Secret Protocols

international | miscellaneous | other press Wednesday July 12, 2006 01:44 by Tommy McKearney - Daily Ireland

Daily Ireland
11/07/2006

When President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company in July 1956, the British, French and Israeli governments believed they had found the excuse to attack Egypt that they had long wanted.

Secret Protocols

When President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company in July 1956, the British, French and Israeli governments believed they had found the excuse to attack Egypt that they had long wanted.

However, by offering to pay investors the company’s traded share price, Mr Nasser had acted within internationally accepted standards.

Deprived of an overt reason for invasion, the imperialists had therefore to camouflage their actions. They met in the French town of Sèvres on 24 October 1956 and signed a secret protocol.

The deal struck was that Israel would attack Egypt and immediately thereafter the British and French would seize the Suez Canal zone, in order to separate the ‘warring factions’ as it were.

That the scheme failed ignominiously has been public knowledge for half a century but it is only in the past decade that concrete evidence of the secret protocol emerged. The British and French went to considerable lengths to ensure their ‘collusion’, as newspapers of the time called it, would never come to light. Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Eden ordered all copies of the agreement destroyed but for some reason, Israel kept one copy of the document, which surfaced ten years ago.

There was a time when British governments would not have felt obliged to resort to such subterfuge. Previous administrations would have sent gunboats to bombard the opposition into submission such as when its navy shelled Chinese cities in order to capture the opium trade for England.

In those days the British also dealt unceremoniously with colonial uprisings. Their usual practice was to send an expeditionary force to terrorise, punish and subdue the civilian population and then equip local pro-British elements to deal ruthlessly with any further resistance.

The post war world was less tolerant, though, of this old style imperialism and made the earlier type of uncomplicated response unsustainable. British foreign policy, therefore, became more circumspect and began employing secret, Sèvres style protocols. This was especially so in what its military described as counter insurgency operations.

There is, for example, no documented proof as yet of a protocol between British Intelligence and Ulster Loyalism, although time may yet reveal verification of what is an increasingly accepted fact.
Of course, London may have learned to cover its tracks better since Suez and leave fewer traces of covert activities.

Something Nuala O’Loan might think about when using British government records to assess situations relating to the Irish insurrection.