The Middle East

ATLANTIC

July 1952

on the World today

EXTREME nationalism continues to operate to the I advantage of Communism in the Middle East. The scene of action has shifted from Teheran to Cairo during the past year, but the cast and the plot are the same: in the name of national sovereignty treaties and agreements are summarily canceled, and the inevitably violent popular reactions open the way to anarchy.

This happened with startling ellcct last January 26 in Cairo when 700 business establishments run by or catering to Europeans and to the pashas were destroyed or looted during the complete breakdown of police authority in the capital.

The Wafd government of Nahas Pasha and Serag el-Din Pasha has since been clearly implicated in negligence if not actual complicity in this disaster. Meanwhile, King Farouk and a group of badly frightened moderate leaders have been trying to pull the country back from the brink of revolution. To this end Parliament, which was dominated by the Wafd, has been suspended: and elections have been postponed, pending the revision of the electoral lists.

In the interval two successive premiers, Aly Maher Pasha and Hilaili Pasha, have striven to remedy some of the most glaring evils behind Egypt’s dangerous unrest. They have also reasserted their country’s demands regarding British evacuation of the Suez Canal Zone and the unification of Egypt and the Sudan.

Internally the government has had to deal with inflated liv ing costs; to reduce some of the more conspicuous privileges of the officials, which had reached beyond endurable bounds; and to resurrect such reforms as the 1950 social security law. At the same time pressure has been put on farmers to reduce cotton acreage in favor of food crops. And a real effort is being made to bring to account the clique of cotton speculators for whose exclusive advantage the prev ious governments unwise pricesupport policy apparently operated.

This probing into ihe cotton scandal is expected to have a salutary effect in showing up the corruption within Egypt’s largest and most powerful political party. It is a political operation in which Hilaili Pasha, who split with the Wafd party last year over the corruption issue, can take special satisfaction, and one which king Farouk has wanted to carry out against Nahas Pasha for over ten years.

THE fanatic and the Communist

The events of Black Saturday in Cairo demonstrated a particular threat to stable government which all Middle East governments now share: namely, the active role played by student revolutionaries in the riots and fire-setting demonstrations. Students at Ibrahim University exploded sticks of gelignite on the campus as a protest over the killing of some forty Egyptians by the British forces at Ismailia. Later they made vociferous objections to martial law, to any deal with Britain, and to any alliance with the “Anglo-American imperialists.” ‘this cry has a familiar ring. Subsequent investigation at Cairo’s three universities has shown that it echoes the left-wing sentiments of several thousand student members of university political unions. The government’s solution so far has been simply to close t he universities.

Like similar student demonstrations in Iran, those among Egyptian students have brought to light a new and dangerous alliance between Moslem fanaticism and Communists. Moslem Brotherhood leaders have successfully propagandized large numbers of Egyptian students into Campaigning against cinemas, luxuries, and night clubs. The identification of these enterprises with resident foreigners, the pashas, and the king has followed naturally. It is therefore not surprising that it was t hese particular establishments, along with British automobile agencies and tourist hotels, which became the targets of the well-organized pyromaniaes of last January.

The pattern of destruction in Cairo is significant. It was anti-foreign and anti-rich and it was only stopped when the king called out the army. The part played in the revolt by specific organizations such as the Moslem Brotherhood and by underground Communists among other extremist organizations like the Green Shirts may never be clear. The expulsion of one Soviet satellite diplomat from Egypt since .January indicates foreign as well as local participation in the well-armed uprising.

As the Egyptian government has set about fixing responsibility and rebuilding destroyed properties, every effort has been made to reassure resident foreigners that the crisis is past and that order has been restored. Nevertheless, foreign official and business headquarters have been rapidly moving from Cairo to Beirut or to Istanbul. This trend began partly as a result of blocked communications and travel between Egypt and other Arab states following the establishment of Israel.

Meanwhile the government has resumed the long diplomatic struggle with Britain over control of the Suez Canal Zone and the Sudan. So far these negotiations have not produced any creative statesmanship on eit her side.

The Colonels take over Syria

Another type of revolution, on tho Turkish rather than the Egyptian model, is going on in Syria. There the military leaders who were behind four coups during the last two years gave up the attempt to maintain a semblance of parliamentary government and openly seized pow er. Colonel Adeeb Shishekly took this radical step November 29, twenty-four hours after an anti-Western government, headed by Dr. Marouf Dawalibi of the People’s Party, had been formed.

Dawalibi had gained notoriety earlier by proclaiming that it would be belter for Syria to be taken over by Communism than by Zionism. His emergence at the head of a cabinet which pointedly excluded military men and was presumed to favor union with Iraq was the signal for Shishekly’s group to take over.

