Enemy on the Euphrates (25 page)

In London there was consternation, not only because all the laborious negotiations with the French over the preceding months had now, apparently, been a complete waste of time but also because of the prime minister’s casual reference in his letter to the secret deal with Clemenceau in December 1918 – an agreement of which the Foreign Office, and indeed, all the other government departments, were in complete ignorance. There was, however, one ray of light in that Lloyd George had now decided Curzon was right – there should be no oil deal until the matter of the mandates had been settled.

Although official negotiations with the French were now stalled, over the summer of 1919 elements within the British government, in particular the Admiralty and the War Office, continued to exert pressure for the restoration of the Long–Bérenger agreement, or its replacement with something very similar.

Throughout 1919 the army continued the geological surveys of Iraq which had commenced in March 1918, using the services of A.H. Noble, a geologist from the Shell subsidiary Anglo-Saxon Oil and another from the Geological Survey of India, E.H. Pascoe. At the conclusion of these surveys – which now encompassed areas of the Mosul vilayet which had been inaccessible before 1918 – Pascoe reported,

In the area under consideration and probably throughout Mesopotamia the mineral of unique and outstanding importance is petroleum … My
opinion, based on evidence collected over a fairly extended tour, is that the country will probably take a not unimportant place among the world’s sources of petroleum. It should rival the Persian fields and collectively outclass those of Burma.
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That the oilfields of Iraq might ‘rival the Persian fields’ was a truly dramatic conclusion – precisely the kind of result that the War Office had hoped for. On 12 November 1919 Churchill, now secretary of state for war, circulated to the cabinet a number of papers concerning the situation in Iraq. They included a statement from the general staff stressing the crucial strategic importance of Iraq as a link in a chain of contiguous British-controlled areas stretching from Egypt to India. They also emphasised the particular importance of Iraq’s oil potential. ‘The future power of the world is oil,’ the general staff proclaimed, adding that although the oilfields of Iraq were not yet ‘proved’, ‘the Mosul province and the banks of the mid-Euphrates promise to afford oil in great quantities.’ They concluded that a pipeline and railway from Iraq to the Mediterranean would assure the supremacy of Britain as a naval power in that important theatre of operations and would lessen dependence on the Suez Canal.

So, as 1919 drew to a close, and with the British government increasingly resigned to handing Syria over to the French ‘lock stock and barrel’, negotiations on oil were resumed. By 21 December, the new British minister responsible for petroleum affairs, Sir Hamar Greenwood, was able to initial a further agreement with his counterpart Bérenger. In fact, this ‘Greenwood–Bérenger’ agreement differed only slightly from its predecessor. Professor Cadman, who, as before, carried out the actual negotiations, was now able to extract from the French a further concession: in addition to two oil pipelines running from Iraq and Persia to the Mediterranean coast through territory which could now, with some confidence, be assumed to come under French control, two British-owned railway lines from Iraq to the Mediterranean were also agreed. The agreement also fixed the French share of the TPC at 25 per cent, although this might fall if ‘native interests’ were to take up their putative share.

Finally, the broad outlines of the Iraq oil question were settled at a conference in London on 12 February 1920 at which Britain and France determined the conditions which were to be imposed on the Turkish government in Istanbul, where peace negotiations were about to resume. On the part of the British, negotiations were conducted as before, by Professor Cadman, while on the French side M. Philippe Berthelot, director general of foreign and commercial affairs at the French Foreign Ministry, was now his opposite number.

According to this Cadman–Berthelot agreement, ‘native interests’ could receive up to 20 per cent participation in any oilfield developments if they so wished. Pipeline facilities would be granted free of any charge when they passed through French-controlled Syria and Britain would offer the same facility to the company operating the Iraqi oilfields if it needed an outlet to the Persian Gulf. The question of what kind of commercial entity would develop the oilfields – private or public – was left open for the time being. Allowing for the possibility that the Iraqi oilfields would be developed ‘by Government action’, the French would be offered a 25 per cent share of net oil output for which they would pay at current market prices. On the other hand, if the development were carried out by a private company, France would receive a 25 per cent shareholding in that company (with the equivalent investment obligations) but the company in question would be under British control.
¹³
Finally, the British government agreed to support any arrangements which the French government might make with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to procure up to 25 per cent of its oil to be piped through French-mandated territory.

