Sadat, Giscard talk Mirages

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 34026, 15 December 1975, Page 17

Sadat, Giscard talk Mirages

N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

CAIRO, December 14.

Talks on an $B,OOO million project for the construction in Cairo of French jet fighters and missiles will dominate the final meeting between President Giscard d’Estaing of France and President Sadat of Egypt today.

Officials from both sides! have said that no arms agreement will be signed during the French leader’s five-day visit — the first by a French President — but Mr Giscard d’Estaing was understood to be pressing for an early Egyptian decision on arms purchases and military co-operation. On this the French are encountering fierce competition from the British armaments industry. President Sadat, who has stressed an increasingly westward course since the expulsion of Russian military advisers in 1972, had repeatedly declared that he wanted to diversify his arsenal, still almost exclusively Soviet-made. The two Presidents are also scheduled to sign today a document dubbed “the Cairo declaration of friendship and co-operation between France and Egypt” — in effect a friendship pact between the two countries.

Just how eager the French are to break into the Egyptian market was underlined by Mr Giscard d’Estaing’s decision to cut short his sightseeing tour of upper Egyptian Pharaonic monuments and instead visit Ismailia, one of the three Suez Canal cities which bore the brunt of three wars with Israel since 1956. After a tour of Ismailia — one of the launching pads of Egypt’s 1973 war with Israel — Mr Giscard d’Estaing declared that the Cairo Government could rely on France’s “active and effective co-operation” in the peaceful development of the Egyptian economy. Mr Giscard d’Estaing, the first non-Arab leader to visit Ismailia since 1973 recalled France’s role in building the Suez Canal — its construction was directed by a French architect, Ferdinand de Lesseps, — and said that France hoped that the canal should “forever be one of

!the routes to peace.” President Sadat told reporters after the French President’s tour of the canal city that he cons i d e r s Mr Giscard d’Estaing’s visit to Egypt and the Canal Zone “a very significant gesture.” Mr Giscard d’Estaing, in reply to a reporter’s question, denied that his visit to the city — badly hit in the 1967 and 1973 wars — signalled a change in France’s declared policy of neutrality in the Middle East. “The Suez Canal ... as far as I know, has always been part of Egypt,” he said.