The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Page 49
The penny packets of men in southern Russia were pulled out during 1920, which was just as well considering the weight of the Bolshevik offensive launched in the spring of that year. There was much grumbling about the damage inflicted on local British prestige, and there was more when the cabinet decided to evacuate units stationed in northern Persia in May 1920.6 Curzon predicted, among other catastrophes, a Bolshevik revolution in Persia, echoing the view of the local commander, Major-General Sir Edmund Ironside, who believed the country was ‘ripe for Communism’ thanks to a ‘thoroughly effete and rotten upper class’.7
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In fact, Russia was in no position to interfere actively in the scramble for the Middle East, although the Communist government repeatedly denounced British imperialism and, in 1921, signed treaties of friendship with the nationalist governments of Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan. Resistance to British ambitions came from inside rather than outside the Middle East, and it was supported by a vocal and influential lobby in Britain. This group argued that the region could not be treated as Africa had been in the last century, as a backward area which could be partitioned and conquered without reference to the wishes of its people. Local nationalism, awakened during the last days of Ottoman rule, had become too strong a force to be pushed aside. Indeed, its present vigour and intensity were the direct result of wartime encouragement by Britain.
The trouble was that fostering Arab nationalism had been only one strand of Britain’s wartime policy in the Middle East. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 partitioned the area into future British and French spheres of influence, and the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 pledged a future Jewish ‘homeland’ in the British zone of Palestine. Matters were further confused as details of President Wilson’s fourteen points began to circulate in the Middle East, making nonsense of the Sykes-Picot arrangements, which, incidentally, were well known to Arabs. It appeared that Britain and France might abandon their imperial ambitions, an impression which was confirmed in the closing days of the war when both governments announced their intention to apply Wilsonian principles to the former Ottoman empire. It was in this knowledge that the Kurds welcomed British and Indian soldiers as liberators in the autumn of 1918. Their leader Sheik Mahmud al-Barzani kept a copy of the Anglo-French pledge in an amulet as a talisman which would transform his people into a nation. Within six months he was busy setting up a Kurdish state in northern Iraq.
An independent Kurdistan, or for that matter self-government for anyone inside Iraq, was wormwood to Colonel Sir Arnold Wilson, the country’s civil administrator. A former army boxing champion, who later in life seriously flirted with fascism, Wilson wanted Iraq as a dependency of India. It would be populated by Indian immigrants, of whom ‘the stalwart Mohammedan cultivator’ was the most desirable.8 In May 1919, Sir Arnold ordered the destruction of the embryonic Kurdish state by a column of British and Indian troops. When Kurdish guerrillas proved too hard to catch, RAF officers asked Churchill, then Secretary for War, for poison gas. He agreed, but it was not used.9 In less than a year, Britain had shed the mask of benevolence to reveal the snarling frown of the conqueror.
The metamorphosis had begun in December 1918 during private horse-trading between the French President Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Britain took northern Iraq with its oil deposits, France got a quarter share in the company set up to exploit them, and a confirmation of its rights in Syria and the Lebanon. During the winter of 1918-19 French troops began to disembark at Beirut.
Disheartened Arab nationalists pinned their hopes on the Versailles peace conference and the conscience of President Wilson. Neither yielded much; the President prevaricated and, when confronted with Egyptian nationalists, told them that their dispute with Britain was none of his business. Syria and the Lebanon were to be given to France under a League of Nations mandate, and Palestine and Iraq to Britain. Mandate was a new word, which some thought a euphemism for old-style colonialism. The relationship between the mandatory power and its territory was the same as that of a guardian to a ward with the League of Nations Mandate Commission acting as a board of trustees. Their duty was to see that the nation which held the mandate governed in the best interests of its subjects, protected them from exploitation, and accelerated their moral, physical and political development. These arrangements were settled in May 1920 by the great powers at San Remo without heeding Middle Eastern opinion.
Arab nationalists put little faith in this brand of enlightened imperialism which reduced them to minors who could not survive without a substitute parent. The Emir Faisal, the Hashemite prince who had fought alongside the Allies in the mistaken belief that his reward would be the kingdom of Syria, returned there early in 1920 and proclaimed its independence. His gesture excited Arab nationalists in Jerusalem, some of whom were veterans of Faisal’s army. There were riots in the city by Arabs who denounced the Balfour Declaration and attacked Jews and their property.10
What was, so to speak, a second Arab revolt spread to Iraq, following hard on the news of what had been agreed at San Remo. Throughout Ramadan (May) Shia and Sunni religious leaders joined forces with Hashemite agents and nationalists in a sequence of public protests against the continuation of British rule.11 Riots turned into a revolution early in June, when a British political officer arrested a prominent nationalist sheik for alleged tax evasion. Wilson’s fragile régime disintegrated swiftly, and a government strapped for cash and short of soldiers found itself dragged into a war.
