EGYPT: Down With Hoard

The Suez Canal today is a great convenience to the world’s shipping butbefore it was built in 1859, Britain’s great Lord Palmerston saw it as a potential menace to the British Empire. On the open seas Britain was supreme. The Suez Canal meant a shortcut waterway from Gibraltar to the Gulf of Aden* requiring, if Britain was to control it, immensely involved politics. It meant that Britain, if she could not block the building of the Suez Canal, must at least partly own and control it and must by hook or crook dominate Egypt, then a vassal state of the Turkish Sultans. Last week in Egypt, key to the Suez Canal. Britain’s historic policy of dominating the now officially styled “Independent Kingdom of Egypt” rose up to knock spots off any moral case Britain has against Italian Imperialism in Ethiopia.

Two years ago Britain’s puppet, Premier Nessim abolished Puppet King Fuad’s tyrannous Constitution of 1930 but he has failed to restore the slightly more liberal Constitution of 1923. There was only a little outward grumbling when Britain poured a vast arsenal of planes and troops into Egypt last month (TIME, Nov. 4). What happened last week was that the Egyptian Nationalists of the overwhelming majority Wafd* Party saw its chance to bargain with the British Empire for greater freedom.

On the eve of the British General Election fell last week Egypt’s so-called Independence Day, anniversary of the day in 1918 when “Egypt’s violent Gandhi,” the late great Zaghlul Pasha, demanded Egyptian independence at the British Residency in Cairo. Zaghlul’s successor is bulky, big-voiced Wafdist Chief Mustafa Nahas Pasha. He has been telling Premier Nessim, that even if the Premier is obliged to let the British fill Egypt with anti-Italian arms, he ought to demand in exchange concessions that will take Egypt a little nearer real independence. Last week the potent Wafd learned with fury that Britain will not let them have even such a slight concession as restoration of the Constitution of 1923. They learned this from none other than British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare. Said he in a London Guildhall speech: “Any revival of the 1923 Constitution is inadvisable since that Constitution is unworkable and the 1930 Constitution is universally unpopular.” At this the Wafd Executive Committee met last week and decided to stage mass riots.

Next morning, on Egypt’s ironic “Independence Day,” young men of Cairo went howling through the streets: “Down with Britain! Down with Hoare! Down with Premier Nessim Pasha! We want the 1923 Constitution!”

Truckloads of steel-helmeted Egyptian police went to meet them. A hail of stones swept the British Consulate, poured into the ranks of the advancing police armed with shields and riot guns. The students took up fence-palings and clubs. The police fired over the students’ heads, then into the mob, wounded 43.

The rioting spread to the nearby towns of Tanta, Beni Suef and next day to Giza, across the Nile from Cairo. There Egyptian police, with British Major Lees at their head, met Egypt’s young patriots at the great Abbas Bridge. Five times Major Lees shouted to them to go back, then a flying bottle knocked him down. The Briton rose to his knee, took out his pistol, killed one Egyptian, wounded three others. Street fighting then began in earnest. Dead at week’s end were eight Egyptians; wounded were more than 200 Egyptians and police.

Cried Wafd General Secretary Nahas Makram Ebeid: “Britain in her behavior toward Egypt makes Mussolini appear comparatively benevolent.”

*Last week the Suez Canal management announced that its gigantic suction dredgers had completed the job of deepening the 100-mi, long ditch through the shifting sand of the Sinai Desert from 33 to 34 ft., to oblige primarily big Australian freighters, incidentally the British Navy. *Wafd means “delegation.” The party takes its name from the delegation led by Zaghlul Pasha to Paris in 1919 to voice Egyptian Nationalist aspirations at the Peace Conference.