paul sann journalism, letters, writing


  reporting


                New York Post Friday, October 28, 1955

arab egypt

 By PAUL SANN

executive editor     They like to call Cairo the Paris of the Middle East.
    And Cairo does have a nice face.
    It has fine mansions and terraced apartments bathing in the sun and tall white office buildings and a $6,000,000 Conrad Hilton hotel coming up and a new Shepheard's too.
    It has Gamal Nasser's revolution and the Nile . . . the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, only minutes away . . . neon signs and belly dancers . . . fountains with colored liqhts . . . the Opera House and the sprawling ex-palaces of the fun-loving Farouk . . . and the mosques and the minarets and the pealing bells.
    Cairo blends the flavor of the Arabian Nights with a touch of the lush splendors of the Twentieth Century. It's a heady mixture and makes grand copy for the writers of tourist pieces but--
    Cairo is not Egypt.
    Cairo is only the clean bandage over the festering wound.
    Cairo fools you.
    The rickety, clattering cart that slows the pasha's $10,000 Cadillac on the broad boulevard comes out of a mud village that is still in the Pharoahs' time. And the fellah whipping the donkey lives (on somebody else's land) in primitive filth and squalor. He's diseased and half-starved.
    That's Egypt without the rose-tinted glasses.
    You can throw away the travel folders, because they make the fellah a picturesque farmer in a spotless robe and a showy turban with an Arabic chant on his lips, singing praise to Allah for all his blessings.
    The fellah can count no blessings.
    He is one of the 15,000,000 ragged human beings squashed along the Nile's banks in the pitifully small strip of Egypt--5 to 10 percent of a nation that is as big as Texas and New Mexico put together--that is not desert wasteland.
    He is one of the 15,000,000 making a few pennies a day and living on hard bread made out of corn or cereal grass, or sour cheese or some vegetables or a speck of meat, or maybe on a few eggs from Point Four chickens (praise be the U.S.).
    He is one of the 15,000,000 living in the green Nile delta in one dark and dirty room with his whole family and some of his animals and a horde of invaders--flies, mosquitoes and insects--and drinking out of a stagnant irrigation canal.
    He is one of the 15,000,000 that is host to the dread bilharzia (the parasite worm that works his way through the fellah's bare legs and eats into his intestines and bladder and liver) or trachoma (which is borne by the flies and can blind him) or malaria or typhoid or TB or dysentery or maybe something that has no name yet.
    (Sound overdrawn? They figured that just about every other fellah is being ravaged by the bilharzia and they have another rough figure for the incidence of disease of any kind in Egypt: it comes out to two diseases per person.)

revolution
    He may have malnutrition, too, but then he always had malnutrition; he had that when he was a child. And very likely he always had the killer-disease or the crippler-disease or that one that blinds.
    He pays no mind to these things. He comes from hard stock. His father and his grandfather and all his ancestors in his feudal poorhouse had the same irritations in their lives. Some of them lived out their days and some of them died too young.
    The fellah doesn't complain.
    Indeed, Nasser's revolution has to run him down and corner him before he samples any of its benefits. You can pump clean water into his village for him but you can't always lead him to it--
    He may prefer to go on drinking and washing in the foul, stinking canal.
    You can offer him land that once belonged to Farouk or someone in the palace guard, but he may spurn it--
    He may not want to drag his plow behind skinny oxen over any more acres or owe any money to any more people--not even to Nasser's government--for more seed or manure. He may just want to be left alone.
    The fact is that the Egyptian Revolution, three years later, looks better on paper.
    Nasser's confiscation of the great landed estates is somewhat deceptive. Out of the vast acreage held by the incredibly wealthy pashas (nobody but Farouk himself ever got richer), so little has been redistributed that more than 20,000 fellahin have dealt in the new reign of plenty, each with five acres.
    Now no pasha may hold more than 200-acres (or 300 per family) but he has a fat string on the wealth the state supposedly seized. He has a 30-year bond, bearing 3-1/2 percent interest, and the payoff has to come from the land.
    So the peasant with the five acre is still a tenant farmer, only with more land upon which to sweat out his subsistence. He has a 30-year bond too--going the other way. He is buying something that sounded like it was free.
    It comes down to this: the
fellah who took the revolutionary windfall very likely is farming four acres to meet his new debts and one acre to meet his old debts. Four out of five Egyptians are illiterate but not that illiterate.
progress
    Thus the land may be harder to give away than you would imagine from reading the glowing handouts of Nasser's Ministry of National Guidance or the glittering reports in Egypt's kept press.
    And what can the heralded land reform come to anyway? The whole program calls for the redistribution of 600,000 acres in a nation where 18,000,000 out of 22,000,000 people (and the population goes up 400,000 a year) need to extract their subsistence from the earth and only a bare handful have an inch of land they can call their own.
tank     Don't blame it all on the Soldier-Premier.
    Egypt lay rotting in the sun and mud for 5,000 years before Nasser, hiding its shame in modern days behind the facade of such glittering Middle Eastern showplaces as Cairo and Alexandria. Egypt under Farouk didn't even dip a toe into our century.

