Cruel & Difficult Struggle

Top Egyptian Singer Um Kalthoum, who barely two months ago was inciting the Arabs with breathy ballads about Israel's coming defeat, has a new job. She is directing a campaign to collect gold, jewelry and stashed-away cash to help Egypt's battered economy. If her daily pleadings have not convinced the Egyptians of the costliness of their rout by Israel, Gamal Abdel Nasser has. Last week he promised his people "a real, cruel and difficult struggle ahead." And "economic struggle," he told the fellahin, "means economic sacrifice. We must eliminate all privileges."

Shortly thereafter, Nasser's socialist regime produced a new emergency budget that showed he was not kidding. It imposed higher taxes on the middle and upper classes, raised workers' compulsory monthly savings by 50%, reduced overtime pay, cut the sugar ration by a third, and curtailed practically all major industrial programs. Only military expenditures were increased, by $140 million to an estimated $1 billion, exclusive of some of the hidden barter arrangements with the Soviet bloc. Nasser also increased the price of beer (by 50 a bottle), cigarettes (50 a pack), long-distance bus and railroad fares and admission to movies.

Nasser's propaganda machine is preparing the Egyptians for even worse to come. The radio, TV and press are stressing as an example of national sacrifice the hardships of the British during World War II, when each person got only one egg a week. Egyptians are now eating macaroni instead of rice, which is being exported to earn cash. The cotton crop is again badly infested by leaf worm, but because there is not enough money to buy insecticide, youngsters have been sent into the fields to pick the worm off the plants by hand. The tourist tide has dried, the guides at the pyramids and Sphinx sit playing trictrac (a variation of backgammon) with each other. Egypt is losing $5,000,000 a week in revenues from the closing of the Suez Canal, where, along with more than a dozen other ships, a German freighter sits helpless with 5,000,000 eggs that are ready to spoil. And on the other side of the canal, the Israelis are sitting on the Sinai wells that produced half of Egypt's oil supply.

With his hard-currency debt (not counting arrears to the Soviet bloc) now approaching $1.5 billion and his foreign-exchange reserves down to $100 million, Nasser is going to have a tough time dodging bankruptcy. To make up for lost trade with the West, he is negotiating new trade and loan agreements with his Arab fellow socialists, the Communists, and sympathetic non-aligned nations like India. Last week Poland gave him a $20 million loan for industrial development, and East Germany announced $100 million more credits. But the strain will continue as long as Nasser insists upon keeping Egypt on a war footing against Israel and pursuing his expensive war in Yemen. Last week both Britain and the U.S. accused the Egyptians of bombing Yemeni royalists with poison gas. The two nations indicated that they would support international action by the Red Cross and the United Nations to stop such practices.

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