As soon as Yevgeny Prigozhin announced his mutiny, the memories began flooding back into the minds of writers and non-writers who felt compelled to share them either on social media or in the press. These individuals found in their memories many Arab figures who resemble Prigozhin. The gist of their sentiment was: we have many of his kind and these inter-regime conflicts.
It was easy to recall Hemedti in Sudan, as his conflict with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is fresh and, in a sense, coincides with the Putin-Prigozhin conflict. Previously, Sudan had seen Hashem al-Atta’s 1971 attempted coup against his partner in the Revolutionary Council, Jaafar Nimeiri, and then his execution and the liquidation of the Communist Party. In 1985, Army Commander Abd al-Rahman Siwar al-Dahab turned on Nimeiri, overthrew him, and then became the only military leader to hand power back to civilians.
We could also put Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1954 toppling of Muhammad Naguib in the same category. The same is true for Houari Boumediene’s overthrow of Ahmed Ben Bella in 1965 and what was called the conspiracy of the two officers, Adam Hawaz and Musa Ahmed, the Libyan ministers of defense and interior respectively, to bring down their comrade Muammar al-Gaddafi. The list goes on and includes both conspirators who succeeded in their struggle with their brothers in arms and failed conspirators.
In Egypt, we also point to Abdel Hakim Amer, the commander of Nasser’s army and his closest friend. It is rumored that Amer’s conspiring against Nasser led to both the unequivocal defeat of 67 and Amer’s equivocal suicide.
Turning to Iraq, we can refer back to the aftermath of the coup that was carried out by Abdul Karim Qasim and Abdul Salam Arif. The former pushed his partner out after accusing him of plotting his own conspiracy. Iraq has an abundance of figures out of which we limit ourselves to the most significant: in 1965, Arif Abdul Razzak, a maximally committed Nasserist, tried to topple Arif, a minimally committed Nasserist.
In 1973 General Security Director Nazim Kazzar was accused of plotting an unsuccessful coup and then executed. Then, in early 1996, it is rumored that the clan executed Saddam Hussein’s two sons-in-law, Hussein Kamel al-Majid and his brother Saddam, who had fled to Jordan and been accused of plotting a coup. Earlier, in 1989, doubt was shed on the story that Adnan Khairallah, Iraq’s Minister of Defense and Saddam’s cousin, had died in a plane crash.
The list is even longer in Syria, and we could consider Sami al-Hinnawi to have laid the foundations. He turned on his friend Hosni al-Zaim in 1949, only for his friend Adeeb Shishakli to turn against him in 1950. The coup that brought the “United Arab Republic” down in 1961 was led by Abdel Karim al-Nahlawi, one of the Syrian officers closest to Amer.
With the Baath, however, the hobby was made into a profession. From inside the “unionist regime” the Nasserist officer Jassem Alwan tried but failed to overthrow the Baathist officers in the summer of 1963. In 1966, the Baathists Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad launched a coup against a fellow Baathist, Amin al-Hafiz.
Four years after that, Assad turned on Jadid. In the meantime, Baathist Salim Hatoum tried to arrest Jadid and another comrade, President Noureddie al-Atassi. His attempt failed, and he fled to Jordan, only to return to Syria with the outbreak of the 1967 war. Hatoum claimed he had done so to take part in the fight against Israel, but his comrades executed him on the grounds that he had come back to carry out a coup. Amid conflict between Assad and Jadid, it was claimed that Abdel Karim al-Jundi, who had been an adjutant of Jadid’s and the head of the National Security Bureau, committed suicide.
The Assads in Syria were not any more convivial and familial than Husseins in Iraq. A 1984 coup attempt was pinned on Rifaat, Hafez’s brother, who was politely exiled to a life of luxury abroad. Then, in 2012, many raised doubts about the narrative around the obscure death of Bashar’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat...
While it might seem that way, this is not particular to the Arab world: in 1973, Greek generals led by Dimitrios Ionidis turned against the colonels who had ruled the country since 1967 led by George Papadopoulos. Moving from the far right to the far left, Lin Biao, Mao’s “comrade-in-arms” and defense minister, was killed in 1971 when a plane carrying him to Mongolia blew up after he had been accused of orchestrating a coup attempt.
The most prominent commonality shared by the examples listed in this terrible registry is military and security men championing evil and secrecy that renders an accurate account of the events impossible. They make determining whether those accused of carrying out the coups had actually done so impossible. By keeping their citizens in the dark, they not only exclude citizens from the theatrical performance, but also make it impossible for them to know anything about it.
All of this is the result of having a political structure in which the state is centered around an individual, a party, or a family, not an abstract entity with a constitution above any individual, party, and family. Thus, no one who heads such a state can be called strong, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has long been for a long time. They can only be weak figures whose frailty has yet to be exposed.
Here, we can draw an analogy with how we see mountains. Looking at the summit, the mountain seems like it has a single slope, but when we look up from the foot of the mountain, we find many plateaus, an array of colors, and various forms of rocks, springs and perhaps trees.
Power is always best seen from the bottom up.
