Egypt's menacing impasse
Desmond Stewart
Alexandria During Nasser's presidency, 23 to 26 July acquired a quasi-liturgical position in the Egyptian year: the first date commemorated the Cairo coup of 1952 and the second Farouk's embarkation from Alexandria, where the king had been summering. Speeches and parades were matched each year by some sense of achievement and much expectation. This year there were no parades, no commemoration of Nasser or of such physical achievements as the High Dam. While action was provided by the departure of the Israeli military delegation from its airfield quarters, the only treats were two Sadat speeches. These reflected a sense of exasperation, expressing evident frustration in both internal and external policies.
The anticipated firecracker in the first speech proved slightly damp: the president's announcement that he intended to form a party —still unnamed —of his own. The news aroused no visible excitement among Egyptians preparing themselves for the ardours of a Ramadan falling in the year's hottest month. Yet Sadat's new party posed an obvious challenge to the Centre Party
headed by the Prime Minister, Mamdouh Salim. The cooperation of this apparently uncorrupt former police officer in the disbanding of his party's membership — whose secretary, according to the leftist weekly A/-Aha/y, has already decided to change bandwagons —cannot be taken for granted. But however much support he obtains, Sadat will find it tiring to combine the roles of head of state and chief executive in a country as complex as Egypt. Even in Morocco King Hassan abandoned the attempt to combine both functions.
Sadat has given no clues as to how he will be better able to solve the problems of inflation, unemployment, over-population and dereliction: during the preceding week one packed bus crashed into the Nile with great loss of life, while two condemned but inhabited tenements collapsed with many dead. But no serious attack on the domestic problems can be undertaken before the solution of Egypt's main foreign conundrum. Sadat cannot act alone. Principle apart—and Sadat has reiterated that the rights of the Palestinians are the nub of the Middle East problem — Egypt is as dependent on foreign aid as Israel; and the only people able to supply it on the scale required are the Arabs. Today, when Egypt's foreign minister laments the tedium of repetitions of known positions, and when Vance and Atherton repeat the historical rabbit-runs of Dr Gunnar J arring, Arab opinion is even less approving of Sadat's negotiations. The manhandling of Egypt's winning footballers at the African games, for example, was not due to hostility to the players themselves.
Arab hostility left Sadat unmoved last November, for it was not reflected at home. Rich Arabs were generally resented, the Palestinians could be caricatured by the Cairo media — anyway up till their heroic flight in South Lebanon —as night-club guerrillas. The volatile and optimistic Egyptian populace played with Sadat's notion that the conflict with Israel was 75 per cent psychological and that, contrary to two decades of Nasserist teaching, most Israelis wanted peace and not territorial expansion. But Begin's stony reponse, backed by a majority of the Knesset and verbally deplored by the West, has convinced every Egyptian known to me — including a surprising number of pay-roll propagandists — that Israel will not willingly disgorge the occupied territories, and that America cannot or will not exert enough pressure to enforce Israel's compliance with Security Council resolutions whose content she dislikes or re-interprets. As one Egyptian argued, the refusal to restore Al-Arish to Egyptian civil conrol preparatory to a new peace meeting was as worthy of international uproar as the trial of Shcharansky.
Sinister speculations, worrying shadows, project themselves against this sombre background. Sadat, who has honoured more promises than his critics expected, has said he will resign if his initiative conclusively fails. Mr Begin himself spoke this week of the situation after Sadat, suggesting that some new Egyptian leader might work to annihilate, not coexist with, Israel. One theory — formula 74 — canvassed in maverick Cairo circles has the clarity of certain states of paranoia. The formula derives its name from what happened to Cyprus four summers back. Under the formula, 'they' promote a group they have no interest in, or liking for, so as to trigger a series of greater events: in Cyprus, the removal of Makarios and the partition of his refractory nonaligned island. The application of the formula to Egypt might involve the promotion of men as unappetising as Nikos Samson and the Eoka B terrorists. Such rabid leadershiP could be used to justify Israel's refusal to abandon the land it is currently settling, and might open an entirely new phase in the struggle for Arab oil.
Such rumours — and there are others as lurid — reflect more than the silly season in which Alexandria has recaptured its prerevolutionary role as summer capital. 'cm Vicars of Bray,' one writer thus described the mood, 'hesitate between their practical commitment to the present and their speculations about the future. They are getting ready to jump: once they know the direc tion.'
This ambiguity of commitment, set beside the universal desire of young Egyptians of talent or enterprise to emigrate induces a paralysis almost as dispiriting as the scenario of formula 74. It underlines the need, in the inte rest of Sadat's critics as much as of his friends, for thodemocracy he affirms to adopt some institutionalised form. Many naive arguments are being used on behalf of the Sadat ideal of a polite democracy in which no one insults or basically disagrees. Mr Aly Hamdy Gamal, Heikal's successor at Al-A hram, argued in an article, entitled Why Should there be a New ParfY?, that such a party should be organised M manner quite different from any now current in Egypt. Sadat himself claimed that Western democracies, including Israel, laboured 0Y for the welfare of the ordinary citizen, unlike Egyptian opposition leaders, who either worked as agents of foreign powers or for selfish reasons. Sadat's arguments are often strange but, on the other hand, he has allowed the reappearance of an Opposition press and the inquisitioned writers have so far not been harmed. In even a bad or naive democracy you have some idea of what yon are getting, however dull. When you are, in the modish word of formula 74, 'de" stabilised' by some movement of ambition or despair, roulette is being played against you on a wheel well rigged — but rigged hY unknown hands.
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