L'Irak en perspective
Une mission sacrée pour qui ? Quelques réflexions sur l’intégration nationale et le mandat britannique en Irak / Whose Sacred Trust? Some Thoughts on ‘National Integration’ and the British Mandate in Iraq1
Résumé
L’idée d’un objectif moral était inhérente à la création des mandats au Proche-Orient au lendemain de la guerre. Il s’agissait en particulier pour les Grandes Puissances de préparer activement à l’indépendance dans un futur qui ne soit pas trop éloigné les pays dont ils avaient la charge. Pratiquement, à l’opposé des idéaux entourant leur création, les nouvelles structures qui émergèrent étaient largement le reflet du désir des grandes puissances de forger des institutions à travers lesquelles elles puissent exercer leur contrôle. En Irak, les considérations économiques dictèrent la formation d’une lourde armée nationale soutenue, si nécessaire, par la puissance de la Royal Air Force. Cela conduisit à l’emploi de la force dans des situations pour lesquelles des solutions administratives auraient été plus appropriées, et en fin de compte, à l’ échec des efforts de création des structures institutionnelles qui auraient été capables de résister à la domination de petites cliques militaires. De même, la politique britannique a été de gouverner par l’intermédiaire de l’ “aristocratie de service” arabe sunnite, en accordant un statut de minoritaire à la majorité chiite de la population. Si cela a été toléré tant que les chiites sont restés en bas de la hiérarchie socio-économique, l’élévation du niveau d’éducation et les progrès de la conscience politique ont représenté une menace pour le statu quo, d’abord sous la monarchie puis sous la république.
Abstract
Inherent in the creation of the post-war Middle Eastern mandates was the notion of moral purpose, specifically that the Great Powers should be actively preparing their young charges for independence at some point in the not too distant future. In practice, in contrast to the high ideals surrounding their creation, the new structures which emerged were largely a reflection of the Powers’ desire to create institutions through which they could exercise control.
In Iraq, considerations of economy dictated the formation of a fairly large national army, backed up, when necessary, by the coercive powers of the Royal Air Force. This led to the employment of force in situations for which administrative solutions would have been more appropriate, and eventually to a general failure to create soundly based institutional structures which would be capable of resisting domination by small military cliques. Also, British policy was to rule through the Arab Sunni ‘aristocracy of service’, effectively according minority status to the majority Shi‘i population. While this was generally tolerated as long as the Shi‘is remained at the bottom of the socio-economic pile, increasing educational provision and growing political awareness produced a series of challenges to the status quo, first under the monarchy and subsequently under the republic.
Texte Intégral
An important feature of the post First World War Middle East was that the sense of uncertainty caused by the sudden demise of the Ottoman Empire lasted for several years. Thus the League of Nations did not assign the mandates until April 1920, nearly twenty months after the end of the war, and the administrative arrangements for the British mandated territories of Iraq and Palestine/ Transjordan were not laid down until the Cairo Conference of March 1921. Again, Iraqis had to wait until the late spring of 1925 before it was decided whether or not Mosul should be part of Iraq, and it took another two years to demarcate the frontier. Partly in consequence, the cost, both human and material, of maintaining the British presence in Iraq was fiercely criticised and hotly debated in the British parliament and in the British press, especially after the shock and scale of the national uprising (referred to somewhat fancifully as al-Thawra al-‘Irâqiyya al-Kubra) of the summer and autumn of 1920.
In all the Middle Eastern mandated states, much of the apparatus and style of the newly created national governments was imported from outside – although his is not to downplay the importance of the Ottoman institutions upon which the new structures were built – and a whole network of interdependencies was constructed in order to maintain them. This was a fairly universal feature of colonial rule: in a few places, perhaps most notably in India, the imported institutions seem to have worked reasonably well2, but in others, probably the majority, they did not. In the case of the mandates, their creation rested on an explicitly ethical basis, the notion that they formed part of a ‘sacred trust of civilisation’, implying a degree of moral duty or expectation on the part of the powers, and also that at some unspecified but not impossibly distant point in the future, they should be able to ‘stand alone’. For their part, the newly created national governments had to be able to present themselves to their ‘publics’ as being fully integrated into if not quite in charge of the new state structures, and able to assume varying degrees of responsibility for the conduct of affairs.
