The Federated Arabs

Under a scorching sun in Tripoli last week, Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi beamed as troops equipped with Soviet rocket launchers and Czech armored personnel carriers paraded past his reviewing stand. Overhead, eight French-made Mirage jets zoomed by. Gaddafi, a lean, intense Arab zealot of 29, was understandably pleased. The parade not only marked the second anniversary of his rise to power; it also celebrated the establishment of a new Federation of Arab Republics, which Gaddafi had been instrumental in founding.

One Flag, One Anthem. The federation will link the 43 million people of Libya, Egypt and Syria. The three nations will have one flag, one national anthem and a federal superstructure, probably located in Cairo. Eventually the federation is supposed to have a common legislature, military command and foreign policy. Later, when the Sudan has settled some internal problems resulting from an unsuccessful coup against President Jaafar Numeiry last July, it and its 15 million people will also join the federation. But each country is to retain its full sovereignty.

Gaddafi has pushed for a union of Arab socialist states almost since he overthrew Libya's King Idris two years ago. He has given money lavishly to the other nations, drawing on Libyan oil revenues, which now reach $2 billion annually. What Gaddafi got for his money is still uncertain. The last union between Egypt and Syria, which lasted from 1958 to 1961, ended unhappily because Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser dominated it. Even Arabs doubt, therefore, that the new union will ever become absolute.

Anticoup Insurance. The federation will have one aspect useful to all concerned. Its constitution provides that any two of the states can intervene militarily to maintain the status quo in the third. That at least gives anticoup insurance to the regimes of Gaddafi, Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Syrian President Hafez Assad. In effect the federation is a union of leaders rather than of people.

To make it seem more democratic, the three rulers sent their voters to the polls last week in a rubber-stamp referendum in which 98% approved of the new arrangement. Gaddafi, the most junior but the noisiest partner, told his Libyans: "As you march to the polls today, you march to Golan and the West Bank, to the mosque of Al-Aqsa and to Jerusalem." But the federation is not expected to alter the military balance in the Middle East. Unlike Libya, the other two partners face Israeli guns across cease-fire lines; then, too, Egypt's Sadat has indicated that he still wants a negotiated peace. As a result, the first rift in the new union may well occur if Gaddafi sounds a battle call and his partners, with understandable reluctance, refuse to heed it.

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