Turnabout

On July 1, a 716-ton freighter bound through the Red Sea on legitimate business for the port of Aqaba, Jordan, and proceeding in international waters, was stopped by a warning shot from a corvette. An armed party "from the corvette boarded the freighter, locked her crew below decks for 13 hours, looted the ship's stores and smashed its radio. The Foreign Secretary of the affronted nation sat on the story for ten days while he nervously checked and rechecked accounts of the incident. When the Foreign Secretary finally protested this violation of his nation's rights, the offending nation said arrogantly, through a spokesman: "There's too much fuss being made about the affair."

The story seemed to fit a familiar pattern: Was this not another case of a big, nasty, imperialist nation bullying a smaller, law-abiding country? As a matter of fact, the injured party was Great Britain and the arrogant bully was little Egypt.

Intolerable Tailtwister. Ever since her spanking defeat by Israel three years ago, Egypt, despite repeated protests, has stopped all vessels moving through the Suez Canal that might be going to Israeli ports. When the Labor government's Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, responding to a Tory question, revealed the details of this incident last week, Commons exploded. Coming on top of Britain's humiliation in Iran, it seemed a tailtwister that the British lion did not have to suffer in silence. Asked the Tories' second-in-command, Anthony Eden: "Is not the real lesson of all this that the more concessions we make to some of these Middle Eastern countries at this time, the more our national interests and the interests of peace will suffer?" Replied Morrison: "No, sir."

But the Admiralty dispatched four 1,710-ton destroyers from Malta to the Aqaba area. Said the Daily Express: "Britain's patience with Egyptian pretensions . . . wins her no credit among these backward peoples. Merely contempt." A London bus conductor fumed: "It's about time we shook our fist under their noses --those damned foreigners."

Threatening Hint. Egypt's Foreign Minister, meanwhile, hinted that, unless Britain removed her troops now guarding the Suez Canal and completely quit the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Cairo would denounce the mutual defense pact between Egypt and Britain, which still has five years to run.

In New York, Israel formally called on the U.N. Security Council to end Egypt's blockade of Israeli-bound ships passing through the Suez Canal. Israel charged that the blockade violated the Egyptian-Israeli armistice agreement, the Suez Canal convention and, by preventing Middle East oil from reaching the Haifa refinery (second in the Middle East only to Abadan), endangered Western Europe's oil supply.

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