Especially during the early years of the mandate, this fiction proved difficult to maintain. Iraqi forces could not conceivably have held off either or both the Ikhwan of Najd and potentially hostile Turkish forces on their own, so the gap, of necessity, was filled by the British military presence. In the same vein, having created the Iraqi government, the British authorities were concerned to maintain and widen its area of influence. For a while such attempts to extend control were routinely resisted by elements of the local population, particularly in the Euphrates area and Kurdistan, much of which had never really known Ottoman rule. In consequence, the aeroplanes of the Royal Air Force became indispensable to the survival (let alone the effectiveness) of the new government, a fact which was readily apparent both to the government itself and to those who opposed it. The government was in no sense ‘popular’ or representative: it was almost entirely composed of members of the Sunni Arab urban communities, who, although more sophisticated and educated than most Shi‘is and Kurds, formed a minority, probably less than a quarter, of the total population. Much of its support came partly from the tribal shaikhs and landlords (who were almost all Shi‘is in southern Iraq), whose powers had been greatly enhanced during the course of the British occupation, and from the British authorities themselves. This partnership survived the Mandate and was only finally broken in 1958.
National Integration
For a number of reasons it is difficult to talk in terms of ‘natural’ geopolitical entities in the Arab Middle East. In the first place, the idea of ethnically based polities was not part of what might be called ‘traditional political thinking’ in a region where, at least until the first decade of the twentieth century, religious affiliation (in the sense of the religious community into which an individual had been born) formed the primary basis of identity. Hence it is anachronistic as well as inaccurate to regard the Ottomans (in say, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) as an imperial ‘power’, and to proceed from there to the notion that, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, British and French imperialism simply replaced four centuries of Ottoman imperialism, division and despotism, and that the liberation of the Arabs, which had been that people’s primary goal for ‘several generations’, was thereby forcibly postponed for another half century or so. That European colonial or quasi-colonial rule retarded, or acted as a brake upon, ‘Arab development’ is a proposition that can legitimately be postulated, but it is as inaccurate to view the Ottoman Empire as ‘just another’ variant of imperialism as it is to project the ‘Arab national struggle’ against the Ottomans very much further back than the early years of the twentieth century. In Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Eric Hobsbawm makes the memorable observation that ‘Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so’, and went on to quote Renan’s Qu’est-ce que c’est une nation ?:
“L’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essential de la formation d’une nation, et c’est ainsi que le progrès des études historiques et souvent pour la nationalité un danger. (Hobsbawm, 1990 : 12).” 3
Of course, within the wider region, there were geo-political units within, or adjacent to, the Ottoman Empire which did possess a certain historical coherence. Thus Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco – with a certain amount of tinkering with boundaries – all experienced a reasonably uncomplicated transition from Ottoman provinces (or ‘Sharifian Empire’ in the case of Morocco) to European colony and from there to ‘modern’ state. The same cannot be said for Greater Syria and Iraq, which, with the exception of the mutasarrifiya of Lebanon, a separate and quasi- self-governing entity since 1861, had had no previous mileage as a geopolitical entity either as a whole or in what became its constituent parts since, even long before, the fall of the ‘Abbasid caliphate in 1258.
Furthermore, the creation of the mandated states, and the states which bordered them, was an almost entirely arbitrary process which took very little account of economic realities, more humdrum than national myths, but important nevertheless. To simplify a more complex reality, the transition from the Ottoman Empire (in the Middle East) to ‘Republican Turkey and the mandated states’ fragmented what had previously been to all intents and purposes a Zollverein, an economic community which included the whole of the region. In addition, although the eastern Mediterranean (in the broadest sense) was becoming increasingly integrated into the ‘world system’ in the course of the nineteenth century, it was still the case that until the First World War, with the exception of a few (mostly) export commodities like Lebanese silk, certain varieties of Egyptian cotton, and Iraqi dates, agricultural and industrial production in the region was directed principally towards satisfying the needs of the local, or Ottoman domestic, market (Peter, 2004: Sluglett, 2004). A cursory examination of the accounts and commercial correspondence of the two leading European merchant houses in Aleppo at the end of the nineteenth century (the Marcopolis and the Poches) makes it clear that trade with the city’s hinterland (in the broadest sense) constituted a vital, perhaps the principal, component of their activities. In the case of Aleppo, this hinterland extended to central and eastern Anatolia and across to Mosul, and, though this is more true of earlier periods, even further to the east. Mosul had similar connections with Anatolia and northern Syria; much of the prosperity of Damascus was based on the trans-desert trade (and on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca); Basra was part of a trading nexus which included India and the Gulf, and so on. If one were to make a rough sketch of the trading ellipses centred around the major cities in, say, 1900, they would mostly not coincide with the political entities which emerged after the First World War.
