Celebration

The sizzling streets of Cairo and Alexandria were charged with happiness and excitement as 23 million Egyptians took a long holiday last week to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Nasser's revolution, the first anniversary of the seizure of the Suez Canal. On a hundred triumphal arches banners proclaimed: "Egypt, Tomb of Aggressors." "Nasser, Hero of Peace." From radios and loudspeakers all over the great (pop. 2,100,506) city of Cairo, the Big Brotherly voice of Nasser could be heard everywhere.

In Alexandria scores of thousands rushed to see a new Soviet-delivered submarine. In Cairo perhaps a million watched a military parade as big as last year's, with Soviet rocket launchers and tanks, and, overhead, Soviet-made jet bombers and fighters flashing good form in their first flypast (but showing gaps on the second pass because some were unable to keep in formation). The Russian arms were impressive, but conspicuously missing from the parade were last year's armed units from other Arab nations. It was a revealing indication of Nasser's diminished popularity with other Arab governments.

Make Up for the Past. Pictured on every poster and saluted by every speaker, Nasser was plainly still enormously popular in the Egyptian streets. His government had overcome the emergency of its Sinai defeat, but had not yet tackled its immense long-term problems (the economy is stagnant, and overcommitted--by as much as 37% of its foreign trade--to the Soviet bloc). Addressing his new one-party Parliament early in the week, Nasser seemed almost too subdued to be true. He summarized his regime's homefront achievements ("Our greatest gain is hope"), and bore down on the need to "build, build, build, to make up for the past, to face the future." Said Nasser: "We must always remember that our people are increasing by more than 300,000 new citizens every year."

For the first time, he spelled out details of how Egypt hoped to build the Aswan High Dam on a do-it-yourself basis, e.g., drawing on Suez Canal revenues (which gave him foreign exchange he did not have before) for the $172 million needed before 1962 for the project's scaled-down first phase.

After so restrained a performance, the Egyptian crowds expected that the strongman's public speech in Alexandria four days later would be sensational. But though it had more fury, it was not wild. Once again Nasser went back over the past, going to great lengths to explain away last fall's sordid military defeat as a "glorious withdrawal." For the first time he managed to acknowledge: "We cannot deny America's attitude during the aggression and its condemnation of such aggression, as well as its attitude in the U.N."

But he snapped right back into the old form: "This attitude changed. They plotted the starvation of the people. America refused to sell wheat to us, intending to cause famine and so realize by peaceful means the objectives which France and Britain realized by war."

Communist Russia, crowed Nasser, came to the rescue. And when Egypt then rejected the Eisenhower Doctrine, the U.S. instituted "a vicious policy of invasion from within" the Arab world, sought "to isolate Egypt," and the battle became clear and open. And for those Arab leaders and "deviators" (a word drawn from the Marxist lexicon) who had lined up with the U.S., there will never be any place "in any Arab solidarity."

The Future. By Nasser's standards, this too was a restrained speech. He made no demands that the U.N. Emergency Force withdraw from Egypt's borders. He made no mention of Israel's ships passing into the Gulf of Aqaba. And in a week of nationalist celebrations, Egypt permitted the Danish freighter Birgitte Toft, under charter to Israel, to pass through the canal with a cargo of rice for Haifa--the first such ship on Israeli charter to go through Suez since last year's Sinai war. (An Israeli sailor, however, was taken off the ship and held.)

The moderate tone of Nasser's performance--the tone of a frustrated man with a grievance, but not an angry caged tiger--suggested that he knows as well as anyone that the only way to end his country's economic stagnation and plan for the future is to get back on better terms with the West.

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