British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

Sadat's EgyptAuthor(s): Philip AdamsSource: Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 3, No. 2 (1976), pp. 73-78Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/194580 .

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SADAT'S EGYPT

Philip Adams

Editor's Note: The following paper is the text of the opening address delivered by Sir Philip Adams, lately British Ambassador in Cairo, at the Third Annual Conference of the Society, held at ColZingwood College, University of Durham, 5-7 July 1976.

When I was discussing with the organizers of this meeting the kind of subject with which I might attempt to deal, I found myself asking the question: Sadat's Egypt--does it lead or divide the Arabs? I think it worth posing the question of Egypt's position in the Arab world once again because Sadat's Egypt is, in its essential political character, quite different from Nasser's Egypt, as, of course, it is from Farouk's Egypt. Moreover, I think it right to think of modern Egypt as Sadat's Egypt because I believe Sadat's influence and personality to be domi- nant in it.

One of the games diplomats used to play in Cairo was to spot the people who made policy, who really governed the country. The list was always a short one; my own version usually had the name of a single man --Anwar el-Sadat.

The President allows himself very few advisers. I do not believe he listens much to advice; nor, on the other hand, does he hand down much by way of instructions to his ministers, officials and service chiefs. He prefers to appoint to high office people whom he trusts in a general way and whose reactions to any given set of circumstances will be broadly similar to his own. When the man strays too far from Sadat's line, the chances are that he will be replaced rather than sent instructions to mend his ways.

As a young man, Sadat must have had plenty of time to ponder and reflect upon the state of Egypt and to formulate his ambitions for it. As a country-bred boy from deep in the Delta, as a young soldier, a prisoner, a revolutionary, his thoughts about Egypt were formed and govern, I suppose, his view of the country and the future. I find him remarkable among Arab politicians I have known for his capacity to look forward and for his consistency.

His own outline of his ambitions for Egypt is apt to begin with a consideration of the population problem, which is perhaps his greatest worry and the key to his thought and policies. No one knows even roughly what the total population of the country is; recent estimates put it at between 35 and 50 million. By the end of the century the higher figure will almost certainly be reached, if it has not been reached already. For the rate of increase one can get a rather firmer

figure, derived from birth and death registrations, of about 1.2 million a year--the equivalent, somebody said, of a new Birmingham each year-- a Birmingham with 100 per cent unemployment. Faced with this prospect, Sadat finds himself looking for a way out of the war situation, a way of converting from a war economy to a peace economy. If only he could

get his people more productively employed, he argues, he could promise them a prosperous future and the opportunity to contribute to the well-

being of the area as well as to share its new-found wealth. Productive employment in Sadat's book means industrialization. His

intention to industrialize an economy based for so long and so deeply on agriculture may be thought odd, and the more so since the President himself comes from an intensively farmed area and because the country

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cannot feed itself anyway. I think myself that there is much in the Egyptian agricultural system that is admirable. Perhaps nature has been too kind to the Egyptians. Despite the rapidly increasing size of the population and the miserable overcrowding which that brings, few Egyptians are on or even close to the starvation level. Admittedly their needs are small. Most rural families content themselves with a low-protein diet based largely on foul (Ar.fjZ), the broad bean. The climate and natural fertility are such that the least skilled peasant can grow enough food of a kind to keep his family from starving. The production of food grains is less successful, and Egypt still spends far too much of her foreign exchange--chronically in short supply--on buying wheat. The Egyptians are now growing some of the new Mexican varieties, which have a very high yield; but these, I am told, need ad- ditional fertilizers and thereby pose other problems for the Government. Following the construction of the High Dam, fertilizer production has been increased, however, and no doubt further increases are possible; these will have important prospects in the export field as well as in the domestic economy. And the 'new' High Dam water has enabled both additional acreage in the Nile Valley to be brought under continuous cultivation and new areas of semi-desert, north-west of the Delta, to be brought under the plough.

Still, none of these recent developments in agriculture has yet ful- filled Egyptian hopes. The slower pace of the Nile has favoured the spread of the dreaded water-hyacinth downstream from the lakes of East Africa, and it is now to be seen on Lake Mariut in the suburbs of Alex- andria. New irrigation has brought new problems of salinity and drain- age. The population movements required by the Dam and to bring farmers into new areas have brought social problems. The supply of electricity from the Soviet-built power station in the Dam seems to be somewhat capricious and generally inadequate. And, surprisingly enough, the actual quantity of water in the river is said by some experts to be in- sufficient to do all that Egyptian planners would like to ask of it. But, all in all, further industrialization seems to Sadat to be his best bet, and the Egyptian work-force his major asset.

