The Middle East

on the World Today

UNDERLYING tire‘growing anti-Western xenophobia and the social ferment that the Communists are now trying to exploit in the Middle East there is one terrifying demographic fact. At the end of the First World War, Cairo was a city of 600,000; today it is a teeming metropolis of 2 million. Baghdad, which had about 200,000 inhabitants in 1918, now has over 650,000. Teheran had about 250,000 in 1918; today it has well over a million.

This tremendous increase in population has been brought about by two main causes: the flight from the land of propertyless peasants driven to the wall by the ruthless exploitation of their landlords, and the introduction of Western plague-controlling techniques.

It is difficult for a Westerner who has not seen it with his own eyes to gauge the magnitude of this problem, or to appreciate just how numerous these miserable creatures are. In Teheran, for example, it has been estimated conservatively that one in every twenty persons is permanently unemployed; and in the winter months, when there is a slowdown in harvesting and in construction, this proportion rises to one in every ten. Most of them inhabit a vast slum area, where the houses are often little more than troglodyte tunnels or shanties reeking with the scent of opium smoke.

In Baghdad it is much the same story, and tens of thousands are forced to eke out a miserable existence in mud huts on the edge of the city which are completely washed away every two or three years when the Tigris overflows its banks.

Like all impoverished masses, the really downtrodden and unemployed inhabitants of the cities of the Middle East are incapable of sustained revolutionary action; but their ever-increasing numbers make them a terrifying social force whenever uprisings can be fomented and sprung on the authorities by more or less professional revolutionists from organized labor and the universities.

Organized labor

As far as organized labor is concerned, the very backwardness of the Middle East has unquestionably been an obstacle to Communist penetration. There are still only three countries in this entire area that can be said to have anything like organized labor — Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Elsewhere, labor has not been able to organize on any notable scale. The 500,000 workers of Egypt only recently got around to forming a new federation of labor, which is under strict government control, while the 700,000 to a million workers of Turkey have regularly been discouraged by the government from forming unions.

In the long run the workers in the Middle East who offer the most favorable terrain for Communist propaganda and infiltration are those employed in the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. Their position is paradoxical. On the one hand they are the best-paid and best-housed workers in the Middle East. On the other hand they are working for an industry in which foreign exploitation of native resources is so obvious that it cannot possibly be hidden.

The universities

More disturbing than this in any long-term evaluation of trends in the Middle East is the fact that most of its universities have recently become hotheds of Communism. This is true of the University of A1 Azhar in Cairo (despite the present Egyptian junta’s crackdown on Communists), as it is of the University of Teheran, where an attempted cleanup resulted in the expulsion of a number of students and twelve leading professors.

Similar activities have been noted among the students of the American University in Beirut (most of whom are Syrians or Lebanese). In March of last year they succeeded in stirring up a serious riot against the prospect of American military aid and the adherence of Lebanon to the TurkeyPakistan pact; and before the uproar was quelled, one person had been killed and 35 wounded.

The simplicity and the very authoritarianism of Communist doctrine make it naturally attractive to a youthful intelligentsia that has lost its faith in Islam and is seeking to replace it with a body of equally clear-cut and autocratic beliefs. Its anticolonial and anti-imperialist propaganda commends it to young men who are looking for a facile explanation of the omnipresent poverty in which their countries are wallowing, and who have not traveled enough to know the socalled “exploitation” of their resources by Western capitalists is in a different class from the systematic plundering of the satellites by Soviet Russia.

In the face of this, what does the West have to offer? Material progress? Marxism-Leninism promises it just as emphatically. Parliamentary democracy? It has little hold on the enthusiasms of people who have never seen anything but factionridden and impotent assemblies, corrupt politicians, vociferous demagogues, and rigged elections. Freedom of thought and of religion? What does this mean to young students who are looking, not for new doubts, but for new convictions? Of all the elements in the contemporary Middle Eastern scene, none appear so foreboding as the present climate of university youth.

While all this presages ill for the future, the fact is that at present Communism, as a political force, has made relatively slight inroads in the Middle East. But the ominous fact is that it is steadily gaining strength. Not only its strength but its organization and tactics vary from one country to the next.

Syria and Jordan

The best-organized Communist Party in the Middle East is in Syria. Its leader, Khaled Bekdash, is generally recognized to be the leading Communist in this part of the world.

A dynamic propagandist and vigorous orator, this 43-year-old son of a Kurdish tribal chieftain today possesses the immense prestige of being an accepted deputy in the Syrian Chamber in Damascus — the first Communist to have been elected to a parliament in the Arab world.

Officially the Communist Party is not legally authorized in Syria. (Bekdash and 21 other Communists ran in last September’s elections as members of the camouflage National Union Party.) In fact, however, it is tolerated. It has a rival in a very strong Socialist party, al Baath, led by Akram Hurani, which has 17 deputies (out of 144) in the Damascus parliament.

In neighboring Jordan the Communist movement has been outlawed ever since it made its first appearance in 1946. A few of its ringleaders were arrested and imprisoned in a desert fortress by the British-controlled police in 1947, but it has nevertheless become very active behind the scenes since then, particularly among Jordan’s 470,000 Palestine refugees.

