The July 19, 1971 Coup: From the Registry to the Realm of History

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

Today marks the 53rd anniversary of the July 19, 1971 coup. I am publishing a word from my book “The July 19, 1971 Coup: From the Journal of Investigation to the Realm of History.” The original is an article in English that I presented as a lecture at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1995 and published in an academic journal in 1996. It was published as a book by Azza Publishing House.

The July 19, 1971 coup remained a prisoner of the criminal and judicial investigation journal since its defeat three days after its occurrence.
The unjust courts, which were convened after the failure, took the elite of the leftist generation of the late forties and fifties. The coup remained hostage to an investigation that was entirely limited to an investigation into whether the Communist Party ordered the coup.
That mischievous movement did not leave the Journal of Investigation and the pursuit with the question “Who The perpetrator?” Even after paying this heavy price.
We did not move from our view of the July 19 coup after the investigation station about who carried out the coup to the historical research that revolves around why and how the coup occurred in its time and place. Historical research includes searching for the perpetrator of the coup, of course, but it is not limited to him, rather it frames its investigations about him in economic, social and cultural contexts that benefit us more broadly for our awareness of the past.
We will not achieve this awareness of the past with the approach of the investigator because it is an approach that assumes the control of the instigators of the thing and those who carried it out over their action in history, meaning that they could have stopped the action when they calculated the profit and loss and found it wasteful.
The historical research approach, on the other hand, is based on the fact that the cultural and social context in which the incidents occur has a force on those who carried them out, and calamities will sometimes happen against their will even if they are well prepared for the future.
A shrewd historian said that history does not make us clever-clients when one of its incidents is repeated upon us.
Otherwise, history, if it repeats itself, helps us to be wise, so that we are wiser this time than the first time.
The historical method informs us of the status of will and compulsion in the interpretation of historical events, while the method of daily investigation makes us think that we will be smarter the next time than the first time.
This cleverness or cleverness does not descend upon history, if it descends upon it, except at the expense of compulsion in it. The investigator-investigator elevates the will of people in interpreting history by focusing on the actions of the individual among them.
If an individual among us makes a mistake, he learns from his mistake to improve his making of history the next time. This cleverness regarding history is based on a belief in moral education.
The investigator is concerned with correcting history by placing the burden of a historical misdemeanor on the individual or individuals. When the individual or individuals discover their mistake, they, or those who follow them, are more accurate in their morals in avoiding slipping into the abyss of historical misdeeds.
The daily Al-Tahri’s approach to assessing the July 19 coup focused on the responsibility of its secretary-general, Professor Abdel Khaleq Mahjoub, in its management. This question is of particular importance because the answer to it may cast doubt on the credibility (which is a chapter in ethics) of this thinker who wrote the brilliant pages on the corruption of the coup plan in political work, and even outlined all his political tactics regarding the May 1969 leftist coup, considering it a petty bourgeois sedition that had awakened.
In 1986, 15 years after the death of the hasty coup, the poet Salah Ahmed Ibrahim continued to present evidence and proof that Abdel Khaleq was the one who ordered the coup.
Salah believed that Abdel Khaleq did not explicitly incite the coup, but rather ordered the communist officers to do so in his well-known suggestive style, from which “the person being addressed, particularly if he is a committed communist, cannot help but infer that his inevitable revolutionary duty is to implement it with great enthusiasm.” This style provides the instigator with the freedom to evade and deny whenever the opposing winds blow.
This is what happened in Salah’s view when Abdel Khaleq denied during his trial that he had planned or ordered the July 19 movement.
This criminal accountability became more serious because the Communist Party was not only late in clarifying the circumstances of the coup, but its Central Committee monopolized the right to evaluate it without the other communists and their allies.
I was among those who said in a booklet issued in secret in 1977 that the wisdom of the Central Committee’s distinction in evaluating the coup should not become a reason to confiscate other efforts issued from a scientific and responsible perspective.
The Central Committee took 25 years to issue its evaluation in 1996. This is enough time to spawn questions of blame that are inevitable in the face of the ordeal.
Thus, the method of the daily investigation prevailed in looking at the July 19 coup. Perhaps the brightest evidence of the ability of the criminal judicial investigation method is the issuance of two communist books in the mid-1990s, that is, about two and a half decades after the July 19 coup, which did not leave the investigation station about who ordered the coup. In 1996, the party’s Central Committee issued the long-awaited document to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of the coup (we will call it the 1996 calendar from here on out for the sake of simplicity).
It did nothing more than stick to the party’s favorite saying that July 19 is an accusation we do not deny and an honor we do not claim.
It is a statement issued during the scorching days of July 1971. The party wanted, through its rhetorical ambiguity, to “prove and eat its fire,” as we say.
The coup, in the party’s opinion, is an accusation leveled against it by its opponents, which has not been proven (and will not be proven), and it will not deny it, however, in order to maintain composure in the ordeal.
It is a national honor that it will not claim because it has not been proven that it ordered it and will not be proven. The 1996 report in the July 19 Movement’s calendar stated in a decisive word that the decision to prepare for and execute the coup was not taken by Abdel Khaleq, or the party’s General Secretariat, or its Political Bureau, or its Central Committee.
That is an honor that the Communist Party does not claim. However, the accusation that the Communists did not defend themselves is that they learned of the coup after the party’s military personnel informed them of their plan, and the Political Bureau studied it, commented on it, and asked them to review themselves in light of its comments in preparation for presenting the entire matter to the Central Committee.
But the sword preceded the reproach, as we will see. Thus, the term of honor and the eloquent accusation did not expire with the passage of time. It will enter the Sudanese dictionary of expressions as a bold and correct expression in the good disposal without loss.
As for the other written that followed the tradition of investigations, it was issued in 1998 by Major Mohamed Mahjoub Osman, a member of the July 19 coup council and the brother of Professor Abdel Khaliq Mahjoub, the Secretary General of the Communist Party (1926-1971), entitled The Army and Politics in Sudan: A Study of the July 19, 1971 Movement. It is undoubtedly a very critical commentary on the 1996 evaluation.
Mohamed Mahjoub believed that the party was involved in the July 19 coup and that its denial of the order to do so was inappropriate. If the party did not carry out the coup, it proceeded with it through its school of thought for the idea of ​​moving with the military. The party accepted in the meeting of the Political Bureau (13-7-1971) from the collective vision of the communist military to resolve the political crisis the idea of ​​carrying out a “corrective movement” by those communist officers subject to the assessments of the Central Committee. Mohamed Mahjoub saw this as the party’s acceptance of what Hashim and his corrective movement had done. In this context, the party asked the military to answer some questions, all of which aimed to ensure the success of the move, taking into account the situation in the country and the positions of those inside and outside the revolutionary movement. In this context, the party asked the military to enlighten them on the situation of some of the weapons loyal to Field Marshal Jaafar Nimeiry, the situation in the south, and any possible intervention by the Egypt-Libya-Sudan alliance, which was being called for at its peak.
The communists’ opposition to the establishment of this alliance was one of the most important points of contention between them and the May government. Mahjoub saw these positions and questions as “the beginning of a coup.” We continue