BEHIND SOUDAN OUTBREAKS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 10 November 1924, Page 5

BEHIND SOUDAN OUTBREAKS.

—; f. \ MYSTERIOUS ANTI-BRITISH SOCIETY.

LONDON, Sep. 22. Fresh reports from the Soudan declare that a mysterious “White Flag League,” an Egyptian anti-British society, whose growing strength con-stitutes-'A grave menace both to the Soudan and Egypt, is behind the Soudan outbreaks. The league is supposed to .be a development ct. the “Masri” organisation, founded in 1921 by Sheik Mohammed Madi, a wealthy Soudanese who sought to use Masri to increase his personal powers in Egypt. The arrest, and imprisonment of Abdul Laitif. leader of the White Flags, brought the agitation to a head, and resulted in numerous violent demonstrations both in Egypt and the Soudan, and is#now followed by the continuous threat, openly and by letter, that pro-British Egyptians will be assassinated. Three explanations are offered as cause of the outbreak: First, that the Egyptian Government hoped to convince Britain of the powers Egypt held in the second, that the Zaghlulists engineered the plot with the view to convincing the nation that it is unsafe until Daghlul returns to Egypt: th'rd, that the plotters were Egyptian agents in collaboration with a section of the Soudanese, who were enamored with the slogan “the Soudan for the Soudanese.” The .Arabic population, however, insist that British control is the only saltation for the Soudan to prevent absolute anarchy. Behind all these is the desire of the Egyptian Government +o seize control of hundreds of thousands of rich cotton-growing lands, just becoming fertile through the erection of rostte irrigation dams on the Nile. At the present time quiet reigns, the orompfc nctio" of the British having -teenm-ertod the plotters, but potential dangers unremoved merely simmer ”nde>- the surface.