Gertrude Bell (51 page)

Believing that the First World War must be the war to end all wars, President Wilson also came determined to create a new forum where the nations could resolve their disputes by discussion, and even impose sanctions on a country showing aggressive intentions. He proposed the League of Nations, to which all independent countries would belong and through which their legal rights relative to other nations would be laid down. Whereas the Paris Peace Conference was meeting to resolve the terms of the treaties to be drawn up between the Allies and their enemies, the League of Nations would approve the boundaries of the new nations, arrange for them to choose their form of government, and, by the issue of mandates, appoint a supervising power over the weaker ones. The idea of an umbrella authority to govern the relationships between countries was ambitious almost beyond belief. There followed a year of work to establish the League of Nations' constitution and to assemble the member states into a body of representatives. Only then could the
League begin to examine the state of each of the new nations, and decide whether the country was ready to govern itself or whether a mandate should be imposed. It would also be the body that approved treaties designed to settle border disputes.

Meanwhile, border disputes continued to descend into outright conflict, weak governments continued to collapse into civil strife, and uncertainty about the future exacerbated incipient revolutionary tendencies. Turkey was refusing to sign a peace treaty with the Allies, and still fomenting insurrection among the people of its former colonies. Now too, Arabia had learnt of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which parcelled up the Middle East between Britain, France, and Russia. The news broke just as the Arabs thought they had won an independent future by backing Britain against the Turks. The end of the war brought the Franco-British Declaration on Iraq and Syria, drafted by the tireless Mark Sykes to prove to the United States that the Allies were carrying out President Wilson's intentions regarding self-determination for previously colonized peoples. The statement contained the promise that with British and French support “indigenous populations should exercise the right of self-determination regarding the form of national government under which they should live.”

But what did the indigenous peoples of Iraq really want? Shortly before leaving Baghdad, Gertrude had written a paper on behalf of A.T. entitled “Self-Determination in Mesopotamia,” largely prompted by Whitehall's demand for a consultation with Arab leaders. This seemingly disingenuous move, apparently ignoring the tangled issues involved, queried whether the population was in favour of a single Arab state, whether it should be headed by an Arab amir, and whether Iraqis had anyone in mind. A.T. had made a half-hearted and rather bad-tempered attempt to respond to the demand: and the answers, as both predicted, were ludicrously inconclusive and unrepresentative, succeeding only in provoking trouble and undermining the government.

The Intrusives had won the day by default. Self-determination was going to come about: America insisted on it, Churchill was intent on minimizing British financial commitments in the Middle East as elsewhere, and the will to expand empires had evaporated. A.T., on the other hand, thought that Iraq could only be run colonially, as India had been, and was outraged by the Franco-British Declaration. He asked Gertrude
to write a paper on the prospects for self-government, explaining the insuperable difficulties involved, for the imminent Conference in Paris. The key question in Gertrude's sensitive analysis of the current situation and its prospects was this: “If we wish to apply the valuable principle of self-determination to the Occupied Territories, how is this to be done?”

The paper sets out to demonstrate the problems so that, whatever policies might be decided upon in far-away capitals for the future of Iraq, they might have some basis in the reality on the ground. Beginning with the impossibility of establishing any pan-Arab government, she progressed to the impossibility of a democratic republic. With 90 per cent of the population innocent of any political views whatsoever, and most of them illiterate, there was practically nothing resembling an Arab national movement. The notion of self-determination aroused more bewilderment than interest. Every family and every tribe was fighting for its own interests in an essentially individualistic society. Gertrude was daily besieged by anxious Arabs coming to her office to demand an explanation of the Franco-British Declaration. Fears were growing that the British would now walk out, lawlessness and even civil war would erupt, and the Turks would return to wreak vengeance on those who had collaborated with the British.

With no sense of nationhood, no figurehead, and no understanding of democracy, how could a constitution be formed, or a leader found who could hold the country together in the name of the Arabs? Effectively there were only two families in Arabia from the ruling traditions, the Sauds and the Hashemites. Ibn Saud was already too powerful for the liking of the West, and his Wahabi puritanism had no foothold in Mesopotamia. Most Iraqis were ignorant of the Hashemites, who had no history east of the Hejaz. If the Peace Conference were to settle on a Hashemite, there would be a lot of groundwork to do.

