Letter from John J. Hearne to Frederick H. Boland (Dublin)
'Egypt and Korea'

I have the honour to report as follows:-¹

The Egyptian Ambassador His Excellency Abdul Rahim² repeated to me in conversation yesterday the reasons for Egypt's abstention from voting on the Security Council on the Korean affair. The main reasons for Egypt's abstention were, he said, the continued occupation of Egypt by British forces, the partition of Egypt, and the partition of Palestine.

In 1948, the Ambassador said, the question of the occupation of Egypt by British forces had been brought to the Security Council. But nothing was done. The Treaty of 1936 under which it is claimed by the British that their troops have the right to stay in Egypt was made under duress when the British were in control of the administration of the country. 'We did get them out of the internal government by the Treaty of 1936', the Ambassador said, 'but internationally we were still in their grip'.

I told Ambassador Abdul Rahim that I recalled the clause in the Treaty of 1936 which says, in effect, that the presence of British forces in Egypt should not be regarded as derogating in any way from the sovereignty of Egypt. That, I added, was the most naive clause ever put into an international instrument of that kind. It amused us greatly in Ireland at the time because we had been trying to get back the Irish ports held by the British on the ground that the occupation by British forces was a violation of our sovereignty.

The Ambassador of Egypt was emphatic that before Egypt could play her full part in international affairs and make her full contribution to the peaceful and harmonious development of the world the British would have to be got out of Alexandria and out of the so-call[ed] Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The British alone ruled the Sudan. Egypt had no real authority there.

The U.N. Assembly had decided upon the internationalisation of portion of Palestine, had decided that a line of demarcation be fixed between the opposing military forces, and had called for the return of the one million Arabs wandering homeless in Gaza, Transjordan, etc. But the Council had blocked the scheme. The result of the failure to repatriate the dispersed Arab population might be that the Middle East would crumble if the Russians marched into Iran. There had been a united Arab population friendly to the British and the Americans. Now you had a million hungry, homeless Arabs living as outlaws in scattered areas being poisoned by powerful Russian propaganda. If Russia struck in the Middle East she could conceivably - with the assistance of the outcast, angered Arabs - march to the Suez Canal in fourteen days. Thus Ambassador Abdul Rahim: 'All this partitioning of Nations and splitting up for so-called strategic purposes of coherent populations with clearly defined boundaries must stop.' Ambassador Abdul Rahim went on with great emphasis: 'It's an old Imperial game. Look at what happened in our part of the world after the war of 1914. Lebanon and Syria handed over to France, Iraq to Britain, Palestine mandated to the League'. That was the beginning, he said, in our time of all the wholesale subjection of historic peoples to a new international feudalism at the very moment when (as in the case of the Western Provinces of the Ottoman Empire) they had thrown off the yoke of their former masters. One hears it said today that the road back from Yalta will be long and hard. No one ever thinks of the road back from Versailles.

I asked the Ambassador what the Department of State thought of his appraisal of the situation in the Middle East. He threw up his hands as if in despair. 'They do not help,' he said.

I spoke of the partition of Ireland, our exclusion by the Veto of Russia from UNO, and our attitude to the Atlantic Pact. I said that in 1920 when all the partitioning was going on Ireland was partitioned also. The laceration had poisoned our national life disrupted our economy and paralysed our foreign policy. We went into the League hoping to fit into the new pattern of international society formed in the Covenant of the League. We were one of the numerous new States which made up the League of Nations. We had hacked our way alone out of the heart of a victorious British Empire while other old Nations had been liberated when European Empires were overthrown by the impact of a World War. We had entered the League as the guarantee of our sovereignty and with high hope of a great future for our people in association with the Nations of the League. We had saved the soul of Ireland alive. But the body of the Nation had, in the fearful ordeal of force, been smashed by the mailed fist of the tyrant and part of it was still held in his iron grasp. Ireland belongs to the Atlantic community. She is a co-founder of Western civilisation and has a deeper interest at stake in the preservation of that civilisation than many of the Nations of Western Europe. But the price our people would have to pay for membership of the Atlantic Pact would be the formal abandonment of their claim to rule the whole of the clearly defined national territory of the historic Irish Nation. They would be binding themselves (under Article 3) to the permanent partition of the country.

Ambassador Abdul Rahim nodded agreement as I went on. He was struck by the similarity of the reasons for Ireland's enforced attitude to the Pact and Egypt's enforced attitude to the policy of the Security Council on Korea.