After a Decade

At a military base in the desert west of the Nile, President Gamal Abdel Nasser last week watched four Egyptian-made rockets roar upward into the clouds. The most potent rocket, named El Kaher (Conqueror), has a range of 360 miles and could land, said Nasser, "just south of Beirut." The area just south of Beirut is better known as Israel.

The rocket-rattling was a forerunner to this week's celebration of the tenth anniversary of Nasser's revolution. The program is elaborate: a major Nasser speech before a quarter-million Egyptians in Cairo's Republican Square, a military parade along the boulevards of the Nile Corniche featuring Soviet T-54 tanks of the Egyptian army and, overhead, Soviet TY-16 jet bombers with Egyptian pilots. Amid fireworks, throngs hurried to the fairgrounds on Gezira island, wandered through airy pavilions and outdoor exhibits crammed with Egyptian-made products, including Fiat cars, five-ton trucks, Ma Griffe perfume and Odorono deodorant, all locally manufactured under license. As a nation that a decade ago had to import even matches, Egypt could feel proud of real progress.

Yet the official opening of the industrial fair showed how far the ageless land still has to go. For one thing. Dictator Nasser, 44, kept the diplomatic corps and other guests waiting a solid five hours while he, unable to delegate authority, was kept busy by economic negotiations. For another, many of the goods exhibited were still far from being in efficient mass production; RCA TV sets, for instance, were made by Egyptian workers from imported do-it-yourself kits at the rate of 200 a day, but only two or three locally produced cabinets were turned out daily. According to a typical Cairo joke, Nasser dies and goes to the Egyptian hell, but finds the place less terrifying than expected. Reason: because of a severe shortage of fuel, the oil does not boil often, the rack is always breaking down for lack of 20 spare parts, and the pitchforking devils--like true Egyptian civil servants--sign in at eight o'clock, then sleep the rest of the day.

Arab Socialism. Despite administrative and economic bungling, Nasser has survived a series of cliff-hanging crises, from Suez in 1956 to last year's collapse of the United Arab Republic, when Syria violently withdrew from the coalition with Egypt. Nasser was so shaken by that event that he allowed his secret police to institute a virtual reign of terror. He pulled out of this scare about four months ago, just in time to avoid a serious political reaction against him. With the help of massive economic aid from the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund, he has made another remarkable recovery, is finally facing the pressing problems which must be conquered before Egypt can enter the 20th century.

Last month Nasser summoned a National Congress of intellectuals, workers and peasants to Cairo and presented them with a "National Charter," his first major political credo since he took over. Despite the fact that Nasser had confiscated $1.5 billion from Egypt's tiny, wealthy, luxury-bathed ruling class, he explained that "Arab Socialism" is not Communism: it favors religion, opposes the dictatorship of any class, and believes in private "but not exploitative" ownership. He called for the setting up of a one-party system based on a complex structure of villages, factories and urban districts. This ramshackle system, many Egyptians hope, may give Nasser a political base other than the army--which to date is the major force keeping him in power. Nasser is the first Arab leader to give government backing to birth control clinics to limit the nation's exploding population--it more than doubled since 1917, is expected to double again to 53 million by the end of the century. Increasing numbers of women are entering the economic life of the country, including 33,000 teachers and 43,000 government workers.

The impressed Congress delegates asked 900 questions about the Charter, including the vital one: How will it be implemented? Replied Nasser genially: "That's a question I have asked myself."

In the Villages. A large part of the answer will come from Egypt's 4,000 villages. Most of them resemble one called Barsha, which lies under an umbrella of bending palms on the banks of the upper Nile. Visiting it last week, TIME Correspondent James Wilde found a cluster of mud-brick hovels and 4,000 people barely subsisting on 200 acres of farm land, probably unchanged in most respects since the days of the Pharaohs. The streets are cluttered by famished yellow dogs and skinny children with red-lidded eyes half-closed by trachoma and stomachs distended by bilharziasis. Young girls in ankle-length dresses go gracefully by with water jugs balanced on their heads. Most will be married at 15, lie on their deathbeds at 40. Many peasants still drink from the filthy canals, scorning the "weak" water supplied by a new artesian well. Life is so cheap that a professional killer can be hired for ten dollars, and it is not uncommon to see a gunman walking casually down a dusty road holding a large, white sunshade in one hand and a gun in the other.

