Egypt

on the World Today

BRITISH diplomats who have come to know General Naguib say that though his public utterances have run to wild abuse and threats of “forthcoming battle,”in private he is an intelligent and on the whole reasonable negotiator. The Sudan Agreement, for instance, was made possible by Naguib’s abandonment of Egypt’s reiterated claim to sole sovereignty of the Sudan.

The crux of the matter is that the Naguib regime has, to some extent, a split personality. By Middle Eastern standards, it is a responsible and unusually progressive reformist movement, whose leader realizes that Egypt’s future, in the economic sphere at least, hinges on close coöperation with the West. On the other hand, Naguib and his associates are all passionate nationalists.

Then, too, Naguib governs as chairman of a board rather than as absolute boss, and he has to take into account the viewpoint of the extremists in the military junta. One of its members is a former terrorist; another was interned by the British in World War II as an Axis agent; several have been associated with the fanatically xenophobic Moslem Brotherhood. Naguib himself is undoubtedly sincere when he stresses that his aim is to arrive at dignified and amicable relations with the Western world: some of his arrests have clearly been aimed at weakening the Moslem Brotherhood’s influence. It remains an open question whether the General’s more civilized orientation will prevail.

Suez: largest military depot

Behind the scenes, constructive compromises and concessions were made in September by both sides in the informal talks about Suez. Britain agreed to withdraw, as rapidly as transport facilities permit, the reportedly 80,000 troops stationed in the Canal Zone. She will be allowed to maintain about 4000 technicians until Egyptian personnel can be trained to take over the billion-and-a-half-dollar base.

The Egyptians demanded a three-year limit on the tenure of the British technicians; the British argued that it would take ten years before replacements can be relied on to operate efficiently the complicated installations of the world’s largest military depot. Still more crucial was the difference over definition of the area on which an attack would automatically entitle Britain (and her allies) to reactivate the Suez base. The British wished to include Greece and Turkey, Iran, India, and Pakistan. The Egyptians insisted on limiting the area to the Arab States, and on leaving it up to the Arab League to decide whether an attack on any neighboring state warrants the return of foreign armies to the Canal Zone.

The tremendous residue of hostility and suspicion left by British colonialism throughout the Middle East tends to make even farsighted Egyptians regard Soviet expansionism as a secondary issue to the so-called “ violation” of their soil by British troops. Thus the British argument that maintenance of a topflight base at Suez is a vital contribution to Egypt’s security makes little impression on the Egyptians. And all schemes to enlist the Arab world in a defensive alliance against Russian imperialism look, when filtered through the prism of Arab nationalism, like cunning attempts on the part of Western imperialism to prolong its domination of the Middle East.

The land program

In Egypt’s internal affairs, Naguib’s Agrarian Law continues, a year after its passage, to be the most hotly discussed issue. The sketchy reports published in the American press have conveyed the misleading impression that the land program, by breaking up the great estates, would rapidly work miracles for the peasantry. Actually the peasantry, while they have benefited from a minimum wage law—the first ever passed in the Middle East — have so far been virtually untouched, materially, by the land redistribution program; and it will be several years before its results can be reliably assessed.

Its tremendous importance, to date, is that it has brought to the wretched fellahin something they have not known for centuries: a sense that the government is on their side and that the future may be brighter.

In 1950, the distribution of land in Egypt presented a more feudalistic picture than in 1900: the very big landowners had increased their share of the total acreage, and that of the very small proprietors had shrunk. About 2 million farmers owned roughly an acre or less, and had an average income of $23 per annum. At the other end of the scale, some 2000 landowners owned 20 per cent of Egypt’s 6 million cultivated acres.

The new Agrarian Law, which allows no person to own more than 200 acres, will bring about the forced sale of 1.2 million acres, for which compensation is to be paid in 3 per cent government bonds redeemable in thirty years. The expropriated areas will be sold to the most deserving smallholders in lots of 2 to 5 acres at the price paid by the government plus administrative expenses. Payment will be spread out into thirty yearly installments.

So far the government has taken possession only of the former royal estates. The rest of the redistribution process is to be completed in five years. The effects of the land reform on the wealthy proprietors can be roughly suggested by the following case. Before passage of the Agrarian Law, a proprietor who owned 500 acres of good Delta land and rented them out had a net income (after taxes) of $40,000; his net income from the 200 acres he is allowed to keep, plus the interest on his government bonds, will amount to $15,000.

Foreign agricultural experts, while completely in sympathy with the social aims of the land program, feel that it has certain practical weaknesses. The most important is that, from the standpoint of efficiency, it represents a retrogressive trend. It will break up the bulk of the cultivated area into holdings of around 5 acres; and in an agricultural system such as Egypt’s, which lives by irrigation and where crop rotation is vital, large-scale cultivation is vastly more productive.

The government has attempted to get around this problem by setting up societies for agricultural coöperation, which will provide the ignorant peasant farmer with expert advice and needed equipment, and will organize coöperatives in the villages.

Help from the U.S.

