In a move that took Egypt and the world by surprise, the Egyptian police detained 1,536 public figures representing all the opposition forces in the country in early September 1981.
The majority of the detained were Islamists, but the rest were opposition leaders and intellectuals who were well-known in Cairo and beyond.
In addition, and in a move that shook Egypt, Pope Shenouda of the Egyptian Coptic Church was put under house arrest.
The detentions were made on the direct orders of late President Anwar Al-Sadat. Many observers and those who have an interest in following political developments in Egypt have tried to understand and explain the reasons behind the sweeping detentions.
There are those who believe that the main political forces targeted were the Islamists. Another more plausible explanation was that the former president, who two years earlier had signed the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in March 1979 at the White House in Washington, was afraid that the growing popular opposition to the treaty within Egypt combined with the Arab boycott of the country could be used by the Israelis to postpone the first stage of their withdrawal from Sinai scheduled for April 1982.
I was following these important political developments at the time from Washington, where I had been posted as a young diplomat in the Egyptian Embassy.
I served from January 1979 to April 1983 during a period that had seen the climax of Egyptian-US relations during the Carter administration (1977-1981) and then what I would describe as their “normalisation” – meaning that the relations between the two countries were stripped of the personal warmth that had characterised the relationship between former president Al-Sadat and his US counterpart former US president Jimmy Carter (a Democrat) who had pushed hard for peace between Egypt and Israel.
Carter had exerted substantial pressure on President Al-Sadat at Camp David in the period from 5 to 17 September 1978 to sign the Camp David Accords (two separate documents) against the positions taken by the Egyptian negotiators with the US and Israeli delegations. Former Egyptian foreign minister Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel submitted his resignation moments before the signing ceremony on 17 September.
The US saw a change of administration in January 1981 that brought about a conservative revolution in US politics. Former president Ronald Reagan (Republican) entered the White House, and Egyptian-US relations entered a new phase that contrasted sharply with the outgoing Carter administration. The first one to experience the depth of the change was President Al-Sadat himself.
The two governments agreed on a visit by the former Egyptian president to Washington and a first meeting with the newly elected US president from 5 to 9 August 1981.
The contrast between Washington under the Carter administration and Washington under Reagan from the perspective of Egypt and its former president could not have been greater. Gone were the warm personal relations that had bound Al-Sadat and Carter, to be replaced by relations between the president of a superpower and a head of state from the Third World, notwithstanding the US-sponsored Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty.
More seriously from the Egyptian point of view, gone too were the US promises to President Al-Sadat that the US would bring in Jordan to join the self-government talks under the Peace Treaty as regards the application of self-rule in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The other promise was that the US would not support any peace initiatives in the Middle East save the Camp David Accords and the resulting Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel.
This left the former Egyptian president in a very delicate situation within Egypt and in the Arab world, where Cairo was accused of signing a “separate peace” with Israel. In order to overcome the growing opposition to the Treaty and to prove his Egyptian and Arab opponents wrong, President Al-Sadat came to Washington on 5 August 1981 with a brilliant idea that he worked hard to sell to the Reagan administration.
He called for “mutual and simultaneous recognition” between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel. He discussed this with Reagan during the talks at the White House. He discussed it with members of the US Congress and explained it in talks with some members of the US media. He brought it up in his remarks before the New York-based US Council on Foreign Relations.
No one in Washington was receptive to the Egyptian proposal. Had it been adopted by the Reagan administration, at least theoretically, and with a public promise that it would think it over with the Israelis and Jordanians, President Al-Sadat would have been able to go back to Egypt with a major and far-reaching diplomatic breakthrough.
When he returned to Cairo empty-handed, he grasped the true meaning of the change of presidents and administrations in Washington and that his efforts to pave the way for a more comprehensive and just peace in the Middle East were now in tatters. His only concern became to do everything possible to carry out the first phase of the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai to Al-Arish-Ras Mohamed.
Had Al-Sadat succeeded in Washington, maybe he would not have been assassinated on 6 October 1981 and the Middle East would have known the just and comprehensive peace that has eluded us over the last five decades. Even today, no one can predict for sure when its dawn may be.
The historical irony is that the same US administration that rejected out of hand the Al-Sadat proposal of August 1981 was the one that in 1988 accepted to enter into a dialogue with the PLO in Tunisia. Egypt had played a prominent role in bringing this about, but this time under a different president, the late Hosni Mubarak.
On 13 September 1993, the chairman of the PLO Yasser Arafat shook hands with former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Guess where. On the lawn of the White House with Democratic US President Bill Clinton.
*The writer is a former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 September, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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