Suez

on the World Today

JUST ten years after events in Suez shook the whole of Europe and the Middle East, and caused Nikita Khrushchev to warn of a third world war, the canal zone is as tranquil a part of the world as any. Despite the dire predictions of its previous British and French owners, the canal functions more efficiently than it did before, and because it has been both widened and deepened, it can take far larger ships (including the new American supertankers) than it could in the past.

Even the most die-hard British captains obediently hand over their commands in Port Said Harbor to the very Egyptian pilots who, they confidently asserted in 1956, would drive the ships into the fragile sandbanks and block the canal. Along the banks, industrial plants, whose construction has been financed by the canal’s earnings, are beginning to operate: a shipyard, an electronics plant, and an oil refinery. The Canal Authority’s employees are better paid than most workers in Egypt. They live, at uneconomically low rents, in villas and apartments provided by the Authority. They and their families are given subsidized medical and educational facilities, and if they are Muslims, they can take paid leave for pilgrimages to Mecca.

Symbol of self-respect

To modern Egypt, the Suez Canal has an importance which is greater than a Westerner can easily understand. It is not simply that its complex operation has been run smoothly by its new management since it was reopened in 1957 after the Anglo-French invasion, or that it has replaced tourism as the nation’s second largest foreign currency earner after cotton exports, or that its traditions of managerial efficiency and employee welfare are beginning to influence other, more disorganized branches of Egyptian enterprise. Suez is to Egyptians what the first Sputnik was to the Russians: a major and much needed symbol of national self-respect.

At least in their own eyes, it has proved that Egyptians are not the primitive “wogs” their colonizers took them to be, and that they are capable not only of running their own affairs in the face of British and French derision but of running them well. In a country which is in a state of almost continual financial crisis, it is premature to talk of national renaissance. But the achievement of President Nasser and his Suez Canal Authority has been to give Egyptians the self-confidence they need for one. Superficially, it is difficult to see many positive results of this today. There has certainly been a considerable amount of industrial development since 1956. The Aswan Dam has been built (President Nasser originally nationalized the canal to pay for it, but in the end the Soviet Union provided most of the necessary foreign exchange). A new town, named Nasr City (meaning “victory,” not the Egyptian leader), is nearing completion just outside Cairo. The beggars and prostitutes who used to plague foreigners during the British occupation have been swept off the streets and into trade schools.

But disease and malnutrition are still primary problems. The grossly excessive birthrate is already threatening to nullify the beneficial effects of the Aswan Dam on the agricultural economy. Few people are noticeably better off than they were under the British, and the middle classes seem to be worse off. There is an atmosphere of political unease, and jokes hostile to Nasser arc rife, though usually concealed from foreigners.

The success of the Suez experiment rests in improvements which are hard to define. If one takes, for example, the frequency of Egyptian threats to invade Israel and “drive the Jews into the Mediterranean” as an indicator of internal unrest and of the government’s need to provide the populace with distractions, one finds a marked improvement. At the last Independence Day celebrations in Cairo, President Nasser warned against “hotheads” who were pressing for an early attack on the Zionists; they were only playing into the latter’s hands. When the appropriate moment came, the Egyptian government would announce it, he said, but it would probably not come for a long time. It is inconceivable at present that an Egyptian leader should actually propose peace with Israel, but many of his audience thought that Nasser was going as far as he could, short of that.

Ministers are becoming increasingly frank in their speeches about Egypt’s problems and shortcomings. Officials are slowly emerging from the bureaucratic maze in which they have hidden themselves since independence, and are becoming less bellicose and more pragmatic in their dealings with foreigners. All this can be reasonably attributed to the new national self-confidence.

No denial of access

One of the worst fears of the British and the French when the canal was taken from them — that Nasser would use it as an instrument of his outspoken foreign policy — has not been realized. At a recent international maritime conference, an Egyptian official heatedly rebuked a delegate who described the canal as “an international waterway,” insisting that it was a solely Egyptian one. Yet in spite of the Egyptian government’s pronounced views on the subject, British warships still pass freely on their way to Aden, as do French ones carrying equipment for the nuclear tests in the Pacific. Two nations are refused passage for their ships: Israel, with whom Egypt is still technically at war, and Rhodesia, which, overtly at least, owns no ships.

On July 26, 1956, when Nasser abruptly announced the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal, the British and French authorities, who between them owned most of the shares in the controlling company, reacted, it will be remembered, first hysterically and then violently. They felt themselves faced not only with the expropriation of foreign assets valued at more than $75 million but also — and much more important — with the denial of access to an international waterway vital to their future as trading and military powers.

In their respective parliaments, both the British and the French leaders denounced the young Egyptian President — “that weak, blustering troublemaker,” one British Cabinet minister called him — as an international thief. They derided his promise to compensate the shareholders according to the price of their shares on the Paris Bourse immediately before his unexpected decree. Most of all, they asserted that the Egyptians would be incapable of running such a complex undertaking as the Suez Canal.