Here, I believe, is an asset with real potential. Successive British industrialists who visited Egyptian factories during my time there were invariably impressed, if not astonished, by the skills and reliability of Egyptians on the shop floor. This is not to say that productivity has yet reached a level acceptable to Western management; it has not. The fault seems to lie both with the equipment itself (for much of the plant from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union which was installed during the Nasser regime was obsolescent and poor in quality) and with the inadequacy of the middle management. This last weakness, incidentally, is one which can be observed throughout Egyptian life and can be attributed in great part to the xenophobic removal of the people of foreign or mixed origin--Jews, Greeks, Italians, Maltese and

Cypriots, for the most part--who held posts at this level in pre-Rev- olutionary Egypt. But some of the top management is top-class, and I see no reason to suppose that training programmes could not be devised to enable Egyptians to fill the gap, serious as it now is.

Looking for scope for further industrialization, Sadat points to the other assets, over and above labour, of which he disposes. So far there have been no oil strikes of first-class importance, but the out- look is distinctly encouraging and it is fairly certain that Egypt will

very soon be a net exporter of oil and, with luck, a good deal more than that. Natural gas is already being exploited and is capable of

expansion. The Helwan steelworks are drawing on Egyptian ore from the

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Western Desert; and phosphates, salt and a great variety of other min- erals are known to be present in one part of the country or another. Lake Nasser, the vast new artificial lake formed by the High Dam, is teeming with fish. There are certainly enough raw materials to support a whole range of new industries. But Sadat needs help in identifying and developing them. Industrialization, at the beginning of his presi- dency, was dominated by Soviet and Eastern European advice and had been conceived with characteristic Communist over-emphasis on heavy industry. In that field, as in the field of defence, Sadat found himself largely dependent upon the goodwill of the Government in Moscow and on Soviet advisers on the ground. He determined to change this situation into one in which he was master not only of his advisers, but also of his economy. He felt by the middle of 1972, I think, that he had extracted from the Russians and their associates as much as he could hope to get, and that the time had come to 'go it alone'. The decision to expel the Soviet experts was the turning-point and marked the beginning of a new independent line in Egyptian policy.

What of the rest of the Arab world in all this? I suspect the Egyptians have always been a bit mixed up in thinking whether they are Arabs or not, Sadat is no exception, although if asked the question outright, he will say, as though the answer were obvious and natural, that of course the Egyptians are Arabs. But--and I think there is logic in this--he sees the very size of Egypt as a factor which makes a certain measure of independence of action inevitable. In seeking to make Egypt strong and capable of acting independently of Soviet support Sadat thinks he is doing the Arabs a service. And in a sense so he is. But the trouble starts when he persuades himself, as Egyptians have al- ways tended to do, that he can thandle the Arabs'. Of course he can do no such thing. He is determined to avoid at all cost entanglements such as the disastrous union with Syria, although his need for cash, if nothing else, will keep him looking hopefully towards other Arab states. The Confederation in which Egypt, Syria and Libya are nominally par- ticipants has always been a farce. I do not know of anything it does or has done apart from occupy palatial quarters in a Heliopolis hotel for which a hundred better uses could be found.

The flirtation with Libya which came to an abrupt end on the eve of the wedding was almost more farcical. I recall one of my more idle diplomatic colleagues in Cairo, at a party on the day after that pro- claimed in advance as the day on which the union would come into being, asking the then Foreign Minister whether it would not be true to say that, although the union had not come about at least the foundations for union had now been laid. 'No', replied the Minister, 'it would be more true to say that a pit had been dug in which the foundations might one day be laid.' But, for all this air of pantomime, I would not rule out the possibility of some closer association of Egypt and Libya one day. The richness of his western neighbour will always be a temptation to Sadat; Libya needs the sort of mechanical and industrial skills which Egypt can (and to some extent already does) provide; and there is the fascinating speculation whether Qaddafi might be the man to restore the head of revolutionary steam in Egypt which Sadat, with his bour-

geois tastes, has dissipated. During the long drawn-out, abortive negotiations with Libya Sadat

was hatching other plans. For one thing, the foundations of the ex- tremely important alliance with Saudi Arabia were laid. Furthermore, the expulsion of the Soviet advisers had cleared the way for him to

pursue his own policy of war and peace with Israel. And the solution-- or removal--of his Israeli problem he saw as vital for the survival of