Reinforcements were found after considerable exertion; in India, recently discharged Sikh soldiers were tempted back by 100-rupee (£16) bonuses.12 By September the local commander, General Sir Aylmer Haldane, was beginning to get the upper hand, although he was still desperate enough to clamour for large supplies of poison gas.13 It was not needed for, as he later admitted, air power had given his forces the edge whenever the going got tough. At the end of the year order had been restored by methods which did not bear too close examination. Viscount Peel, Under-Secretary at the War Ministry, was glad that the ‘sentimentalists’ at home had been so distracted by the brutalities of the Black and Tans in Ireland that they failed to notice what was happening in Iraq.14
The public, the press and the Commons did, however, notice that the government’s policies in the Middle East were achieving nothing more than a colossal waste of money and lives. The Indian-style administration of Colonel Wilson was in ruins, and it was obvious that Iraqis did not want to be ruled by district officers who generally behaved like arrogant public-school prefects. It proved possible, largely through the employment of superior technology, for the French to crush the Arabs in Syria and the British to do likewise in Jerusalem and Iraq, but having done so, both powers faced an uphill struggle holding down their mandates. Moreover, it was impossible to square threats of using poison gas against tribesmen with the essentially humane and benevolent ideals behind the mandate system. The only answer lay in reaching an accommodation with the Arabs which would balance Britain’s strategic needs with the aspirations of local nationalists.
This had been the line taken by T.E. Lawrence during 1920, when he had undertaken a press campaign in favour of Arab self-determination within the empire as an alternative to coercion. Might not the Iraqis become the first ‘brown dominion’? he asked. The £40 million bill for the Iraq war convinced the government that he was right. Early in 1921 he joined the staff of Churchill, who had just taken over the Colonial Office with orders to negotiate a settlement in the mandates in which the security costs were kept to a minimum. The result was the Cairo Conference of March 1921. The wartime alliance between Britain and the Hashemite family was renewed; Faisal was given the throne of Iraq and his brother, Abdullah, that of a kingdom then known as Transjordan (Jordan) which consisted, as its name suggests, of land on the eastern bank of the River Jordan. Both kings would be advised by British officials to ensure that the terms of the mandate would be adhered to. Palestine would be the responsibility of the Colonial Office with
internal security in the hands of a gendarmerie recruited from the now redundant Black and Tans and Auxis.
The peace of Iraq and Jordan would be kept by a novel system known as ‘air control’, which had the enthusiastic backing of Churchill, Lawrence, Leo Amery and Air-Marshal Lord Trenchard, the Chief of Air Staff. Aircraft had been used in pacification operations in the Sudan, on the North-West Frontier, and most recently in Somaliland. The final defeat of the Mad Mullah in 1920 had been achieved after the bombing of his strongholds in what the Colonial Office regarded as a model campaign. Its total cost was £70,000, which made it the cheapest imperial war ever, and did much to convince waverers that air control was the thriftiest way to police the empire’s more unruly subjects.
The kings of Jordan and Iraq had at their disposal RAF bombers, supported by armoured car squadrons and detachments of locally-recruited levies under British officers. Any outbreak of truculence was handled by bombers, which first dropped warning leaflets, and then bombed property or livestock. The leaflets dropped on the Mullah’s villages had been vivid, robust pronouncements (‘the arm of the government is long … its officers fly like birds’), but afterwards their tone became almost apologetic. In December 1938, the inhabitants of Arsal Kot on the North-West Frontier were given nanny-like instructions as to what to do before the bombers appeared:
You should … remove all persons to a place of safety outside the danger area and keep away until further notice is given to you. Government do not wish that your women and children should be harmed.… You are also warned that it is most dangerous to handle unexploded bombs.15
This last piece of advice often went unheeded; unexploded bombs were sometimes carried to military roads, placed in culverts and surrounded with brushwood, which was then ignited! In Iraq, delayed-action fuses were placed on bombs during operations in 1930–32 to prevent villagers creeping back to their houses under cover of darkness. During this campaign, leaflets were augmented by a loud-speaker system set up in a transport aircraft from which warnings were bellowed, a sensible measure in a country where less than one in ten of the population could read.16
Air control saved cash, but it generated a bitter debate between those who represented it as an efficient method of imposing order in wild and inaccessible districts, and those who represented it as a harsh and impersonal astringent. Champions of air control stressed its quickness. Whereas in the past a considerable time had elapsed between an act of defiance and its punishment, the chastising arm now moved swiftly. Every effort was made to prevent civilian deaths, and it was repeatedly pointed out that old-style punitive expeditions had always burned crops, killed livestock and demolished houses. Opponents of air control, often soldiers whose pride was hurt by being upstaged by the technicians of an upstart service, protested that it was inhumane. Colonel Francis Humphrys, an experienced North-West Frontier political officer who had also served as a pilot during the war, feared that air control would incense rather than pacify its victims:
Much needless cruelty is necessarily inflicted, which in many cases will not cower the tribesmen, but implant in them undying hatred and a desire for revenge. The policy weakens the tribesman’s faith in British fair play.17
There was certainly no sign of ‘fair play’, whatever that may have meant in terms of punishing tribesmen, during the early application of air control in Iraq. Within a few months of the Cairo Conference, Churchill was horrified by a report that described an air raid in which men, women and children had been machine-gunned as they fled from a village.18 Care was taken to ensure that the public never learned about this incident, and it was understandably excluded from a lecture given by Air-Marshal Sir John Salmon in which he explained what had been achieved by air control in Iraq between 1921 and 1925. His talk ended on an optimistic note: thanks to air control ‘a heterogeneous collection of wild and inarticulate tribes has emerged in an ordered system of representative government by the vote.’19
As well as bringing the semblance of political stability to Iraq, Salmon’s aircraft had been decisive in the repulse of an admittedly half-hearted Turkish invasion of Mosul province during the winter of 1922–3. This attack was an uncomfortable reminder that Lloyd George’s government had failed to neuter Turkey. During 1920 and 1921 every encouragement had been given to the French, Italians and Greeks to stake claims to parts of Asia Minor, but each power had been evicted by the armies of Atatürk. It was Britain’s turn in the autumn of 1922, when the Turkish nationalist leader turned his attention to the British forces on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles. Despite some ministerial misgivings, the cabinet put on a bold face and announced its intention to remain in Turkey. Appeals for help from the dominions were rejected by all save New Zealand. At home, arguments about prestige cut no ice with the public or the press. The Conservatives deserted the coalition, Lloyd George fell from power, and, after a nail-biting confrontation at Chanak, British forces left Turkish soil.
