EGYPT: Moscow’s Neutrals

EGYPT Moscow’s Neutrals “To our armies—the Soviet, the Syrian and the Egyptian,” toasted Nikita Khrushchev at a reception for Egypt’s War Minister Abdel Hakim Amer. “You are our sincere friends, the friends of freedom,” cried General Amer. Last week Premier Bulganin announced that the Soviet Union, selflessly sympathetic with the aspirations of Egypt, had decided at Amer’s request “to aid in building up Egypt’s national economy.”

Aboard a shiny Soviet TU-IO4 jet airliner, General Amer flashed back to Cairo to take the word to President Nasser. Next day Cairo’s press blared that the Soviet Union had granted Egypt a $175 million loan, and that Industry Minister Aziz Sidky would leave shortly for Moscow to negotiate detailed projects for building docks, drydocks and an automobile assembly plant, plus developing minerals and supplying tractors and machinery. “This is what Russian aid will do for you,” explained Al Akhbar in a fine burst of reckless accounting. “It will find you and your son a job because it will help our five-year plan make 500,000 more jobs; it will increase your income because now the national income will be increased by $100 million; it will enable you to live better because now the standard of living will rise.”

Nasser has always spurned Western aid as “aid with strings.” Yet chances are that his latest loan, like Syria’s, also covers new arms aid, and, like Syria’s, provides for explicit Russian approval for each project as it comes up. The press called the deal “a triumph for Egypt’s positive neutralism.”