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Egypt, as I have already tried to indicate. Ideally--and here he is surely acting like an Arab--he would have liked someone else to solve this problem for him. He hoped that something would turn up. And, of course, the particular something for which he hoped was the Americans, for only they could exercise the necessary pressure on Israel. But his relations with the United States Government were bad, almost non-exist- ent. Nevertheless a line was opened, not through conventional diplo- matic channels but through one of Sadat's closest associates, Hafez Ismail, who was given the title of National Security Adviser, or some- thing which sounded like that, to give him status comparable with the post then held by Dr Kissinger.

In February 1973 Hafez Ismail was despatched to Washington to dis- cover how far the United States were prepared to go in urging a settle- ment on Israel. He came back with nothing in the bag; and from that moment, I believe with hindsight, Sadat determined that he would have to go to war to get the Americans to wake up. Certainly, from that time on, one could observe increasing preparations and rehearsals for war; and ministers began to say openly that it would soon come to that if the Great Powers would not bestir themselves. Yet no foreign observer, I think, foresaw with any accuracy just when the strike would be made or how successful it would be. Sadat sought immediately to make his purposes plain to the powers. I was one of a small series of ambassa- dors for whom he sent within twenty-four hours of the opening of hos- tilities, and since they give some indication of the character and mood of the President I hope I may be forgiven if I include some rather personal recollections of this and other meetings I had with him during the brief war.

Called to see the President at about noon on the Sunday after the outbreak of the war, I found him, in uniform, standing in the hall of the small former royal palace which became his headquarters. He was reading the morning paper and had evidently just concluded a meeting as servants were briskly moving chairs out of an adjoining room. When they had finished, he motioned me into it and we sat down on two re- maining small armchairs between which was a little table with his pipe, tobacco and matches, and a transistor radio--switched off, thank good- ness! Sadat looked around him, decided that he did not like the look of the room and suggested that we turn our chairs around so as to face the open French window which looked on to a rather unkempt but charming garden with old-fashioned roses and crumbling statues. 'That's much better', he said. 'Now, what do you think is going to happen?' In reply I said that I had come hoping that he was going to tell me. He insisted that I should answer his question, so I said that one thing which had struck me was that something was not happening which I had expected to happen. This was that no one had called for a meeting of the Security Council. 'Quite right', said Sadat, 'and it will not be called'. He went on to say that he had resorted to war because the Israelis had continued to defy United Nations resolutions calling on them to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967, and the powers had continued to allow the Israelis to get away with it. He made it clear that the war could be stopped in hours, if not in minutes, and that it would be so stopped just as soon as the Israelis agreed to re- store Arab lands to Arab ownership. As far as Egypt was concerned, this meant the restoration of the old Sinai border, which had a differ- ent status, he claimed, from the borders to the east of Israel; these were essentially armistice lines and, he allowed, properly subject to

negotiation. Sadat claimed that the Syrian President was completely of the same view as himself; both agreed that the continuing occupation of

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East Jerusalem would be completely unacceptable in any settlement. Sadat went on to say that if the Israelis neither agreed to with-

draw nor were persuaded by the Americans or anyone else to do so, the war would continue until the pre-1967 borders had been regained. He said that the Canal crossing and the initial penetration into occupied Sinai had been accomplished with extraordinarily few casualties; they had been prepared for many more. But, if the Egyptians had to take casualties, they would--and could. He was prepared, he said, to lose a million a year--something which the Israelis could not contemplate. There might well be military reverses because of the higher skills of the Israelis, but he had no fear of a long drawn-out war. In the end the Arabs could not fail to win. But it was up to the Great Powers to decide on the next steps and whether to spare the Middle East further years of warfare and suffering. He urged me to make this as plain as I could to my Government.

The history of the military operations is now well known and I do not need to recall it here. I would only mention the moment at which the Americans believed there was a chance of getting a cease-fire res- olution through the Security Council. It was a week-end, and Kissinger urged the British Government to sponsor a resolution to be rushed through the Council before Congress or anyone else who might see it as a move to deprive Israel of victory had woken up to what was going on. The Foreign Office apparently replied to Kissinger that, unlike the Americans, they did not judge that Sadat was in a mood to accept the situation which would be created. Kissinger was pretty angry but, when pressed, indicated that his assessment was based mainly on Soviet re- ports (since the United States had effectively no representation in Egypt of their own). I was therefore instructed to check with Sadat personally and at once, and I had the rare experience of being received by a Head of State in his pyjamas at 4.20 in the morning. Sadat ex- plained his position in detail and added that he had been very angry with my Soviet colleague whom he had seen earlier in the night and whom he must by then have recognized as the source of the Americans' in- formation.

