EGYPT: Organized Chorus

In the spacious Celebration Hall of Cairo University last week 500 delegates from more than 40 countries rallied under a huge banner showing two hands, one light and one dark, clasped around a torch that lit up the outlines of Asia and Africa. A milling throng of students waved a banner that read DOWN WITH THE EISENHOWER DOCTRINE; from the gallery, schoolgirls shouted: "No bases—no pacts —no H-bomb!"

Opening the proceedings, Brigadier Anwar el Sadat, Deputy Speaker of the Egyptian National Assembly, rejoiced at prolix length in the new freedom of lands "where once Western wild beasts roamed." Getting down to the real business of the meeting, an Indian delegate attacked the NATO summit meeting as "a clear indication of the design of the imperialist powers to interfere in Afro-Asian affairs." Briskly following up that lead, Japan's Professor Kaoru Yasui warned that the aim of Britain and the U.S. was "to explode atom and hydrogen bombs over the heads of the colored race."

The official title of this week-long hymn of hatred for the West was the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Conference. Its delegates, sadly enough, were in many cases people of substance and standing in their native lands. The Indian delegation was led by bulky, 71-year-old Mrs. Rameshwari Nehru, a respected social worker and cousin-in-law to India's Prime Minister. The 45-man Japanese contingent was headed by Tokutaro Kitamura, a prominent banker and Liberal-Democratic member of Japan's Diet. Among the delegates from the Sudan was Foreign Minister Mohammed Ahmed Mahgoub.

No Time for Turkomans. The conference's origins lay not in Cairo but in India, where 2½ years ago a pro-Communist Ihdian M.P. named Anup Singh organized the "Asian Solidarity Committee" to influence the first Afro-Asian conference at Bandung (TIME, May 2, 1955). Last year Singh approached Nasser, suggested a conference in Cairo as a suitable sequel to Bandung. It was a play on words. The delegates to the Bandung conference had been official representatives of their nations, many of them heads of their governments. The delegates to the Cairo conference officially represented nobody but themselves. Unofficially, the moving spirits among them represented world Communism and its sympathizers.

Singh & Co. had succeeded in excluding or scaring off irrepressibly anti-Communist Asians. The Philippines refused to send a delegation, no South Koreans were invited. Two Formosans who asked for admission as observers were turned down, as were two Turkoman refugees from the U.S.S.R. But all the Communist nations of Asia were represented in force. So, too, was the Soviet Union, which had dusted off for the occasion its claim to be as much an Asian as a European power.