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EGYPT: Farouk Takes a Chance

3 minute read
TIME

King Farouk has never liked his demagogue Prime Minister, Nahas Pasha, has twice fired him from the premiership. Farouk’s father, old King Fuad I, felt the same way about Nahas. He also sacked the Wafdist leader twice, only to be forced to make him Prime Minister again. Today, Farouk would probably like to fire Nahas again. Nahas’ administration is corrupt and indolent, diverts attention from its own shortcomings by inflaming the mob against the British. Farouk does not love the British either,* but he realizes that Egypt’s security lies with the West. He is openly appalled by the foolish Wafdist flirtation with the Russians, and aware that the daily diet of riots has weakened all authority in Egypt.

Last week the King decided to take a royal hand in the squabble before it was too late. To his personal royal cabinet he named two men whose foreign policy runs directly counter to the Wafdists’. Into office as chief of the royal cabinet (which has no explicit powers, but advises the King) went Dr. Hafez Ann Pasha, Ambassador to Great Britain from 1936 to 1938 (and admiring author of The English in Their Homes), lately head of the Bank Misr, one of the largest financial houses in the Arab world. In as royal adviser on foreign affairs went Old Oxonian Abdel Fattah Amr Pasha (TIME, Dec. 24), who last month quit London with noticeable reluctance after serving there as Egypt’s Ambassador for the past seven years.

Publicly, the Wafd bowed to their monarch’s decision. Premier Nahas paid Afifi a congratulatory call, chatted for 40 minutes. Wafdist Foreign Minister Salah el Din, an anti-British firebrand, now in Rome, swallowed hard and welcomed the two appointments as “a natural choice.”

Privately, the Premier was far from cowed. Mobs of students appeared simultaneously in several cities; as if by magic, the streets of Cairo and Alexandria echoed to the same cries: “Down with the King!” and “Go to your mother in America, Farouk!” (Farouk’s 57-year-old mother, with whom he has quarreled, lives in Beverly Hills.) The students fired stones at the police, the police fired back buckshot ; at week’s end the government closed all universities and secondary schools.

King Farouk had courageously given the West another chance. He had indicated that a sensible offer would be well received by the Crown and its supporters, and in doing so he knowingly risked the mob’s fury. The next move was up to the West. The U.S. would have to take the lead; the British were disliked by the Egyptians and compromised by past performances. But the West would have to move quickly; else it might lose its best single friend in Egypt.

*He has never forgotten, never forgiven the British for training tank guns on his palace in 1942, to force him to make Nahas Pasha Premier. At the time (Rommel’s forces were threatening Alexandria), Nahas, curiously enough, was Britain’s friend, while the King’s nominee for Prime Minister was pro-Axis.

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