
instinct and vision were correct, that if he moved ahead far
enough and reached at least one oasis, he could point the way
of the caravan out of the wilderness."

Anwar Sadat believed so completely in his mission that he was
prepared to perish rather than change direction. And from that
faith came the courage to face the dangers before him with his
oft-repeated dictum: "This is my fate. I have accepted my
fate."

--By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Dean Brelis/New York and
Wilton Wynn/Cairo