CAIRO: The Egyptian defence minister who oversaw the so-called War of Attrition with Israel that followed the loss of the Sinai peninsula in the Six-Day War of 1967 died on Saturday at the age of 88.
A staunch supporter of the pan-Arab socialism of president Gamal Abdel Nasser, Amin Huweidi fell foul of his successor Anwar Sadat and spent a decade under house arrest.
But he was still given a military funeral in the Armed Forces Mosque in Cairo on Saturday, the official MENA news agency reported. It gave no cause of death.
Nasser appointed Huweidi to head the defence and intelligence ministries after Egypt s humiliating Six-Day War defeat, in which Israel seized the Sinai in just three days, destroying Egypt s air force in the first hours of the war.
He oversaw the War of Attrition, in which Israel and Egypt exchanged artillery and commando attacks between 1967 and 1970.
The then Soviet Union deployed pilots and surface-to-air missiles to bolster Egypt s defences.
Huweidi s fortunes changed after Nasser died of cardiac arrest in 1970.
He was among 91 people arrested and accused of treason in a purge against senior officials whom Sadat felt were disloyal.
He never returned to government after his long years under house arrest, instead becoming an author and analyst.
To the end, he remained a fervent defender of Nasser against charges of authoritarianism, telling an interviewer he had no time for Western-style democracy, which he described as the antics of the ballot box – vote-buying, vote-rigging, the whole farcical lot.
True democracy is about meeting the basic needs of the masses. That is what I understand social justice to be. That is how Nasser saw it. He laid the foundations of true democracy, Huweidi said in a 2007 interview with the English language Al-Ahram Weekly. -AFP
