THE TABLET August 10th, 1957. VOL. 210, No. 6116

TH E TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaeet

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

AUGUST 10th, 1957

NINEPENCE

Protecting the Citizen : Appeals Against Officials

The Vocation of a Doctor ; By G. P. Dwyer, Bishop-elect of Leeds Experience of Reunion ; Mar Athanasios Comes to Town. By S. G. A Lufi

R. R. Stokes: An Appreciation

Critics' Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

HELPING A SULTAN

'T 'H E British operations in the territories of the Sultan of *• Muscat and Oman are being undertaken, Mr. Selwyn Lloyd has told us, on the Sultan’s behalf. We have not been told much else about them, and meanwhile the Arab League, seeking to rouse world opinion against Britain, and appealing to the United Nations, the United States and Russia, makes no mention of the Sultan, and only denounces British Imperialism. It seeks help for the Imam of Oman as though he were an independent ruler. There are grounds for feeling uneasy about anything that Mr. Selwyn Lloyd does in the Middle East, and it must handicap us in putting our case that the Foreign Secretary is the man of last autumn, who still maintains that he acted very sensibly then. The condition of any help to the Sultan should obviously have been that he came forward and avowed it, and stated his case to the Arab world to which he belongs. The particular kind of propaganda being employed against us all over the Middle East could then not have taken the form it has.

Meanwhile, the Malayan Princes have solmenly renounced their treaties with Britain, and prepared for independence at the end of the month, having elected one of themselves to be what the Anglo-Saxons would have called a Bretwalda or overlord, for a limited term of five years. Something very parallel is likely to happen in the Persian Gulf, which, like Malaya, was in the orbit of the Indian Army when these protective treaties with Britain were made.

There is a quite unexplained disparity between the very heavy weather the War Office and the Air Ministry are making of the operations, and the apparently small scale of the rebellion against the Sultan, spoken of as a matter of hundreds rather than thousands of rebels. The operations are announced as British, not as the Sultan’s, which they should be. We trust the legal position between the Sultan and the Imam precludes the United Nations from taking cognizance of the affair, and that members of the Afro-Asian bloc, Mr. Nehru not least, have strong reasons for retaining the conception that these are internal affairs, where the dissentient has no recourse to an international tribunal. But the more the British troops are kept in the forefront and the Sultan in the background, the more international the whole business is going to look. The Daily Mail, not generally a critic of the Government in these activities, characterises the handling of this one as “ evasion, suppression, contradiction and confusion,” something dragging on for weeks which should either have been settled in a few days or muchmore fully explained and defended. When Sir Winston Churchill spoke at the Guildhall last week to members of the American Bar, he had pertinent things to say about the Assembly of the United Nations, to which the deadlock in the Security Council has given an importance never foreseen or intended by those who drafted the Charter. He mentioned the strong bias that is found in the Afro-Asian bloc, of twenty-nine countries, against Britain and France, and their relative indifference to the active imperialism of the Soviet Union as it is being manifested today over the peoples of Eastern Europe. All this was much to the point, and yet no one can be surprised that the imagination of Asians and Africans is dominated as it is by the great European Powers, whose predominance and rule they have known for a long time, so that they remain fully conscious of it in the first flush of an independence about which they are not yet altogether sure. While it is reasonable to exhort them to understand that when the Assembly acts in a judicial capacity its members must not do so for unworthy reasons like emotional enmity or mutual bargaining, we must recognise that this exhortation, coming from ourselves, is not likely to make very much impression. What will make an impression is the policy we pursue from now onwards towards these peoples, the proofs we give that we genuinely accept and respect their new - found juridical status as sovereign countries. They have all of them the strongest interest in building up the authority of the United Nations as an effective protection, for none of them command the revenues or the armed forces which can leave them indifferent to dangers to their States, either from attack from without or subversion and fragmentation from within.

The British Government is rapidly showing itself more prepared to admit in public that Cyprus is much less important than it was thought to be when the Canal Zone was abandoned three years ago. Then Cyprus remained the only British base able to provide fighter cover for that reoccupation of the Canal Zone which was then thought a serious possibility. But is not so thought of any longer. The operation in Oman cannot need Cyprus, and it is to be hoped that we shall not engage in any more extensive single-handed or Anglo-French operations in the Middle East, where the only contingencies which need to be envisaged are those in which we would be helping an Arab Power that asked for