Why was Anwar Sadat assassinated in 1981?
The Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978 led to a negotiated peace between those two nations in 1979, the first between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for bringing their countires into those historic agreements. However, the initiative was far from universally popular in Egypt and the Arab world in general, particularly among Muslim fundamentalists. The Arabs believed 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. Without Egypt’s military power, the threat of force evaporated because no single Arab state was strong enough militarily to confront Israel alone. Thus, the Arabs felt betrayed and dismayed that the Palestinian issue, the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, would remain an unresolved, destabilizing force in the region.
The agreement with Israel brought peace to Egypt but not prosperity. With no real improvement in the economy, Sadat became increasingly unpopular. His isolation in the Arab world was matched by his increasing remoteness from the mass of Egyptians. While Sadat’s critics in the Arab world remained beyond his reach, increasingly he reacted to criticism at home by expanding censorship and jailing his opponents. 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, an impressive, nonpartisan body of citizens charged Sadat with superseding his own constitution.
In the months leading up to the assassination Sadat had lost much of his support at home and in the West due to a brutal crackdown on fundamentalists. In June 1981 tensions between Muslims and Copts in Egypt exploded into a gruesome round of violence in the overcrowded Cairo slum of al-Zawiyya al-Hamra, precipitated by intense summer heat coupled with frequent cutoffs in the water supply. Men, women, and children were slaughtered.
Egypt and the world were horrified by these events. Tensions continued to mount as Muslims and Christians blamed one another in inflammatory press accounts. In September, Sadat cracked down on both sides with mass arrests and brutal police tactics. The powerful Islamic student associations were banned on September 3; their leaders were arrested and roughed up. The head of the Coptic Church, Pope Shenuda III, was banished to a monastery.
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.
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