The short era of bluster in the Middle East was over. Public disquiet, a scarcity of cash and a lack of fighting men had driven Britain to abandon belligerence in favour of compromise. From 1922 onwards, British power in the region rested on paper promises. An accord with Turkey was reached at Lausanne in February 1923, which gave Mosul to Iraq, although it was feared that Atatürk might break his word. In 1925 exigency plans were drawn up by which, if Mosul was invaded again, a seaborne force with aircraft-carriers would attack the Straits.20 What was at stake in the dispute over Mosul was not Iraq’s integrity, but oil.
Middle Eastern reserves of oil were not yet as great a factor in international affairs as they became after 1945. During the 1920s the United States and Mexico produced over four-fifths of the world’s oil, although the greater part was for American domestic consumption. The demand was rising and even before 1914 preliminary exploration work was underway in Persia and Iraq. The Persian government had granted the Anglo-Persian Oil Company a concession covering half a million square miles which expired in 1961. Drilling began in 1909 and, three years after, work started on a massive refinery on Abadan Island. Output rose from 7.5 million barrels in 1919 to 57 million in 1934. In peacetime, the safety of the wells and the uninterrupted flow of the oil depended on the Persian government’s goodwill and ability to maintain internal peace. Both were guaranteed by Reza Pahlevi, a former Cossack officer, who, with British approval, had managed a coup in 1920, and made himself Shah five years later. Supported by the army, Shah Reza was the ideal ‘strong man’ who would cooperate with foreign business interests. Iraq’s Kirkuk oilfields were opened in 1927 and run by the Turkish Oil Company, which was financed by British, French and American capital. Its security and that of the supply pipeline which stretched to the Palestinian port of Haifa depended upon the Iraqi government.
Iraq and its oil remained firmly within Britain’s unofficial empire. In 1930, Britain had relinquished its mandate and Iraq received what passed for independence. In fact, it remained a British satellite under the terms of an alliance signed the same year. Britain trained and equipped the Iraqi army, was promised extensive base and transport facilities in the event of war, and retained the RAF aerodrome and garrison at Habbaniya.
The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was, like its Egyptian equivalent signed six years later, a focus for nationalist resentment. The two agreements and the bases they guaranteed were reminders that Britain was still the paramount power in the Middle East and that, ultimately, even those states with theoretic independence would not be permitted to act in ways which might harm British interests. Britain had not had everything its own way: insurrections in Egypt in 1919 and across the Middle East a year later had forced its government to reach an accommodation with local nationalism. But the events of this period had destroyed much, if not all of the faith which enlightened and politically conscious Arabs had had in Britain. Edward Atiyah, a Lebanese Christian and Anglophile, who had been educated at the British school at Alexandria and then at Oxford, remembered the bitterness felt by those who had once bel
ieved in British honour, integrity and sense of justice:
The record of Anglo-French diplomacy during the War and immediately after it – the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, the decisions of the San Remo Conference had shocked even the most loyal among them, and the disillusion had deepened as a result of personal contact and direct experience of Mandatory rule.21
What had also shaken Atiyah’s admiration and respect for Britain was the crass behaviour of its representatives. He was dismayed by the aloofness of his British colleagues at Gordon College in Khartoum, where he was a teacher in the mid-1920s. When the governor-general visited the college, all the non-British staff were ordered to keep out of sight, a snub which deeply distressed Atiyah and converted him to a nationalism which had at its heart a loathing of Britain. Even so, he defended what Britain had achieved in the way of administrative reform and economic and educational regeneration, but he found it impossible to refute those Sudanese (they could equally well have been Egyptians or Arabs) who complained to him about the insults they had suffered from the British. ‘Your friends are hopeless,’ one claimed, ‘they will never get rid of their racial arrogance; there is no chance of our ever becoming friends with them. They say they are taking us into partnership, treating us as equals, but it is all words. At heart they remain rulers, fond of domination, resentful of our claims to equality in practice.’22