Nasser was very much a realist. He believed that his regime needed sufficient force at its disposal to meet its internal and external enemies. Without such force, he argued, political aspirations were unachievable. In politics Nasser was a pragmatist. He judged that ideology, no matter how well founded, amounted to very little unless it was backed by the means to impose it. That was why, once in power, he did not rely simply on popular appeal but continued to suppress opposition and develop mechanisms for enforcing political and social control. His chief instruments for suppressing opposition were:
• the armed forces
• the Mukhabarat - the secret police and intelligence agencies, the main instruments for maintaining state security. Growing into a large bureaucracy, with a staff of 10,000 officials, the Mukhabarat stood outside the law and had the power to interfere with any of the other state organizations
• the bureaucracy - Nasser deliberately governed through an extensive bureaucracy in order to suggest that his authority had a much wider base than simply his own individual power
• the government-controlled trade unions
• the Fedayeen - now regarded as representing Nasser's popular following and capable of controlling Egypt's internal dissidents
• the government-controlled media which acted as Nasser's propaganda machine.
All these bodies were either directly concerned with carrying out his wishes or were compliant with them. They were a formidable set of controls which effectively stifled public criticism of Nasser and made open opposition to him or the regime virtually impossible. Protest was necessarily furtive and clandestine. By 1960, 8,000 Islamists and 10,000 communists had been imprisoned along with hundreds of army officers.
Nasser set the tone for repression when he declared to a committee of the Arab Socialist Union (ASU): 'We do not allow any deviationists to remain among us. Should a person deviate in any committee of the ASU, this committee must speak up and seek to expel him.'
Nasser sometimes personally intervened to condemn the excesses of the Mukhabarat, when they came to light. He declared on one occasion, following the death of a political prisoner under torture by the security forces, that such methods had no place in the new Egypt. But his protest seems to have been issued for form's sake rather than being a genuine expression of outrage. As observed by Said K. Aburish, one of Nasser's major Arab biographers: 'As long as Nasser was alive and well and capable of overwhelming the people around him, the chances of creating a democratic or semi-democratic system had little chance of success.'
World History