Hence the creation of Iraq and the other mandated states, as well as Republican Turkey, produced six entities where the ‘natural’ forces of political integration were not highly developed and in many ways quite problematic. Of course, the whole notion of ‘national integration’ and what it entails in practice is a highly complex issue. In the first place, it functions at so many different levels of meaning. One way of looking at it, in Benedict Anderson’s words, is ‘to see how administrative units could, over time, come to be conceived as fatherlands’ (Anderson, 1991: 53) (which may also involve considering the ways in which this did not take place). How, then does one try to map out what might be called the stages in the construction of national sentiment, or to try to encapsulate what ‘being Syrian’ or ‘being Iraqi’ came to mean in the 1930s and 1940s ?
To put it another way; immediately before the First World War, Aleppo and Damascus, the two principal cities of what was to become ‘Syria’, were equal in rank to one another, and then, after 1920, Aleppo became subordinate to Damascus. In mandatory Iraq, the former provincial capitals of Basra and Mosul became permanently subordinate to Baghdad, a position they had sometimes, but by no means always, held. In what ways did the notions of ‘Syria’ and ‘Iraq’ gradually become internalised, especially among the urban populations of those cities whose status had inevitably diminished in the process? How did they come to participate in national politics? Was it that the elites simply appropriated the ‘alien creations’ called Syria and Iraq, giving them a reality and instrumentality of their own to act as a not so subtle means of substituting indigenous for foreign rule?
Iraq is even more complicated than Syria, since the cleavages were so much more obvious. The French singled out the minorities in Syria for their favour because they feared the seductions of the nationalist movement. In contrast, there are many ways in which the British in Iraq actually helped to construct national sentiment, of course in ways which would be most likely to assure their continuing influence. On the other hand, in spite of its original artificiality, it was relatively easy for nationalists in Syria to foster national sentiment and national integration. Thus while there is still a lot of talk – mostly ill informed nonsense – of Iraq falling apart into its Kurdish, Sunni and Shi‘i fragments, no-one thinks about Syria in those terms, in spite of its original ‘artificiality’.
In February 1919, two leading ayatollahs in Iraq, Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi and Shaykh al-Shari‘a al-Isfahani, wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, who was attending the Paris Peace conference, soliciting his help in the construction of a future Iraqi state:
“The desire of the Iraqis as a totality and as a Muslim nation, is that they should be accorded the freedom to choose a new and independent Arab and Muslim state, with a Muslim king assisted by a national assembly. As far as the question of a [sc British] protectorate (wisâyya) is concerned, it should be left to the national assembly either to accept it or reject it, after the Peace Conference.”
The word ‘Arab’ should be taken as reflecting the authors’ milieu rather than anything exclusively ethnic, since they were themselves Persian (Luizard, 2004); a year or so later, Shirazi was prominent in the events leading up to the national rising of 19204. It is also of interest that the attachment of Mosul to Iraq was on the agenda of all the political actors in Iraq at the time, including the Shi‘i religious establishment, who considered the Kurds as Muslims and thus saw no reason why their political and other needs would be properly catered for in an independent Muslim state of Iraq. Of course most Kurds were Sunnis, and most Shi‘is were Arabs, but there were also Sunni and Shi‘i Turkmen, and Kurdish and Persian Shi‘is in Iraq. For its part the Sunni Arab elite saw its salvation in an almost seamless transfer to the British of the loyalty which it had until recently bestowed upon the Ottomans, and could therefore sleep more easily with the notion of an Arab, rather than an Islamic, state. For clarity, it is worth saying that the kind of state that the Shi‘is envisaged in 1919 and 1920 was Islamic in the sense that the Ottoman state had been, or in the sense set out in the Persian constitution of 1906, and in no sense comparable, for instance, with the post-1979 Islamic Republic of Iran.