The rest of the war, and the near debacle at the end of it, are now history. Whatever the other Arabs may have said, Sadat was neither

apologetic nor dismayed. Incidentally, I have often wondered how well informed he was personally about the course of the war'in its later stages. There were certainly a number of changes of key appointments which could have confused the lines of communication. At all events, Sadat enthusiastically welcomed the United Nations peace-making oper- ation and the first disengagement agreement. At this time 'linkage' was his favourite word; he wanted the cessation of hostilities to be clearly linked to the making of peace, and that each step should be seen to be leading to the restoration of the 1967 borders. If he was less than energetic in the pursuit of the eastern borders of Israel than the southern, it was probably because of his view of the differ- ence of status, and because the Syrians and Jordanians seemed uninter- ested in the Sinai situation. But the slow pace of the negotiations, and the failures at Geneva and Aswan must have been profoundly depress- ing to him. About this time I found myself thinking more and more that Sadat's position was like that of a man on a bicycle: so long as pro- gress is maintained at a fair speed, he is very stable; if the pace slackens he begins to wobble; if it gets too slow he may fall off.

This leads me to my concluding remarks. What, in fact, is the out- look for Sadat and for a Sadat-style settlement in the Middle East? Others present will have views which may be more valid than mine. But

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here are a few thoughts for comment or rejection. First of all the internal scene. Sadat runs a risk of opposition

from three quarters. First, the so-called intellectuals--which is Egyptian-English for the small but significant group of writers, thinkers, university teachers, by and large supporters of Nasser's rev- olution who think that Sadat has betrayed that revolution. They point to the growing corruption and to the incompetence of the administration, to the regal life-style of the President and his family and to the fact that nothing is done to improve the lot of the working classes, the only obvious political power base in the country. The intellectuals are more concerned for the working classes, I believe, than these are for their own lot. Maybe foreign communists, perhaps even the Chinese, will one day be able to foster and sustain a genuine working-class movement. Secondly, there are the armed forces, who may well be criti- cal of the leadership for having, in effect, closed down the supply route for Soviet materiel without providing a reasonable alternative. Far too many soldiers are mobilized for far too long, and it is hard to believe that there is not much discontent. But diplomats are notori- ously bad at spotting the military instigators of military movements, and I must leave talent-spotting in this area to others who are better qualified. Thirdly, there are the young. Students in Egypt, as in other parts of the Middle East, have traditionally been a source of trouble for governments, and all I would say here is that I believe the present Egyptian administration is at least conscious of this and of the need to pay attention to the problem. During my time in Egypt the student/administration relationship gave progressively less trouble.

Next the international scene. I think that Sadat ought to be worried, even if he is not, on two counts. In the first place, has he not over-invested in Dr Kissinger? A Kissinger-type disengagement is all very well if it works. But Kissinger will not be there for ever, or perhaps for long enough to ensure the continuation of his policies; and, even if he were, would he be able to deliver the whole Sinai border intact, let alone Jerusalem? In the second place, what about the other Arabs? I have not spoken to-day explicitly about the Palestinians, although they are, after all, what the whole Middle East problem is supposed to be about. Will Sadat be able to establish a reasonable relationship with them, or will they continue to complicate his relationship with others--the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Libyans and the Kuwaitis, for example? He is inclined to take the view that it doesn't matter very much, that his is the only way for the Arabs to take, as the others will come to see one day. But this is to risk overlooking Sadat's basic problem, the Egyptian economy and his chronic lack of capital to get it going. 'Arab money', we used to be told, will be available, but so often Arab money has turned out to be a

mirage. This adds up to a formidable list of problems. But the Egyptians

have extraordinarily tough sinews inside that sometimes flabby flesh-- and they certainly cannot be written off. The very scale of the place and, I submit, the quality of its leader mean that if we ignore Egypt and what it stands for we do so at our peril. The country has inherent

greatness, of which we shall see more evidence it our time, and will

always be worth our closest attention.

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