Middle East: A Call to Mecca

In the Middle East, where hates flare and die with the course of the sun, there is no letup in the feud between Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who leads the Arab world’s revolutionary camp, and Saudi Arabia’s King Feisal, who leads the conservative forces.

Nowhere is this rivalry more sharply drawn than in the arid sands and craggy cliffs of Yemen. There, in four years of sporadic skirmishing, the 50,000 Egyptian troops sent in by Nasser have been fought to a standstiil by tribesmen loyal to the ousted Imam Badr, who holds the hills and sustains his ragged army with supplies and arms from Feisal. Of late, however, Nasser has had less trouble fending off Feisal’s royalist friends than in keeping in line the ragtag republican regime he sponsors in Yemen’s capital of San’a.

A year ago, Nasser discreetly removed republican President Abdullah Sallal, who had turned out to be so much of a Nasserite that his fiercely xenophobic republican colleagues were growing restive. If Sallal had become too fawningly dependent on Cairo, his successor, General Hassan Amri, proved to be too fiercely independent. So Nasser reinstalled Sallal as his proconsul. He was no more welcome than before. To demand that Nasser bounce Sallal once again, Amri flew to Cairo three weeks ago, taking with him, as Amri boasted, “the entire state of Yemen”: nine Cabinet officers, three members of the Republican Council, and 29 important army officers. Amri wanted better treatment from Nasser, and he got it—in a Cairo clinic.

On the Radio. Egyptian military police carted Amri and 15 of his most important officials off to military hospitals for “medical treatment.” With Yemen’s government thus quarantined in Cairo, Sallal proclaimed a new one in San’a, taking over the premiership as well as the presidency, and forming a Cabinet nearer to Nasser’s desires. Sallal then took to the San’a radio to warn that the “traitors and deviationists” who had “led a campaign of doubt and suspicion between the U.A.R. and Yemen” would be brought to trial.

Nasser’s brand of political Medicare would hardly help his image in the Arab world—or the prospects for peace in Yemen. Nasser wants to keep the feud going so that his expeditionary force in Yemen will be positioned for a possible move into strategic Aden when the British withdraw year after next.

Traveling Salesman. That prospect is anathema to Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King Feisal, the ruler of the largest and richest of the moderate Arab nations. Last week Feisal wound up a 28-day, five-nation tour in President Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia—his latest trip in ten months to promote his projected Islamic summit meeting in Mecca. While

Saudi Arabia’s government-controlled newspapers call the rulers of Egypt “butchers,” and Cairo’s press summons all good Arabs to “a battle of destiny” against Feisal, the King himself preaches Islamic brotherhood and cooperation. “President Nasser is one of our great Moslem leaders,” says Feisal, “and it is inconceivable that he should consider our Islamic call to be aimed against him.”

In the seething tangle of Middle Eastern intrigue, that is precisely what Nasser does consider it—and he is determined to frustrate Feisal’s call to Mecca just as he torpedoed the fourth Arab summit meeting, which was to have been held this month, rather than sit at the same table with Feisal’s “forces of reaction.” Increasingly, the Arab states are being called to line up on one side or the other, Nasser’s or Feisal’s. Nasser is still the name to conjure with in the streets of the Middle East, but Feisal can offer hard cash to his allies. In addition to helping the Yemeni royalists, he is supporting Jordan’s King Hussein with millions of dollars for everything from road building to weapons. He is also strengthening Saudi Arabia’s own defenses with purchases of some $1.5 billion in military hardware in case a fight with Nasser should ever be necessary.

The Line-Up. In such a showdown, Nasser could count on Algeria, Syria, Iraq and Sallal’s part of Yemen—all more or less socialist, Soviet-armed regimes. Feisal would have on his side Western-equipped Jordan, Bahrain, the tiny sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, and perhaps Morocco, Tunisia and Kuwait. Non-Arab Iran, whose Shah despises Nasser, would probably aid Feisal enthusiastically. Anxious to remain neutral are Lebanon, Libya and the Sudan. But it may never come to a showdown. The meeting around a fire is as old as

Arab history: much coffee and lengthy but inconclusive talk. Should Feisal ever get his Islamic summit, it might prove just the cooling-off conclave the Middle East requires.