Constant references by the Sunni elite to Iraq’s ‘Arab’ identity and to Iraq’s links with the Arab nation (as well as Nuri al-Sa‘id’s efforts to promote various schemes of ‘Fertile Crescent Unity’ (Balfour-Paul, 1982)) served to obfuscate the Sunnis’ actual minority status and the real confessional character of the state, with the topsy-turvy result that the Shi‘is, who were, and still are, at least 60 per cent of the population, came to play the role of the minority. The unwillingness of the Shi‘i establishment to accept this role, and of course the dependence on Britain on the part of the Sunni elite which was a necessary for the continuation of Sunni rule, eventually led to the expulsion of many ‘ulamâ’ from the country in 1924 (Luizard, 2004 et 1991).
To some extent, this reversal of reality, as we may consider it, persisted more or less unchallenged as long as the Shi‘i majority remained in its almost stereotypical position at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. A number of factors ensured that this state of affairs would not last unchallenged for ever – the very great expansion of education between the end of the mandate and the Second World War, which continued apace in later years; waves of rural to urban migration, particularly from the rural South, which brought many Shi‘is to Baghdad and, ipso facto, gave them greater educational and employment opportunities than they would otherwise have had, and of course the great boost to the country’s prosperity when oil revenues began to take off in the 1950s. In addition, as was true of almost all Iraqis, the Shi‘is gradually became more politicised and in particular to realise that their relative deprivation was man made rather than God given. They were particularly attracted to the Iraq Communist Party in its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, although they risked the wrath of the Shi‘i religious establishment by associating themselves with it5. However, an interesting point of continuity, after the eclipse and persecution of the Communists in the 1960s, was that many of the socio-economic concerns and the struggles for social justice previously espoused by the Communists were taken over by Shi‘i thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s, who were in their turn imprisoned, expelled or executed by the Ba‘thists. Finally, it is important to point out that while the Ba‘thists were Sunnis almost to a man, their persecution of Shi‘i clerics and political organisations over the last four decades has almost nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the fact that since the Ba‘th had eliminated the secular opposition, Shi‘i clerics and organisations were the only ones left with the power to rally significant sections of the population against the Ba‘th’s oppressive and dictatorial rule.
Let me now turn to a consideration of the role of the armed forces in Iraq under the British mandate and onwards into national independence as a rather different aspect of ‘national integration’.
The Armed Forces and the State
The Iraqi army came into being at a very early stage. It was founded on 6 January 1921, several months before Faysal ibn Husayn arrived in the country, and was allowed to increase slowly from about 3 500 men in 1921 to about 12 000 men at the time of independence in 1932, a figure far lower than Nuri al-Sa‘id and his friends considered adequate. The Iraqi army was an entirely Iraqi institution, that is, it was commanded by Iraqi officers6 - in contrast to the Syrian army, where well over half the officer corps were French nationals. At the Cairo conference in March 1921, the imperatives of cost cutting encouraged British officials to make do with a far smaller British military presence in Iraq (comprised principally of squadrons of the Royal Air Force) than had been envisaged earlier. This meant that Britain would continue to support the formation of the Iraqi army, but it was thought desirable that it should remain fairly small. Given the many other problems besetting the young state in its early years, including coming to an agreement on the nature of the relationship with Britain, setting up an Iraqi constitution and so on, the question of the role of the army was allowed to lapse for a while, but it began to resurface in 1926-27, specifically in the context of the Military Agreement of 1924, which was due to expire in 1928. At that time, theoretically, Iraq would assume full responsibility for its own defence. How, in practice, could this be achieved?
There seemed to be two alternatives. First, that Iraq should request Britain to continue to allow the RAF and the Assyrian Levies (a British-officered ‘colonial’ force recruited from Christian refugees from western Iran and south eastern Turkey, most of whom had arrived in Iraq after the British captured Baghdad in March 1917) to come to the assistance of the Iraqi Army when this was judged necessary. At the same time, pressure would be brought to bear on Britain to make good the creation of an Iraqi Air Force, which had been promised under the 1924 Military Agreement but whose formation had been successfully blocked by the Air Ministry in London. In this scenario, the role of the Iraqi army would have been limited to the role of maintaining internal security: Sir Henry Dobbs, the High Commissioner, did not visualise the possibility of Iraq alone ever being able to defend itself against invasion from outside, a view which did not imply an early end either to the British military presence or the British mandate. Dobbs seems to have envisaged an army of about 10 000.