Last summer it succeeded in launching a camouflage National Front, dedicated to throwing out the British and the American Point Four mission, and got two deputies elected to the parliament in Amman in last October’s turbulent elections, in which 23 people were killed, the U.S. Information Center was burned, and Glubb Pasha was almost assassinated.

Iraq

In Iraq the Communist Party has been officially outlawed since 1947. Until the drastic anti-Communist drive launched last summer by Nuri as-Said, it was able to survive as a significant political force behind the mask of the left-wing National Democratic Party, which it thoroughly infiltrated several years ago. Ostensibly this was simply a liberal party of some 5000 to 6000 members headed by a former Minister of Economic Affairs and small landowner called Kamil al-Chaderji. But since 1950 its party program and slogans have been virtually indistinguishable from those of the Communist Party in Syria or of the Soviet Arabic broadcasts from Tashkent.

In the Iraqi elections of June, 1954, this party succeeded in engineering a momentary alliance with the extreme right-wing Party of Independence (Istiqlal), and this new political formation picked up 11 seats (out of a total of 135) in the Baghdad parliament, while the dominant party of Iraq, the Constitutional Union of Nuri as-Said and the feudal sheikhs, lost 15 and with them the absolute control of the Iraqi Chamber. All political parties were then dissolved, a nation-wide hunt for Communists began, and new rigged elections were held in September to consecrate Nuri as-Said’s dictatorial power.

Iran

The Middle Eastern country most threatened by Communism still is Iran. Last fall when a vast, military conspiracy was uncovered, nearly 800 officers (about one tenth of the entire Persian officer corps) were arrested and 460 of them brought to trial. There was not a branch of service in the Persian armed forces that had not been infiltrated. The amount of money furnished the leaders of the conspiracy was, by Persian standards, fabulous: 8 million rials a month — about $80,000. (A captain in the army gets barely $50 a month.)

Elaborate plans, it seems, had been laid to overthrow the Zahedi regime, call back Mossadegh from his confinement, and if he refused, to bring back from Russia the exiled Secretary General of the Tudeh party, Dr. Reza Radmanesh. The guiding spirit of the conspiracy, Khosrow Ruzbeh, an ex-captain in the Iranian army, was not captured and is still at large.

This brilliant and ambitious man is probably the most dangerous Communist in Iran. Several years ago the Daily Express termed him the “Lenin of Iran.” The son of a good family, he started out as an antiaircraft artillery specialist in the Persian army. He soon built up a reputation as an author of books on ballistics and the French campaign of 1940, and even of two on chess. In 1947, on the eve of his promotion to major, he was arrested by the army and sentenced to fifteen months in jail for publishing a book called Blind Obedience that was full of left-wing ideas. He escaped from prison, defied a second sentence, and has been leading a clandestine life ever since.

The present government of Hossein Ala has toned down the harsh policy of repression carried out with military thoroughness by General Zahedi, and a number of suspected officers have been released. There has thus been an improvement in the tense atmosphere of last autumn.

But the basic problem still remains unaffected. Communism has thriven in Iran in recent years as a form of violent protest among underpaid officers and embittered intellectuals, dissatisfied with the prevalent corruption of the administration and the undiminished power of wealthy merchants and an absentee landed aristocracy who know how to bribe the taxmen. Until some drastic attempt is made to grapple with these basic ills, it is doubtful that Iran can be saved from Communist anarchy and despotism except by brute force; and even this will depend on the internal unity of the army.

Arab neutralism

While systematic government repression has undoubtedly struck the Communists a severe blow in Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, they have by no means been completely crippled. Recently, indeed, they have been remarkably successful — behind the façade of the Partisans of Peace and other front organizations — in arousing popular hostility toward Westernsponsored military pacts.

The general hostility of the Arab world toward the recently concluded Turkey-Iraq pact is due, among other things, to the fact that since the collapse of the Pishevari government in Azerbaijan in 1946, the Russians have made no overtly aggressive gesture against any country in the Middle East (Turkey perhaps excepted). There has been no Czechoslovakia, no Korea, no Indochina in this part of the world. What there has been is the Palestine war of 19481949, and no Arab can forget the amount of material and moral aid furnished to Israel in that war by the United States. The average Arab’s reaction to our insistence on arming them against the Russians is thus “A plague o’ both your houses!”

If this feeling is stronger than ever in the Arab world today it is also because of the prodigious increase in Russia’s aerial might. When Turkey joined NATO in October, 1951, Russia’s bombing power was still relatively undeveloped, and the major threat was in the form of some 25 Soviet divisions permanently stationed in the Caucasus. Since then things have changed so dramatically that there is now not an air base in Turkey or any city in the Middle East that could not be wiped out by the ultramodern bombers and atomic bombs at Russia’s disposal.

The increasingly frequent exhibition of Russia’s latest bombers over Moscow has been carefully designed to foster the growing spirit of neutralism. It is an unequivocal warning to the hesitant governments and peoples of the Middle East, no less than to those of Europe, that any nation that now lines up with the United States faces the prospect of mass destruction.