Nasser, Gamal Abd al- 1918-70
Egyptian statesman

He was born in Alexandria. As an army officer with bitter experience of the mismanaged Palestine campaign of 1948, he became dissatisfied with the inefficiency and corruption of the Farouk regime, and founded the military Junta which led to its downfall. Chief power behind the coup of 1952, he was mainly responsible for the rise to power of General Mohammed Neguib. Tension between the two grew and Nasser assumed the office of Prime Minister (April 1954) and then President (November 1954) by deposing Neguib. Nasser was officially elected President in 1956, and his nationalization of the Suez Canal in that year led to Israel's invasion of Sinai. When Anglo-French forces intervened, widespread differences of opinion in Great Britain and elsewhere, coupled with veiled Russian threats, enabled Nasser to turn an abject military d�b�cle into a political victory. His aim was to build an Arab empire stretching across North Africa, the first step being the creation, by federation with Syria, of the United Arab Republic of which Nasser was President in February 1958. In March 1958 the Yemen and the UAR formed the United Arab States. This was followed by a sustained effort to break up the Baghdad Pact and liquidate the remaining sovereign states in the Middle East, a policy which succeeded in Iraq, but was thwarted in Jordan and the Lebanon by the deployment of US and British forces. His plans for unity among the Arab states received a setback when Syria withdrew from the UAR and when the union with the Yemen was dissolved (1961). In 1964, however, the UAR formed joint presidency councils with Iraq and the Yemen. After the six-day Arab-Israeli War (1967), heavy losses on the Arab side led to Nasser's resignation, but he was persuaded to stay on, and he died in office, one year before the completion of one of his greatest projects, the Aswam High Dam.

Bibliography: Robert St John, The Boss (1961)