The second alternative was that favoured by King Faysal and his closest associates, especially the ex-Ottoman officers Nuri al-Sa‘id and Yasin al-Hashimi. They wanted a much larger army (figures of between fifteen and twenty thousand were mentioned) together with an Iraqi Air Force7. Only this, they considered, would be sufficient to guarantee the country's independence, for only with so large an Army could Iraq dispense with British military help. However, an army of that size could only be put together by resorting to conscription, of which British officials in Iraq were profoundly distrustful. The issue of conscription was to loom large in the various Anglo-Iraqi negotiations in the late 1920s.
The largest flaw in the plans of the King and his associates was that however much conscription might appeal to former officers of the Ottoman Army, it would meet with serious opposition from most of the rest of the population. While Sunni townsmen and the sons of Sunni tribal leaders would officer the army, and thus be able to maintain Sunni dominance, the Shi‘i tribes in the South and the Kurds and Yazidis in the North would most likely not acquiesce, for precisely that reason. Both the High Commissioner and the Adviser to the Ministry of the Interior considered that conscription would be strenuously resisted if it were to be introduced. Its application would strengthen the hands of tribal shaikhs, who would, for instance, be able to pay off old scores by picking tribal sections led by their rivals for the leadership and sending them off to the army8. Certain parts of Iraq, especially the Euphrates below Baghdad, would have to be excluded; in fact, if conscription were to be introduced at all it would be better to remove the tribal areas as a whole from its application. In addition to this limitation of the field of recruitment, there was another important objection. In the same despatch, the High Commissioner pointed out:
“It is to my mind out of the question that British aeroplanes should bomb Iraq tribesmen for resistance to conscription for the Iraq Army and should thus divert against the British in Iraq the discontent which will inevitably be produced by an attempt to enforce among the tribes a policy never enforced by the Turks. If the Iraq Army and the Police are likely to be strong enough by 1928 to see through a policy of conscription among the tribes, let them see it through.”9
In the following month, October 1926, the Iraqi government presented Dobbs with a draft Conscription Law. By submitting the draft, together with his own comments, to the Colonial Office, Dobbs left Whitehall with little alternative but to tackle the problem head on, and to reach conclusions identical to his own. At the Colonial Office, Sir John Shuckburgh pointed out that the use of British troops to enforce conscription in Iraq would meet with serious opposition from other government departments, and indeed, in Britain generally. Furthermore, conscription was
“… a policy which is against all our traditions and which has never been enforced in this country [Britain] except for one brief period ... during the stress of the Great War. Sir Henry Dobbs apparently hopes that the Iraq Government, knowing that they cannot count on support from us, will realise that the task is beyond their powers and will drop the project. If so, well and good, but it is in the nature of a gamble, and like other gambles may not come off. But in all the circumstances I can see no better alternative.”10
The decision, that active British support would not be given, was communicated to the Iraqi government in January 1927. Although there was no official announcement, the attitude of the Residency, and, by extension, of the Colonial Office, was well known in political circles in Baghdad. In the middle of May, Faysal complained somewhat naively to Dobbs that he felt that the conscription law would not command a majority in the Chamber of Deputies unless it was helped by popular enthusiasm:
“… which he maintains would be created by the desired announcement that H. M. Government will at the close of the Protocol period [i.e. in 1928] press for Iraq's admission to the League ... Unless he can obtain it he thinks he will have to withdraw the conscription bill. This would make it impossible for Iraq to afford troops to replace the British forces and make all discussions regarding the new military Agreement very difficult.”11
As this conversation implies, there had been no formal announcement that British troops would not be used to enforce conscription. Fearing a cabinet crisis, Dobbs had urged meeting Faysal’s wishes, and urged London not to insist on a formal statement unless direct questions were asked in the Chamber of Deputies in Baghdad12. By the middle of May 1927, with no progress either on conscription or the revision of the Agreements, which might in theory have enabled Iraq to enter the League in 1928, the cabinet’s resignation was expected daily13. Faysal apparently promised several Shi‘i leaders that a new cabinet would contain as many as three Shi‘is, provided that they agreed to support conscription, but the leadership of the Hizb al-Nahda declared that none of its members was prepared to cooperate14. In fact, this was all apparently some kind of smokescreen, since Dobbs reported to London on 27 May that the whole matter of the cabinet’s threatened resignation had been staged by the King, in order to enable the cabinet to publish their criticisms of Britain’s dilatoriness over military policy and the whole question of Iraq’s entry to the League. Faysal apparently hoped that this would jolt Britain into beginning negotiations at once. Dobbs ‘found it difficult to combat in respectful terms this petulant and childish plan,’ and advised the King to refuse to accept the cabinet’s resignation, informing him at the same time of his own efforts to obtain London’s approval of a policy of silence over the exact nature of British participation in the enforcement of conscription15. Four days later it was reported that the Cabinet had withdrawn its resignation. On 8 June, the last day of the parliamentary session in Baghdad, the Conscription Bill was given its first formal reading in the Chamber of Deputies. As had been expected the Shi‘i Minister of Education, Sayyid ‘Abd al-Mahdi, resigned immediately, but with the end of the session the issue slipped quietly into the background16.