Despite all the difficulties, Gertrude believed that the time had come. For Iraq, self-government would have to be a British decision, organized by the British, and supported by the British. The other members of the old Arab Bureau had been equally captivated by the Arabs, and by the civilization they had created and enjoyed before the five hundred years of Turkish misrule. The ambition to restore to them their ancient culture was heartfelt, but pragmatic too. There was no prospect of any
outside nation now having the will or the resources to colonize all or even parts of Arabia.

Lord Kitchener had written: “If the Arab Nation assist England in this war that has been forced on us . . . England will guarantee that no internal intervention takes place in Arabia and will give the Arabs every assistance against external forcing or aggression.” The promise had been made, and as far as Gertrude was concerned, it must be honoured. Suggestions of less worthy political agendas or imperialist intentions in the West roused her to a passionate and majestic anger:

I propose to assume . . . that the welfare and prosperity of Iraq is not incompatible with the welfare and prosperity of any other portion of the world. I assume therefore as an axiom that if, in disposing of the question of the future administration of Iraq, we allow ourselves to be influenced by any consideration whatsoever other than the well being of the country itself and its people we shall be guilty of a shameless act of deliberate dishonesty rendered the more heinous and contemptible by our reiterated declarations of disinterested solicitude for the peoples concerned.

Her protective fury was directed not only at the politicians, but at the military. Soon after their occupation of Baghdad in 1917, British troops had come into contact with the southernmost Kurdish tribes. These had risen in revolt against the impositions of the Turks, partly in response to the cynical dealings of the Young Turks, and partly because of a yearning for racial autonomy in an area that had historically been such a melting-pot of conflicting interests. There were two Kurdish tribes, the Hamawand around Sulaimaniyah on the mountainous Persian border north-east of Baghdad, and the nomadic Jaf, further north and distributed along the western side of the Diyalah river. There was a third Kurdish area concentrated around Kirkuk, roughly halfway between Sulaimaniyah and the Diyalah. These tribes had refused the Turkish demand to preach Jihad against the Allies. Indeed, the Hamawand had welcomed the British army, believing they would become the benevolent occupiers of the important city of Khanikin, south of Sulaimaniyah. The chief of Khanikin was one Mustafa Bajlan.

In describing the dreadful fate that befell Khanikin and the Kurdish tribes, Gertrude's anger is manifest. Also evident is the reason for her
contempt for the late commander-in-chief, General Maude. Cox had urged the importance of the army occupying Khanikin, even nominally, in order to maintain British interests and influence. Maude had refused to do so for lack of troops. Meanwhile, a regiment of Cossacks were drawing close to the city. The Russians were allies of the British and, coming with British consent, were not opposed by the Kurds. However, as they drew near, accounts of the excesses they had committed in other areas caused dismay and panic. They occupied Khanikin in April 1917, and almost immediately reports began to circulate that they were laying it waste, raping, and looting. Mustafa Bajlan, having retreated to Sulaimaniyah, begged that at the very least a British political officer might be sent to observe and deter the Russians, but General Maude had once again refused. In her
Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia
, Gertrude commented: “[Maude] did not see his way to comply fearing that friction with our allies might result from the inherent difference in our methods of treating the natives of the country.”

Their treatment at the hands of the Cossacks sent the Kurds fleeing back to Turkish occupation, bad as this had been. Mustafa Pasha, the chief of Khanikin, now came to Baghdad in person to report on the devastation there, which included the murder of both women and men and the stealing of herds and flocks. Cox went for the third time to the military command and asked them to reconsider their position. They replied that they “doubted the accuracy of the Khanikin reports” and refused to create complications between the Allies. They even referred Mustafa Pasha's complaint to the Russian commander, who—not surprisingly—responded that no British interference was needed or required. As soon as the Russians left, the Turks reoccupied Khanikin and took over the canal heads, blocking the flow of water south, where it was vital for crops. Not until December did the British beat the Turks out of the region. Gertrude wrote: “In no part of Mesopotamia had we encountered anything comparable to the misery which greeted us at Khanikin. The country harvested by the Russians had been sedulously gleaned by the Turks, who, when they retired, left it in the joint possession of starvation and disease.”