Two months later this final oil agreement was ratified at a conference of the Allies at San Remo on 24 April 1920. Lloyd George and Alexandre Millerand, the new French prime minister, confirmed with their signatures a memorandum of agreement on oil on the very same day that the conference assigned the mandates of Syria and Iraq to France and Britain, respectively.

THE DIVISION OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE’S EASTERN POSSESSIONS INTO THE BRITISH AND FRENCH MANDATES 1920

When General Maude and his men captured Baghdad on 11 March 1917 they had found a broken city – physically broken and broken in spirit. As the infantry of the 35th Brigade cautiously probed the outskirts of the capital they were confronted with a dismal sight – a vista of rotting corpses and animal bones, fires smouldering, filthy streets commandeered by hundreds of half-starved dogs and crumbling houses spilling rubbish into the streets and alleyways. In what remained of the commercial area Arab and Kurdish looters were at work.

Starvation, cholera and the casual brutality of a retreating Turkish army had afflicted all sectors of the city. So when the British finally arrived there was relief, if not actual jubilation, that the misery of the previous three years had ended. Almost immediately the British set to work on a major programme of restoration and development. A modern boat bridge across the Tigris was constructed. New streets both parallel and perpendicular to the major thoroughfare made by the Turks were built. Other streets were widened and a new system of mapping the city by quarters was devised so that for the first time every house and street had a unique address posted in English and Arabic. Work began on expanding the city’s flood protection system and a power station was constructed. The police force was reorganised and the old civil prisons were transformed.

Yet soon, much of this investment and restoration appeared to the citizens of Baghdad as a strong indication that the British were here to stay: these improvements began to be perceived as being not really for
their
benefit; on the contrary, it began to seem that the British were
remodelling Baghdad as a
British
city for
British
occupiers. After the armistice these fears increased, as did a growing sense of grievance against the new masters. In particular the requisitioning of private houses by the military – which most Baghdadis imagined would cease at the end of the war – continued and actually intensified, in spite of the fact that the judicial secretary, Edgar Bonham Carter, pointed out that it ‘will obviously be a very unpopular step’.
¹

Soon the people of Baghdad began to experience other ‘unpopular steps’. With postwar retrenchment in Britain, some investment projects were abandoned; employment of Arabs in government departments was reduced; the outcry for more schools was unmet (with one exception, provided by a group of inhabitants themselves); outside the city military roads and camps blocked canals and damaged vegetable and fruit gardens; some new irrigation works cured neither drought nor floods; price inflation was severe and the insistence on full tax revenue collection on every garden and crop was galling alike to rich and poor. So by early 1920 large sections of the capital city’s population had become hostile to the continued British presence.

Meanwhile, a despondent Emir Faysal returned to Syria from the Peace Conference in Paris, where, although supported by Lawrence, he had been unsuccessful in seeking guarantees for an independent Syrian state. On his arrival in Damascus he was faced with accusations that in his attempt to head off an occupation by the French he had compromised far too much with them. Wilder currents of nationalist opinion now flowed through the Syrian capital. Lawlessness and disorder were increasing. There were attacks by Arab Muslim bands on Christian Arab villages and similar raids on some Jewish settlements in northern Palestine. Faysal had to regain the initiative and he did so by resolutely restating his complete commitment to the cause of Arab independence throughout the whole of the Middle East. On 22 January 1920, in a speech delivered at al-Nadi al-‘Arabi (The Arab Association) in Damascus, to a great gathering of notables, nationalists and army officers, he declared his allegiance to the supreme aim of Arab independence – not only of Syria but of all the Arab lands.