Six years ago, change came to Barsha in the shape of a government organizer from Cairo, who convinced the villagers that they should pool their resources in a cooperative and set up interest-free loans for seed and fertilizer. The government has built a combined school and medical clinic to serve Barsha and other villages (the building is still empty for lack of a technical staff). A circuit-riding doctor pays a once-a-week call at Barsha, and Cairo surprised the villagers last year by passing out free insecticides to combat the cotton-worm blight and, when this failed, paid a $10-per-acre subsidy to those who suffered complete loss. Under Egypt's land reform program, only three Barsha families have received five acres each. Throughout Egypt, 1,650,000 acres so far have been seized from the big landlords by the government, but distributing it is so laborious a bureaucratic process that so far less than half of that land has been parceled out--to one-twentieth of the country's landless peasants.

At the Dam. Another, equally typical, scene of Nasser's battle is Aswan, the site of the famed high dam, which represents Nasser's industrial ideal. When completed around 1970, the dam will form the largest man-made lake in the world, reclaim nearly 1,000,000 acres of now arid land, and double the nation's electricity supply. Egyptians hope to make the city an "Arab Pittsburgh," and it already boasts a West German-built fertilizer plant and a modern sugar refinery, both surrounded by workers' housing developments and air-conditioned, U.S.-style supermarkets where veiled Arab shoppers mingle with the dumpy Russian wives of the 570 Soviet technicians working on the dam.

Between the extremes of ancient Barsha and modern Aswan lies a hodgepodge of "model" villages, badly designed steelworks like that built by West Germans at Helwan (even the Egyptian railroads turned down its steel rails), and the auto factory whose Ramses sedan is unquestionably the ugliest car ever built (Westerners have dubbed it the "fellah wagon"). Nasser is determined to create an industrial middle class independent of the land. Plans call for creating half a million industrial jobs during the next two years, and for spending nearly $3 billion on development during the next five years. But the vast majority of the people are still concerned with agriculture--mostly cotton--and produce only enough wheat to feed the country more or less adequately for 40 days a year; the rest is made up by foreign aid, largely by surplus-food shipments from the U.S.

The Balance Sheet. Since 1952 the U.S. has supplied $531 million worth of food, and this year has already nearly doubled the amount spent in 1961. The Communist bloc has contributed an estimated $633 million in the last ten years.

Another $639 million in long-and short-term credits comes from Britain, France, Italy, West Germany and Japan.

Through its nimble borrowing, Nasser's regime has built up a staggeringly bad balance sheet, but so far can boast that it has never welshed on a debt. The method of payment is often odd: last week Egypt got together the $5,600,000 needed to pay off British subjects whose Egyptian properties were recently confiscated by the simple expedient of borrowing the money from Great Britain.

For all its problems and pitfalls, Egypt today is probably the stablest country in the Middle East, and perhaps the only one with a growing sense of where it is going. Despite desperately limited schooling at home, Egypt manages to export teachers --about 3,600 to the school systems of the Arab states--and Egypt's universities import swarms of students from Africa and Asia. Nasser has given Egypt more dignity and confidence than seemed possible a few years ago. But what with Russian influence and Nasser's constant socialist promises, a further drift to the left in Egypt is possible. A point of rising expectation is often also a danger point. "The Egyptian masses have now been fed not only with food, but also with propaganda, promises, ideas and false statistics," explains one observer. "There is a deep and pervading sense of frustration because of the failure to fulfill the slogan of 'Plenty for Everyone.' "

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