Hearing that there was aid to be had, the Kurds poured down the mountains and back into the town, starving and typhus-ridden, to die or recover in British camps and hospitals. The British army distributed its
surplus rations and paid in cash for what it took for itself, but Kurdish goodwill had evaporated. As the road to the north-east, the Persian road, was opened up, the deep hostility to the Allies aroused by the conduct of the Cossacks became evident. One village that constituted a continual threat to lines of communication was bombed by British planes. Meanwhile, revolution had overtaken the Russian army, which was no longer under control or fighting alongside the Allies.

The Kurdish tragedy was far from over. A meeting of chiefs and nobles was held at Sulaimaniyah and a provisional Kurdish government set up, but the necessary diversion of British troops from the principal city, Kirkuk, to open the Persian road, had allowed the Turks to reoccupy the territory once again. Fleeing refugees from every district became the objects of revenge, defenceless against any tribe or army that came across them. Gertrude wrote to Chirol in December 1917: “We have taken on Khanikin . . . The tribes coming down from the North bring quantities of Armenian girls with them—tattooed like Bedouin women; I've seen some of them in Baghdad. Oh, Domnul, the awfulness of it! The rivers of tears, the floods of human misery that these waifs represent.”

Mosul was finally occupied by the British in November 1918. Now once more there was an opportunity to pacify the country: but two years earlier the Sykes-Picot Agreement had decreed that the Mosul
vilayet
was to be in the French “sphere of influence.” After all they had endured, the Kurds were in a ferment. They did not know, and were not told for another year, who would be granting—or denying—them racial autonomy, or where their borders were to be. Gertrude fumed. Lonely political officers, the unsung heroes of the Mesopotamian administration, were placed in charge of volatile districts with a couple of clerks and two or three armed soldiers for protection, and told to hold the peace. Three were killed in Amidiyah, Zakho, and Bira Kapra, together with their parties.

The Paris Peace Conference proved once and for all that the ignorance of the West about the Middle East was equalled only by its lack of interest. A.T. had noted in Paris:

Experts on Western Arabia, both military and civil were there in force, but not one, except Miss Bell, had any first-hand knowledge of Iraq or Nejd, or, indeed of Persia. The very existence of a Shi'ah majority in Iraq was blandly
denied as a figment of my imagination by one “expert” with an international reputation, and Miss Bell and I found it impossible to convince either the Military or the Foreign Office Delegations that Kurds in the Mosul vilayet were numerous and likely to be troublesome, [or] that Ibn Saud was a power seriously to be reckoned with.

Travelling among the Kurds on her expeditions, Gertrude had written that she had “rather lost her heart” to them, but they were, and remain to this day, a particular problem for any administration. Occupants of the northern reaches of Mesopotamia since prehistory, they were constantly at war with their neighbours, the entire area a mix of many races and creeds, Sunni, Shia, and Christian. They were also scattered throughout Turkey and northern Persia. She admitted that an Arab national ideal, if such were possible, would be of no good to the Kurds, and she would struggle for the rest of her life to yoke their inchoate nationalist aspirations to the service of peace and progress. For now, on the Kurdistan question, the Iraq administration was obliged to mark time, partly because they did not have the troops to police the area, and partly because the border between Turkey and Iraq would not be established for many years to come. Neither were the three groups of Mesopotamian Kurds united with each other: the Kirkuk Kurds refused to be connected in any way with the Sulaimani Kurds. Nevertheless, they were of one mind in demanding “a Kurdish independent state under our protection,” wrote Gertrude, “but what they mean by that neither they nor anyone else knows . . . So much for Kurdish nationalism . . .”