EGYPT: King v. Country

“Won’t! Won’t!” was in effect petulant King Fuad’s reply when Prime Minister Mustapha Nahas Pasha recently asked him to sign a bill duly passed by Parliament. In defying his Prime Minister, the King (a British puppet) was defying Egypt. So complete is the Egyptian Parliament’s confidence in Nahas Pasha that up to last week not more than three votes had ever been cast against his government.

The bill King Fuad refused to sign would have prevented a repetition of the 1928 coup d’état, when the puppet monarch dissolved Parliament and ruled with a puppet government headed by Mohamed Mahmud Pasha (TIME, July 30, 1928). Defied, wrathful Nahas Pasha replied to his sovereign by resigning and then— against all precedent—marched back into Parliament and, although no longer Prime Minister, asked and received a tempestuous vote of confidence.

Four days later King Fuad, after consulting his British advisers, appointed one Ismail Sidky Pasha of the minute Ittihadist (pro-Palace) party to be Prime Minister. Everyone knew that this cabinet would fall the moment Sidky Pasha showed his nose in Parliament, but he did noi show it.

Instead the new Prime Minister hastily drafted and King Fuad signed a decree constituting a second coup, dissolving Parliament until next November, creating a dictatorship ad interim. The bill King Fuad had previously refused to sign would have made it a crime to govern Egypt thus by decree, would have rendered the new Prime Minister and members of his cabinet liable as criminals to crushing fines and life imprisonment. Last week though cowed into discretion by the imminence of British guns, Nahas Pasha embarked upon a bold, quasi-revolutionary course.

Marching en masse to Parliament House the wafd deputies and senators found the great iron gates locked. “Unlock them!” commanded the deputies’ president, a wafdist. “So sorry!” apologized the chief of the parliamentary police, “but the key is lost!”

“In Parliament’s name,” roared the president, “I order you to burst in the gates.” Oddly enough the order was obeyed. This appeared rather to disconcert the wafdists who trooped in for an uneventful session at which the royal decree dissolving Parliament was read amid dead silence.

Not until a few days later did real trouble begin. Some 500 deputies and senators met as a self-constituted National Assembly, took a solemn oath “to defend the Constitution and defend our liberties even if it means sacrificing our lives.”

Cried one deputy, “the people are ready to crush the biggest head in this country!” —presumably King Fuad’s. In a long and passionate oration ex-Prime Minister Nahas Pasha sounded unmistakably the note that Egypt now faces the supreme crisis: King v. Country. “The Constitution,” he cried, “can no longer be allowed to remain the plaything of those who wish to deprive Egypt of her liberty.”