FUTURE OF THE SUDAN

Southland Times, Issue 19345, 10 September 1924, Page 5

FUTURE OF THE SUDAN

ANGLO-EGYPTIAN NEGOTIATIONS.

ZAGHLUL TO VISIT LONDON. (By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright.) (Australian and N.Z. Cable Association.) LONDON, September 8. Zaghlul Pasha has agreed to meet Mr Ramsay MacDonald, probably in London, at the end of September. Mr MacDonald has followed the traditional British policy of unwavering fidelity to the fair and honourable policy established by the great men to whom the Egyptian people owe all modern blessings. King Fuad’s Minister of War is quietly demobilising across the frontier the mutinous battalion which caused the clash with British troops at At bar a several weeks ago. Egyptian officers have tried and sentenced some of the rioters, while the disobedient cadets, who held an anti-British demonstration, and afterwards refused to surrender their arms, are in open arrest and will be tried by court-martial. The tribes everywhere are quiet, despite the Egyptian propaganda. Sir Ernest Budge points out that the Egyptians never conquered the Sudan. Their alleged conquests, since the year 3000 8.C., he says, were a repeated and interrupted series of raids for slaves and loot, which all Egyptians sought in the Sudan. “It is our duty to see that never again do the Egyptians seek them by their traditional methods,” says the Times, quoting the declaration of a Sudanese official that the handing over of the Sudanese to the Egyptians would amount to a re-establish-ment of slave-trade in its worst form, and make Britain responsible for actrocities as bad as any in history. The Sudanese would have no redress, and no means even of bringing their sufferings to the knowledge of the civilised world. They could neither read nor write, and would simply revert dumbly to the misery and silence from which we delivered them.