MIDDLE EAST: A Page Is Turned

At 11 o'clock one morning last week, perhaps the best news from the Middle East in years issued from the ornate cabinet room in Cairo's presidency: Egypt and Britain had reached an amicable solution of their half-century-old dispute over the Sudan. By its terms, Britain will quit the million-square-mile area (one-third the size of the U.S.), and allow the 8,000,000 Sudanese to decide their own political future. "A new page has been turned in the relations between Egypt and the United Kingdom," cried Egypt's Strongman Mohammed Naguib, "a page that restores confidence and augurs well." "A new era of friendship," agreed Britain's Ambassador Sir Ralph Stevenson.

"Mabrûk, Mabrûk!" (congratulations), murmured Stevenson and Naguib to each other as they signed the blue-paged agreement. Naguib, his face a picture of glee (see cut), held aloft the fountain pen and said: "I will send it to the museum." Newsmen and photographers hugged and bussed him; guards, overcome with emotion, bent to kiss his hand, were told sharply: "Give me a strong handshake. That would be better." From Washington came a strong handshake: "This Government is highly gratified."

Union Jack & Crescent. Half a century ago a cocky and flamboyant young British journalist named Winston Churchill wrote: "The Sudan is naturally and geographically an integral part of Egypt." The Egyptians thought so too.

Greedy for gold, slaves and ivory, Egypt's "liberator," Mohammed Ali, conquered the Sudan in 1820 and began 60 years of maladministration and slaving. (To this day, the Egyptian gutter name for Sudanese is "Abid," which means the slaves.) In 1882, rotting Egypt burst apart; the British moved into Egypt proper, and a religious fakir, calling himself El Mahdi (The Messiah), took the Sudan. Famed General "Chinese" Gordon, an Englishman employed by the Egyptians, tried a holding operation in Khartoum, but died on the steps of his headquarters, a human pincushion for dervish spears.

Thirteen years later, in 1898, General Horatio Kitchener avenged Gordon. He led a combined Anglo-Egyptian force of 25,000 (one of whom was Subaltern Winston Churchill) up the Nile, shattered 40,000 dervishes and Fuzzy-Wuzzies at Omdurman, razed the Mahdi's tomb and regained the Sudan. But for whom?

The British raised the Union Jack and Egypt's Crescent side by side over Khartoum, and proclaimed a weird device for joint British-Egyptian government called the Condominium. It was a formality only; the British ruled, the Egyptians did little more than pay some of the bills. In 1924 the British threw the remaining troops of their "copartner" out of the Sudan; 16 months ago, the Egyptians got equally fed up. They denounced the Condominium and proclaimed Egypt's sovereignty over the Sudan; the nationalists' outcry for the Sudan moved from Cairo's streets into the world's chancelleries.