EGYPT: Back to Puppeteering

With the abruptness of a thunderbolt Egyptians found themselves one day last week without either a Constitution or a Parliament. Ever since fatty degeneration weakened the heart of King Fuad early this year and left him a prey to fainting fits, crisis has been in the air. Only last week did the veil of Egyptian censorship lift sufficiently to disclose as the “nigger” in Cairo’s woodpile His Excellency Maurice Peterson, Acting British High Commissioner.

On April 19, 1923 fat King Fuad signed a British-dictated Constitution which gave his country a joke status as “the Sovereign, Free and Independent Kingdom of Egypt.” For seven long years His Majesty played the role of British puppet with a certain grace, distracting himself with such harmless amusements as riding around & around the royal gardens at Alexandria on a white ass. All the while, however, he was scheming for a palace dictatorship. He got it on Oct. 22, 1930 when he put through and signed a new Constitution vesting crucial powers in the Crown.

Since then Britain has bided her time while King Fuad’s health weakened. Two months ago quiet Mr. Peterson had a talk with servile Premier Abdel Fattah Yehia Pasha, creature of the palace dictatorship. According to a well-informed Cairo source, the Acting High Commissioner was able to adduce proofs of “enough monarchial scandals to make a modern Arabian Nights.” In the name of Righteousness and George V, Mr. Peterson pressed for a change. The Cabinet collapsed and gasping, heart-sick King Fuad was constrained to appoint as Premier grim-jawed Anglophile Tewfik Nessim Pasha, his personal enemy.

It was Nessim Pasha last week who forced King Fuad to abrogate the Constitution of 1930, thus automatically dissolving Parliament. Read a curt Cabinet communique: “It has not yet been decided whether Egypt will resume the Constitution of 1923 or promulgate a new one.” Nothing seemed certain except that Mr. Peterson had reduced ambitious King Fuad once again to abject dependence on the Government of His Britannic Majesty. Paradoxically the Wafd. Egypt’s vast and conglomerate popular party, seethed with satisfaction at the prospect of more liberty under fresh British puppeteering than the Wafd has enjoyed under palace dictatorship.