Even those liberals who saw no reason why Egypt should not take over a waterway running through its territory, and who were soon to protest violently against the Anglo-French invasion which was then being planned, doubted the Egyptians’ abilities to run the canal, and suggested that it should be put into the hands of the United Nations.

Like all occupied peoples, the Egyptians under the British appeared in their worst light. British barracks dominated all the main towns, including Cairo, where they stretched along the banks of the Nile including the present site of the Hilton Hotel. An army makes specific and often unsavory demands on the local population. It wants prostitutes, servants, laundrymen, clerks, chauffeurs, and interpreters who are willing to work for an occupying power in their own country. Frequently despised by their hirers, they are understandably tempted to do the minimum of work for the most money, and whenever possible, to cheat. “You have your wog who lives in the towns,” ran one of the military clichés of the time, “and your Arab who lives in the desert. The latter is a fine man. Never confuse the two.”

It was the “wogs,” and the aristocracy, led by the corrupt and gastronomically and sexually depraved King Farouk, that gave the European colonizers their impression of the Egyptians. As a white Rhodesian today cites his cook or his garden boy as evidence that Africans are incapable of taking over the machinery of government, so the British officers and their wives in Cairo and Alexandria pointed to theirs and asked one another how such a man could run a canal, let alone a country.

The middle class takes over

The people whom they largely ignored — and who also ignored them, at least socially — were the Egyptian middle classes, rapidly expanding as education became more widespread, of which Colonel Nasser was a member. As students, they became a generation of rioters against the monarchy and the British occupation that propped it up. But they passed their examinations, many of them at the privately endowed American University at Cairo, and filtered into the professions and the commissioned ranks of the army. It is they who took over Egypt in the almost bloodless revolution of 1962 and who, three years later and after much agitation, negotiated the withdrawal of the British troops.

One of them was Mahmoud Younes, an engineer who became the canal’s first Egyptian chairman. When, in July, 1956, he walked into the canal’s headquarters in Ismailia, Younes immediately guaranteed the contracts of all the company’s foreign employees. Many of these were minor French officials who could easily have been replaced by Egyptians, but about two hundred of them were pilots trained in the intricacies of canal navigation, without whom the ships could not pass. And these, under pressure from their local consuls, walked out at midnight on September 14.

In Port Said, eleven pilots — ten Egyptians and one American, Jim Estes, who is still there — remained on duty out of a total of twenty-six. The rest crossed the harbor to the Canal Company’s yacht club to await the expected disaster. The daily convoy from the south was due at nine the next morning. Nine o’clock came, but no ship was in sight. The foreign ex-pilots, now standing on the club’s lawn by the waterside, jumped in the air and cheered. Ten minutes later, the convoy appeared in good order, and no less punctual than usual. The pilots, instead of being relieved at Ismailia, had taken their ships all the way through, standing for sixteen hours on the bridge. After two hours’ sleep, they returned with the southbound convoy; and so it went during the ensuing weeks.

In one way, the Anglo-French invasion of Port Said in November came as a relief. Within a few days, the Egyptian authorities had blocked the canal with sunken dredgers and hulls, in retaliation. And when peace returned and a United Nations team started to clear the canal, Younes and his staff had time to recruit pilots from abroad — the countries they came from included the United States, Russia, Spain, Poland, and Yugoslavia — and to train Egyptian mariners for the job. Since then, it has been a story of gradual improvement: a new piloting system in the Suez roads has halved the accident rate; there has been widening and deepening; new dredgers have been commissioned; and there is now a hydraulic research institute in Ismailia.

From garrison to nation

Egypt itself has become a duller place since its victory. New housing is rising around Port Said, but its old reputation as one of the world’s great “swinging” towns is almost dead. Few tourists ever call these days. The nightclub hostesses who remain are gone fat and weary. The dirty-postcard vendors of old now mostly sell views of the harbor. The Casino Palace Hotel, whose tea dances were famed throughout British India, is closing this year, and an antiseptic government-owned establishment is taking its place.

Cairo is making efforts to clean itself up for the tourists. New hotels are being opened every year, but the standards of food and service they provide would have outraged the British officers of the days before 1956 as much as the closing of the brothels would have outraged their soldiers. Cairo is becoming a utilitarian rather than a romantic place, where the foreigner is no longer so shielded from the poverty and the shortages around him.

But Europeans and Egyptians can now meet each other, without the one feeling condescending and the other ashamed. It may not seem much progress to achieve in ten years of freedom since Suez; but (few of the British or French who lived there before 1956 would have believed it possible. The Suez Canal has changed Egypt from a garrison into a nation.