EGYPT: Aid to Britain

The Libyan desert was loud with the clatter of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Panzers moving eastward.

Egypt’s attitude toward the war had become crucial. Egypt’s Premier Mustafa El Nahas Pasha had pledged himself to the fantastic task of keeping Egypt neutral and yet supporting Britain’s war effort. Last week, as the pressures of war made Egyptian “neutrality” more & more precarious, he supported Britain by jailing perhaps the best Egyptian friend of the Axis, onetime Premier Aly Maher Pasha, “for reasons relating to the safety and security of the State.”

Jet-haired, twinkling, courteous Aly Maher Pasha was Premier of Egypt when World War II began. Behind him was a vigorous record as a lawyer, administrator and nationalist politico. Aly Maher Pasha had also found time to indulge a passion for swimming and handsome daughters of Egypt. But when Italy entered the war, Britain found him unsympathetic to the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty calling for Egyptian cooperation with the British Army, and King Farouk accepted Aly Maher Pasha’s resignation.

When General Sir Archibald P. Wavell captured Bardia, Italian officers were found to have translations of the British plans for Egypt’s defense. Among the few possessors of those plans had been Aly Maher Pasha. Last February Egyptian students celebrated the British retreats in Libya shouting “Long Live Rommel!” and “Long Live Aly Maher Pasha!”

When Mustafa El Nahas Pasha became Premier in February, he asked Aly Maher Pasha to keep to his estate, “The Green Castle,” near Alexandria. Aly Maher Pasha soon turned up in the Parliament lobbies in Cairo. Inside Parliament he was immune from arrest, but when he left the building one day last week the police nabbed him.