UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC: First Anniversary

“Our land, our Nasser—You are our Beloved, 0 Gamal,” shrilled the marchers of Damascus as they streamed in thousands—girl scouts, militia, mullahs, mothers, cadets and kerchiefed workers—through Liberation Square and the Street Called Straight. Students shuffling under the eucalyptus leafed arches chanted in unison: “Neither internationalism nor Communism but Arab nationalism.” At the municipal stadium a festive crowd roared as desert riders staged a camel race. Thus, as their hero arrived from Cairo this week with his guest and fellow neutralist, Tito of Yugoslavia, the people of Nasser’s northern province (pop. 4,000,000) began celebrating the first anniversary of the merger of their country with Egypt in the United Arab Republic.

Only a year before, when Syrians welcomed Nasser as the new Saladin and his merger as “a turning point in world events,” it seemed to his followers as if the tide of Arab nationalism might wash the whole Arab East into one Nasser ruled state. But the West threw up its dikes in Lebanon and Jordan, and the Communism that Nasser had invited into the Middle East was now helping Iraq’s Premier Kassem to roll back the Arab nationalist flood from Baghdad.

If in Syria itself there was now no visible opposition to Nasser’s rule (the Communists and all other parties are banned), economic strains were being felt. Syrian foreign exchange holdings had shrunk in half in the merger’s first year. Nasser’s determination to force Syria’s free-enterprise economy into Egypt’s state socialist mold had sent private capital into flight, and threatened to make Syria’s hard pound almost as soft as Egypt’s. It had been a disastrous year for Syria’s wheat and barley crops. But Gamal Abdel Nasser himself seemed still to be the most popular man in the country. To make the new republic’s first anniversary memorable, Nasser planned the first formal distribution of 155,000 acres of land to the peasants.

Two months ago, in his first recognition that Communist agitation threatened him, Nasser had jailed 100-odd Syrian Communists, and received a warning blast from Nikita Khrushchev himself that it was “wrong” and “naive” to “accuse Communists of helping to weaken and divide” the Arab nationalist movement.

Last week, with Tito at his side as he addressed an anniversary crowd in Cairo’s tented Republic Square, Nasser announced in a two-hour speech that he had sent a personal letter to Khrushchev complaining about Communist skulduggery in Syria. He had just received Khrushchev’s reply: Russia would stay out of “U.A.R. internal affairs” and “continue sincerely to support your struggle despite our ideological differences.”