Success at Suez

Two years after that wild day when the Egyptians sank 40 ships to plug the Suez Canal, the world's No. 1 international waterway hummed last week with peaceful trade, and a golden flood of hard-currency tolls poured into President Nasser's United Arab Republic treasury.

Some of the hulks dredged up by U.N. salvagers and dumped in the shallows still jut from corners of Port Said harbor; a few weatherworn propaganda posters still flap from the city's walls, and the scarred stump of the statue of Canal Builder Ferdinand de Lesseps, torn down by mobs celebrating the departure of the last Anglo-French invaders, still stands at the canal entrance. Vastly more in evidence, as Egyptians prepared to celebrate the second anniversary of Nasser's Suez "victory," were the 385 ships that his Suez Canal Authority shuttled through the canal last week with smooth efficiency. Good operation of the ditch is now taken for granted, even by those who predicted so darkly back in 1956 that the Egyptians would make a mess of it.

"Only the Best." Since Nasser seized the canal, his men have put 28,949 ships through without a single serious accident. One day last March an alltime record of 84 ships passed through the canal. By all signs, this month will set another record. Last August the U.S. aircraft carrier Essex, with a deck half again wider than that of any ship transiting the canal before, showed up at Port Said on an emergency dash to reinforce the Seventh Fleet off Formosa. The Egyptians eagerly built a special platform on the deck, and from this vantage their senior pilot, a Greek with 30 years' experience, conned the flattop through, nonstop. "I'm trying to give my customers the best,'' says the authority's able, open-shirted Managing Director Mahmoud Younis, 46, a fellow soldier of Nasser's with good engineering experience. "I realize they have to come to me because there is only one canal, but I also want them to come because they know they will be well served."

Younis has bought new equipment, trimmed the canal banks with the help of 30,000 fellaheen digging by hand, and dredged the canal to the old maximum depth of 35 feet. The workmen, pilots and supervisory staff are paid from booming revenues. Younis says the authority took in about $110 million last year, and paid $15 million into Nasser's treasury as profit. His hastily recruited 220 pilots, replacing those who walked off in a body one day, include six Americans, 21 West Germans, 40 from Communist countries, and 100 Egyptians. They have worked well. By way of improvement, Younis hopes to install radar, walkie-talkies for pilots, and eventually closed-circuit TV to control headquarters ashore. He also talks of building a smaller canal paralleling the present one, to facilitate passing. All this will take major outside financial aid.

Achievement. "The thing you hear from most shipping people," says one U.S. observer in Cairo, "is that the old company was consistently arrogant, the Egyptians consistently courteous and helpful." Considering all the sneers at Egyptian ineptitude, the Egyptians have chalked up in their first two years a creditable achievement.

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