Never So Neutral

Miracles have been achieved Due to Gamal's determination. --The Aswan High Dam Song

On the great day, radios all over Egypt blared the new hit tune. At Aswan itself, 430 miles upstream from Cairo, thousands of white-robed fellahin flocked along the Nile's reddish-granite brink. Two trainloads of newsmen arrived from Cairo.

Then, in the presence of Morocco's visiting King Mohammed V, Soviet Power Station Minister Ignaty Novikov, Cuba's Foreign Minister Raul Roa, and scores of other dignitaries, including the American and British charges d'affaires. President Gamal Nasser yanked the switch that exploded ten tons of dynamite in the river cliff. At last, work had begun on the billion-dollar Aswan High Dam, which when built will be a mightier achievement than the proudest pyramid of the Pharaohs. It will increase Egypt's arable land by one-third, reclaiming 1,000,000 acres of desert and giving another 700,000 acres the capability of producing several crops a year instead of only one.

Four years ago, when John Foster Dulles abruptly withdrew a U.S. tender of a $56 million Aswan Dam loan, it looked as if the dam might never be built. But the Russians came through with a promise of about $10 million. That offer has survived Nasser's later disenchantment with the Soviets (he has, for example, quietly withdrawn many Egyptian students from Russian universities, is sending 500 to study in the U.S.). At the Aswan ceremonies, after duly thanking "the country that agreed to help us," Nasser grandly dismissed past "threats and economic pressures'' from the West: "They afforded us an opportunity to win."

Open to Offers. Nasser is being insistently neutral these days, and no longer shows a pattern of antagonism for the West. Leaning away from the Communists because they back his rival Kassem in Iraq, he makes it clear that he has signed with the Russians to build only the Aswan project's first stage (coffer dams and a diversion canal). Concerning the project's more ambitious second and third stages (building the nearly three-mile-long, half-mile-thick dam itself and its power plants), Public Works Minister Mousa Arafa says: "As a neutral country, we will take the offer most to our benefit." Despite the Russians' head start, Japan, Italy, Britain, Austria and West Germany are running hard for second-stage contracts. This month West Germany's Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard is due in Cairo to offer a $48 million credit to start some second-stage work without waiting four years for the Russians to finish their preliminary job. But the Egyptians want to see the Russians deeply involved in the first stage first.

Back to the Village. Any possible speedup at Aswan will be attractive to Nasser, who is pledged "to double the national income [currently a woeful $150 per capita] in ten years." Nasser, the audacious international adventurer, has at last begun looking to his country's internal needs. During a flurry of Cabinet meetings last June and July, the President ordered a rethinking of policies in the light of U.A.R. failures to extend its leadership in the Arab world--not only in Iraq, but also in Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, the Sudan, Libya. One result of this rethinking was Nasser's speech at Port Said last month redefining Arab nationalism's goal not as one-Arab-nation but as merely "solidarity" of foreign and defense policies among sister Arab states. And for the first time in years he has been traveling intensively around his own country.

A Cow, A House. Sending his right-hand man, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, to mend badly neglected and sagging fences in the northern Syrian province, Nasser took personal charge of his lagging Egyptian land-reclamation program and recently handed title to 350 new smallholders at Edku in the Nile delta. At Port Said last month, he proclaimed that his first $870 million, five-year industrialization plan was creating 800,000 new jobs, and that his $1.3 billion rural-development program would "build a house for every farmer, give every farmer a cow, and . . . change our society." The U.S. has not yet matched Russian aid, but has put up or is planning to advance some $150 million in loan and credits, making Nasser indisputably the Middle East's most successful neutralist.

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