    For a man who was a schemer and not a planner, Nasser has done some good.
    Nasser built more schools in one year than the royal famliy built in 20. Nasser doubled the beds in some hospitals and built new ones, and clinics and health centers, too. Nasser paved roads and pushed industry and brought in steel and started to dig for oil.
    And Nasser has Moscow and Washington fighting over whether the East or the West is going to help him build his billion-dollar High Dam to harness the Nile and put another desperately needed 2,000,000 acres under cultivation.
    Nasser's script, you see, calls for all kinds of assaults on the feudal society he rules.
    I saw the Premier the day after I had gone through an Arab village--a quick ride from his own home in Cairo--where I couldn't shake off the swarms of flies and mosquitoes long enough to focus a camera and where I was assailed by the stench of dried straw and dung heaps and the rags that pass for beds in the mud huts. I asked Nasser about the millions in the villages and he talked eagerly about what he was doing for them and what he wanted to do.
    He talked about the hospitals and the schools and new settlements, even about better seeds and better fertilizer. He talked a little about what the rulers before him had done. He said he wanted to put more and more money into social services--money that used to stick to Farouk's fat hands--but he added that reform had to go slow because it was so costly.
trouble
    So I asked Nasser, naturally, how much faster reform could go if Egypt didn't spend so much on its military establishment and then go further and swap its Number One export--cotton--for Czech arms.
    Nasser said it was a very disheartening situation (for which he blamed Israel) but where Egypt formerly put one-fifth of its expense budget into defense it must now spend a great deal more. The old figure was $150,000 a year. Today it is much higher. How much?
    "Now it is a secret," Nasser said.

    Egypt's published budget shows about $135,000,000 set aside for defense in the '55-'56 fiscal year but--as in Israel--the figures don't mean a thing. Both states carry military outlays under all kinds of camouflage.
    In Israel, officials admit that defense spending takes 50 to 60 cents out of every government dollar but they say Nasser spends three times as much as they do.
    Nasser, as noted, doesn't say.
    Ironically, Egypt and Israel have the same problem: they both need every dime they can raise for their domestic economies--Egypt to an infinitely great degree--but they're spending like mad on their war machines.
    The Egyptian dictator's problem is worse than his little neighbors in another respect.
    He rules through a military junta. His Revolutionary Command Council has varying shades of opinion in it, and the 300 to 400 high-riders in his League Officers are military men not social reformers.
    The latest innovations in seeds and fertilizer don't interest them. What they want from their Colonel, having ridden into power with him, are medium bombers and jets and Stalin tanks--just what the Russians happen to have available for export.
    And you gotta keep 'em happy down on the firing range.
    Nasser in his brief three-year reign has already had to shake his busy hands loose more than once to stamp out simmering revolts among his restless young officers.
    War or no war, you have to buy the military boys things play with--weapons, that is.
    So the revolution is on the local track and going ever so slowly. That's Egypt in 1955.
____

    IN THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE: The Gaza Strip--a two-page spread with pictures.

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