Twin Troubles

When he nationalized his country's press last May. U.A.R. President Gamal Abdel Nasser showed special tolerance for a pair of his oldest supporters--Cairo's weighty (476 lbs. between them) publishing twins, Mustafa and Ali Amin, 47. Though they were formally stripped of their ownership of Cairo's most popular daily, the jazzy Akhbar el Yom (News of the Day), the Amins were allowed to keep control of the paper's twelve-man editorial board and were saddled with only one government representative, Amin Shaker, 37, once Nasser's secretary. But last week the twins found themselves deprived of their property in fact as well as in theory.

The Cardinal Sin. The Amin brothers' sin was not sedition but success. Like every other Cairo paper, Akhbar dutifully printed interminable Nasser speeches and daily photos of the dictator's dazzling grin. But it also continued to be the racy, mischievous paper that Cairo readers (except the puritanical Nasser) had learned to love. In Akhbar, Nasser's highly publicized visit to India last spring played second fiddle to a story with the banner head: MAD KILLER SHOT IN SUBURBS. Nasser was further irked by Akhbar's juicy coverage of Cairo society divorces. Against this formula, the official government organ, Al Gumhuria (the Republic), went so deeply into the red that not even giveaway promotion schemes could pull it out.

The twins' real trouble, however, began when Nasser--despite his reservations about Akhbar--chose Mustafa Amin to accompany him to the U.N. last fall. This deeply offended Government Watchdog Shaker, who had counted on the trip for himself. Setting out to undermine the Amins' popularity with their employees, Shaker told Akhbar's printers that they should no longer submit to the twins' "capitalistic exploitation" and grandiosely promised all staffers a 40% pay raise.

A Slight Misunderstanding. Catching wind of Shaker's maneuvers, the Amins coldly passed word that Akhbar's once fat profits had dwindled to the vanishing point since Nasser's nationalization. There would be no raise, they said. Enraged at this "reneging," a crowd of infuriated typesetters pursued the brothers to their ninth-floor office, besieged them with shouts of "Swindlers! Stealers!" Police drove them away. Soon after, Nasser barred both the Amins and Shaker from the Akhbar building.

Cairo rumor now has it that Nasser would like to scuttle Gumhuria and turn Akhbar into a kind of Egyptian Pravda. But most Egyptian newsmen argued that in the end Nasser would recognize that he needed the Amins and their lively journalism to get his own message across. Such was obviously the hope of the Amins themselves, who scrupulously refrained from any criticism of Nasser, would only say cautiously: "There has been something of a misunderstanding."

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