Shishekly has installed a fellow officer, Colonel Fawzi Silo, as head of stale and together these two have set out, during the last six months, to remodel Syria along the lines of Ataturk’s Turkey, justifying their assumpt ion of power on the grounds that it was necessary to safeguard the independence of Syria, they have proceeded to rule by decree.

Their decrees, which now number well over two hundred, provide for such sweeping innovations as graduated income taxes, price controls, land reform, press control, abolition of all honorary titles, abolition of political parties, proscription of dress and licenses for divines, prohibition of new foreign schools and licensing of all private schools, prohibition of foreign contacts to government employees and of political activity among students.

It is apparent from all this that the young colonels are attempting to carry out what they believe to have been the original purposes of the late Marshal Zaim. The importance of their attempt at this time is that it sets up an example of order and purposefulness in contrast to the disordered state of most neighboring countries, where the forms of parliamentary government have so far failed to provide the substance of reform or stability. If, for example, Shishekly and Silo succeed in enforcing their decree on land reform so that new landholdings will be limited in size and unused lands will revert to the state, they will have accomplished what every other Middle East country has been unable to do.

Similarly, if at this particular juncture they are able to carry out their idea of channeling the energies of Syrian students into dealing with concrete social problems such as rural welfare and housing, and away from political demonstration, they will have turned a sharp and perilous corner indeed. And if the present Syrian experiment succeeds in raising the living standards of the peasant and slowly righting age-old inequalities, it can be verv significant for the entire Middle East.

A constitution for Jordan

A third and more familiar pattern is evident in the revolution now taking place in the Hashemite Kingdom of .Jordan, when* King Talal has dropped the autocratic policies of his father, the late King Abdullah, in favor of constitutional government. Officials in Amman now proudly hand out English translations of a new, written constitution which makes cabinet ministers responsible to Parliament and establishes personal and political freedoms for the citizens of Jordan.

Jordan’s population is composed of three elements. There are half a million former Jordanians, mostly nomads; another 450,000 are the residents of that part of Palestine which King Abdullah incorporated into his kingdom after the partition of Palestine. Finally there are some 400,000 refugees from what is now Israel. Among these are some of the ablest civil servants of the Mandate government, who have, thanks to Abdullah’s policy toward them, been welcomed into the Jordan government and given an important place in Jordanian affairs. It is due to this influx of more sophisticated and educated new citizens that the pace of constitutional development has been pushed —with the blessing of King Talal.

Unfortunately, many of these new citizens are of the urban, white-collar class, for whom there are few employment opportunities in the pastoral expanses of Jordan. A minor industrial revolution is therefore being forced on a barren and frugal economy, with as yet unforeseeable results. The immediate problem is to bring into being small industries which can reduce the country’s need of imports, and to extend the arable land in order to feed the larger populat ion.

Irrigation amd flood control

The emergency character of Jordan’s needs has already brought forth substantial loans from Britain. Further subsidies are now arriving from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for projects specifically set up to absorb Arab refugees, and from United States Point Four funds. One such scheme, which is about to get under way, is the irrigation of some 189,000 dunums (1 dunum = .061 acre) of land in the Jordan Valley by diverting the waters of the Yarmuk, chief tributary of the Jordan, through a canal running along the east side of the Jordan.

This project is expected to provide about 6000 holdings of 30 dunums each on which Arab refugees can be

permanently settled. Since Jordan is the only country which has offered former Palestinians permanent status in an effort to assimilate them, the project is attracting a large portion of 1 he funds and technical assistance with which the United Nations is attempting to stabilize the area.

Another significant development in the Middle Fast has been the work of the Iraq Development Board, set up in 1950 and now fully functioning. Encouraged by a recent report of the International Bank on its promising prospects, and fortified by an assured income from oil royalties of some $400 million during the fivevear period beginning in 1952, the board has already begun an extensive food control and water storage project on the Euphrates, and has let contracts for the Tharthar scheme, which will within five years prevent flooding of the Tigris.

In carrying out such schemes Iraq is learning that technical progress requires trained people. So far, even the graduates (at present few in number) of Iraq’s technical schools are not equipped to operate their own development schemes, because they lack practical, on-the-job training. An enlightened Minister of Education in Iraq is attempting to remedy this primary need as well as to speed up and improve education in the elementary schools.

A direct hazard to the country is inflation. To avoid this, a movement is on foot among the more farseeing Iraqis to revise the tax structure, which now provides only 18 per cent of the tax receipts from direct taxation and rests primarily on indirect taxes. What reformers in this field hope to bring about is a graduated income tax on cultivable land.

Whether this radical measure can be introduced depends on how much support it can get from an essentially conservative government. Unless some such reform is instituted, whereby rich landlords assume tax responsibility and are forced either to make their lands productive or to divide them, no solid or lasting improvements in Iraq’s economic and social structure will take place. This will be the test, then, of Iraq’s capacity to head off the pressures and revolts which threaten there as elsewhere in the troubled Middle East.