Term Paper on Anwar Sadat
Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat was an Egyptian army officer and politician who remained
the president of Egypt until hi death on October 6, 1981. He was born on
December 25, 1918. He was awarded nobel prize for his initiation of the peace
negotiations with Israeli Premier Menachem Begin. Under their leadership, Egypt
and Israel made peace with each other in 1979. Graduated from the Cairo Military
Academy in 1938, Sadat was a politician from the very begenning. During World
War II he conspired to exude the British from Egypt with the help of the
Germans. The British jailed him in 1942, but he afterwards escaped. By 1950
Sadat had joined Gamal Abdel Nasser's Free Officers organization and
participated in their armed coup against the Egyptian monarchy in 1952 and
supported Nasser's election to the presidency in 1956. Sadat held numerous high
offices that led to his serving in the vice presidency two times, from 1964-66,
1969-70. On Nasser’s death on September 28, 1970 he became acting president and
was elected president in a plebiscite on October 15. His domestic policies
covered decentralization and diversification of the economy and abatement of
Egypt's political structure.
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Sadat made his most dramatic efforts in foreign affairs. Opinioned that the
Soviet Union gave him insufficient support in Egypt's ongoing conflict with
Israel, he sent home thousands of Soviet technicians and advisers from the
country in 1972. The subsequent year he begun, with Syria, a collective invasion
of Israel that began the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973. The Egyptian army
consummated a due surprise in its attack on the Israeli-held Sinai Peninsula,
and, although Israel fortunately counterattacked, Sadat came out of the war with
extremely improved éclat as the first Arab leader to in fact retook some
territory from Israel.
Sadat began to work toward peace in the Middle East after the war. He made a
two-day visit to Israel on November 19, 1977, during which he traveled to
Jerusalem to place his plan for a peace settlement before the Knesset (Israeli
Parliament). This instituted a series of diplomatic efforts that Sadat
protracted notwithstanding resolute opposition from most of the Arab world and
the Soviet Union. The U.S. president Jimmy Carter arbitrated the negotiations
between Sadat and Begin that ended in the Camp David Accords on September 17,
1978, an introductory peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. For their
efforts, both were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978. From the day of
starting the presidency, Sadat set a new course surprisingly independent from
Nasser. While Nasser had aligned himself away from the West, and started
collaboration closely with the Soviet Union, Sadat sacked 20,000 Soviet military
personnel two year after seizure of power.
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In 1973 Sadat was one of the inciters of the Yom Kippur war against Israel, but
this only gave part of the triumph he had hoped for that aimed at regaining
control over the Suez Canal. However, the war proved that the Arab military was
now at least as strong as the Israeli that was backed by the US aid. Sadat's
ascending star on the Arab sky, fell to the ground in 1977, when he
flabbergasted the world by visiting Israel. This visit was largely motivated by
the economical problems after many wars with Israel. The outcome of the
negotiation was the Camp Davis Accord that was basicalli in two parts;
1. Israel should give up land taken from Egypt in exchange for peace.
2. Israel should secure the establishment of a Palestinian state and no more
building of settlements on the occupied territories.
Despite many efforts, the second part was never fulfilled.
But the signing of this treaty isolated Egypt in the Arab world, and strong
opposition was expressed from the Islamic countries.
Sadat's popularity may have risen in the West, but it fell climactically in
Egypt because of internal opposition to the treaty, a heightening economic
crisis, and Sadat's suppression of the resultant public disagreement. Muslim
extremists while reviewing a military parade commemorating the Arab-Israeli war
of October 1973 assassinated him.
The Camp David Accord did bring peace among Egypt and Israel but detatched Egypt
from the rest of the Arab and Muslim world who were of the opinion that only a
unified Arab stance and the threat of force would persuade Israel to negotiate a
settlement of the Palestinian issue that would satisfy Palestinian demands for a
homeland. Lacking Egypt's military power, the threat of force drained away
because no single Arab state was strong enough militarily to challenge Israel
single handedly. Consequently, the Arabs felt betrayed and appalled that the
Palestinian issue, the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, would remain an
unconcluded, destabilizing force in the region.
However, a further enigma associated with the peace accord was the continuous
deteriration of the Egyptian economy. With no genuine improvement in the
economy, Sadat became increasingly unpopular. His solitude in the Arab world was
paired by his increasing loftiness from the mass of Egyptians. While Sadat's
connoisseur in the Arab world remained outside his range, increasingly he
retorted to criticism at home by augmenting censorship and imprisoning his
rivals. Sadat subjected the Egyptians to a series of referenda on his actions
and proposals that he invariably won by more than 99 percent of the vote. In May
1980, a poignant, impartial body of citizens charged Sadat with overruling his
own constitution.
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In June 1981 tensions between Muslims and Copts in Egypt detonated into a
frightening round of violence in the packed Cairo slum of al-Zawiyya al-Hamra,
precipitated by fierce summer heat linked with repeated cutoffs in the water
supply. Men, women, and children were slaughtered. Egypt and the world were
frightened by these eventualities. Tensions continued to horse as Muslims and
Christians condemned one another in inflammatory press accounts. In September,
Sadat fissured down on both sides with mass arrests and barbaric police tactics.
The strong Islamic student associations were bootlegged on September 3; their
leaders were jailed and roughed up. The head of the Coptic Church, Pope Shenuda
III, was exiled to a hermitage.
On October 6, 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat was attending an annual military
parade celebrating the "successful" campaigns during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He
was saluting the troops when an assassination team ran from one of the parade
vehicles and began firing weapons and throwing grenades into the reviewing
stand. Sadat was killed and 20 others, including four American diplomats, were
injured. Also in the reviewing stand with Sadat were future UN Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Hosni Mubarek, the Air Force officer who succeeded
Sadat as President. Neither Mubarek nor Boutros-Ghali were injured.
Following Sadat's assassination, the killers were identified as Muslim radicals,
members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. They opposed Sadat's landmark peace
treaty with Israel and hoped to impose Islamic rule in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak and
General Fouad Allam, head of Egypt's security service, waged a campaign against
radical Islam that featured unlawful arrests, detention without trial, and
torture to force confessions. Thousands of suspected terrorists were rounded up
and jailed, among them Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was later convicted of
conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of
Osama bin Laden's two top lieutenants. In September 1981, Sadat gave the
direction to round up 1,600 dissidents, Islamists and Communists. A month later,
on October 6, three soldiers under a military parade in Cairo assassinated him.
Works Cited
Studies of Sadat's life and achievements include David Hirst and Irene Beeson,
Sadat (1981)
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Sadat and His Statecraft, 2nd ed. (1983)
Heikal, Mohamed (Muhammad Haykal), Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat
(1983)
Israeli, Raphael, Man of Defiance: A Political Biography of Anwar Sadat (1985).
Sadat's autobiography, In Search of Identity, was published in 1978.
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