The root of Egypt’s misfortunes is that its population has long been expanding at a vastly greater rate than its resources; the only real answer to this is increased productivity. The Point Four program is far too modest in scale to bring about any striking changes in the over-all picture, but it has proved itself a valuable stimulus to the Egyptians, and has set an encouraging pattern of friendly coöperation both on the official level and out in the field. The Egyptian government has complemented the U.S. dollar contributions with a slightly larger sum in local currency.

Tractors driven by Egyptian officers have been breaking up the hardpacked soil of a 40-mile strip of desert near Alexandria, which the Egyptians hope, with Point Four aid, to convert into grazing land. In another attempt to expand pasture farming, techniques learned in restoring the American dust bowl have been employed on a 2500-acre test area, which has been planted with forty different varieties of edible grasses. Egyptian farmers were paid a premium to try out a rust-resistant wheat seed, and found that their output increased in some cases up to 20 per cent.

U.S. experts have calculated that Egypt could save a million dollars a year lost because of animal disease. They have inaugurated a successful program of vaccinating chickens, and are importing Rhode Island Reds. Egyptians have been trained in the operation and maintenance of two helicopters purchased by their government; and the helicopters have been invaluable for locust dusting and spraying cotton against leaf worm. The Egyptian government has drafted an ambitious plan to build a second giant dam near Aswan which would irrigate another million acres.

Other Point Four activities include nurses’ education; the training of 200 Egyptian technicians in the United States; the introduction of sanitary facilities to Egyptian villages; and assistance in reclaiming a large stretch of marshland near Cairo, where it is hoped to settle 16,000 families on farms.

Expanding Egypt’s resources

The Naguib government, for its part, shows a decidedly keener awareness than its predecessors of the urgency of developing Egypt’s resources. One of the primary goals of the Agrarian Law was to disengage much of the huge wealth invested in land and make it available for investment in industrial projects. To eliminate the endless talk and rivalry between ministries over new industrial projects, the government has created a National Production Council directly responsible to the cabinet.

It has also revised some of the regulations that discouraged foreign investment. A new mining law eliminates the provision that oil and mineral leases could be granted only to Egyptians. New provisions applying to foreign capital permit (with certain reservations) the transfer of profits out of Egypt and, after five years, the repatriation of the original investment.

Democracy or dictatorship?

It is still too early to judge whether Naguib’s Revolutionary Movement will harden into a fascistic dictatorship or evolve in the direction of liberal democracy. Naguib took over the premiership only after Aly Maher, the Premier he had appointed, had for seven weeks played the old game of talking reform and doing nothing.

There is no doubt, too, that the General, before dissolving the political parties, gave them a genuine opportunity to carry out a house cleaning. One of the paradoxes of Middle East politics has been that the parliaments, so far from being a democratic force, have been strongholds of corruption and resistance to change. The party in Egypt which had the vote of the masses, the Wafd, was the most flagrantly compromised by dishonesty and by opportunistic maneuvers with the Communists. Thus Naguib’s decision that the military junta would govern Egypt until further notice was not in itself a setback for democracy. It actually increased the prospects of a decisive break with the old iniquities and the old inertia.

In addition to the reforms already mentioned, Naguib has abolished one of the most far-reaching economic curses of Egypt: the system of family wakfs or endowments. The endowment was unsalable and untouchable, and as time went by, the number of beneficiaries would grow so large that each one’s share of the interest was minute. Meanwhile, the land or building constituting the wakf would go to seed because of no provisions for upkeep and repairs. The wakf system, in effect, froze a substantial part of the country’s resources and condemned them to deterioration.

Unfortunately, the Revolutionary Movement, though its goals appear to be laudable, has shown a disturbing weakness for totalitarian techniques. It has marshaled its most active adherents into the National Liberation Rally, the only authorized political party. It has gone in for mass meetings and slogans such as “ Unity, Discipline, Work.” Its top foreign advisers are Germans. And recently, accusing the press of complicity with “imperialist enemies,” it threatened tightened censorship and purges.

The “Blessed Revolution”

These fascistic strains have been more in evidence since the regimeafter its startlingly easy beginnings— has had to cope with considerable internal difficulties. The decline in the market for Egyptian cotton, accompanied by the need to import food at high prices, has made the economic situation tough. Private business has been stagnant owing to the dislocations and uncertainties caused by a change of regime. And there has been some disillusionment among the fellahin, who had been oversold on what the “Blessed Revolution” was going to do for them.

Unprejudiced observers are still inclined to ascribe the more disturbing aspects of the new regime’s behavior to lack of self-confidence rather than to any pronounced totalitarian bent. The members of the military junta are men between thirty and forty with no experience of government. All things considered, their record has not been a bad one.

Every foreigner in Cairo agrees that there remains an area of acute uncertainty about the Naguib regime, though it has been in power for almost a year and a half. Two things, however, can be said with certainty about Egypt’s new leadership. The first is that the “Blessed Revolution” has given the Egyptian masses a distinct psychological lift. The second is that — in a region where corruption and callous reaction have been the norm among the governing classes — Mohammed Naguib is a leader of exceptional decency. He is incorruptible, immensely hard-working, and passionately devoted to the welfare of Egypt’s barefoot millions.