Then, on 8 March, a ‘General Syrian Congress’ was convened in Damascus and declared Faysal king of ‘a United Kingdom of Syria’, including both the Lebanon and Palestine. The flag of the new kingdom was unfurled – a black, green and white horizontal tricolour with a red chevron – and the air filled with the din of hundreds of jubilant rifle salvoes.

Shortly afterwards an equally significant announcement was made: the ‘complete independence of Iraq’ under the sovereignty of Faysal’s elder brother, Emir ‘Abdallah. This decision, it was reported, had been taken by an ‘Iraqi Congress’ meeting in Damascus and working in cooperation with the General Syrian Congress.
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This ‘Iraqi Congress’ was composed largely of the small group of former Ottoman army officers who had deserted to the British during the war and fought alongside the Emir Faysal’s Bedouin. By now they had formed a new branch of al-‘Ahd, known as al-‘Ahd al-‘Iraqi, and its membership included two individuals who would come to play an important role in the future politics of their homeland – Colonel Ja‘far al-‘Askari and his brother-in-law Lieutenant Nuri al-Sa’id.

One such former Ottoman officer was, however, notably missing from this event – Lieutenant Muhammad Sharif al-Faruqi. He had played no part in the final defeat of the Turks in Palestine and Syria and in the meantime had lost the support of Sharif Husayn and the latter’s British backers in Cairo. However, he had somehow managed to ingratiate himself with Husayn’s youngest son, Emir Zayd, and for a time enjoyed the position of ‘senior staff officer’ in Zayd’s small private army based in Syria.
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However, sometime in 1919 he had fallen ill. Zayd arranged for him to be sent to Paris (at British expense) at a time when the Hashemites could still siphon off a good deal of British gold for their own – or their friends’ – personal expenses. After his treatment and recovery, in early 1920 Faruqi travelled to London, apparently under the impression that the emir would finance his stay there in return for some unspecified diplomatic activity. But the money never arrived and Faruqi was compelled to turn to the British Foreign Office to pay off the debts he had meanwhile incurred in England. He also asked the
Foreign Office to send him back to Cairo. Presumably glad to be rid of him, the Foreign Office agreed but it seems that Cairo now had little to offer him and he soon began to plan his return to British-controlled Iraq. It would be a fateful decision.

Meanwhile, Emir ‘Abdallah was with his father in Mecca. Precisely what he thought about his ‘election’ as Emir of Iraq is unknown. Since his initial meetings with Kitchener and Storrs in 1914 he had been an ally – albeit not a particularly active one – of the British. By the time his memoirs were published in 1950 he was King of Transjordan – one of Britain’s most loyal allies in the Middle East – and perhaps understandably, in those memoirs there is absolutely no mention of these events. On the other hand there is also no public record of his renunciation of the Iraqi Congress’s offer, and with the British seemingly acquiescing in the ‘coronation’ of his younger brother in Syria, ‘Abdallah may have been quietly pleased by this unexpected turn of events.

One might also wonder to what extent public opinion in Iraq favoured one of the Hashemites – hitherto anathematised by many as pro-British traitors – as their new ruler. But the currents of political opinion in Iraq had now become exceptionally fluid; bygones could soon be bygones in this turbulent flow of new political ideas, and a heady mixture of these often incongruent and inconsistent anticolonial sentiments was now swirling around the country – some of them emanating from Damascus, some from Mustafa Kemal’s Turkish nationalist power base in Ankara, others from Bolshevik agents in Persia and yet others from the Shi‘i cities invoking a return to an Islamic state. Given the ideological heterogeneity of this anti-colonial movement, wide sections of Iraqi public opinion, both Sunni and Shi‘i, had begun to gravitate towards the one political programme that offered some degree of coherence and the possibility of practical implementation – an independent Arab kingdom under the leadership of Sharif Husayn’s second son – but with the important proviso that the king would be guided by an elected assembly.