Although the political situation in Baghdad calmed down for a while, Dobbs was concerned at the behaviour of the King and his immediate circle. In a personal letter to Amery, the Colonial Secretary, on 14 June, he suggested that the King, Yasin and Nuri were deliberately trying to confuse the issue: they wanted to build up ‘a large army free of British control, and at the same time to be helped and safeguarded by us while in the process of making this army’. Further, they maintained that such an army could only be created by conscription. For his part, Faysal realised that he needed the RAF to stay on in Iraq, but believed that Britain was equally anxious to keep air squadrons there to protect oil, imperial communications and other British interests. Hence, as the High Commissioner saw it, Faysal would make a bargain; Britain should recommend Iraq for entry into the League in 1928, and in return, Faysal would allow the RAF to stay on in Iraq for a limited period. Additionally, the King and the Iraqi government would require to be given complete control of the Iraqi Army. Britain would not, whatever happened, leave Iraq in chaos, since this would be as inimical to its interests as to Iraq’s. On the other hand, if Britain would not yield, the King and his circle might attempt to start a rising in the country in favour of complete independence:
“What the King, Nuri and Yasin want to do is, on the one hand to rouse anti-British feeling or demonstrations sufficiently to pass conscription and frighten the British Government into relaxing all control, and on the other hand to smother the agitation when they have gained their ends and return bowing and smiling to a comfortably relaxed British alliance. The King took precisely the same position in 1922 when Cox was insulted at the Palace. The King's fortunate attack of appendicitis then saved the situation. We cannot count on appendicitis again”.
The High Commissioner considered that if the RAF was to remain in Iraq after 1928, there should be no question of any relaxation of British control over the Iraqi armed forces. Thus both the Palace and the Residency considered that they possessed the trump card: Faysal thought that the British would not leave because of the oil, and Dobbs believed that Faysal could not hold his throne without a British military presence17.
Eventually it was agreed that Britain should maintain the RAF in Iraq, train and equip an Iraqi Air Force, and maintain two battalions of Assyrian Levies as imperial troops to act as aerodrome guards (for the RAF). After these arrangements had been agreed upon by the British government on 6 July 1927, Dobbs was told to communicate them to the Iraqi cabinet, together with the assurance that Britain would support Iraq's candidature for the League in 1932, ‘provided that the present rate of progress was maintained’. It might have been concluded that Faysal and his circle had got most of what they wanted18, but, as subsequent events were to show, the King’s irritation at having got what he felt was only half a loaf prevailed. Acrimonious exchanges continued over the next two years until British officials came to the conclusion that unconditional support for Iraq’s entry to the League was the only way ahead. An interesting quotation illustrates both Britain’s dilemma and the always ambiguous realities of the mandate:
“For better or for worse we have chosen King Faisal as the instrument of our policy. In the eyes of the world we are identified with his regime. He may have his failings like the rest of us, but upon the whole he has served us well and there is the greatest objection to any course which would seriously antagonise him or place him in a position which he would regard as untenable. The loss of his goodwill and cooperation (to say nothing of his covert hostility) would make our position untenable. We cannot, in fact, have a contented Iraq without a reasonably contented Faisal. ”19
Again, it is of some interest that Dobbs should have written to London in October 1927, a few days after the first major oil strike (at Baba Gurgur, near Kirkuk):
“… the recent enormous commitments of the T.P.C. and the A.P.O.C. in Iraq and the discoveries of immense quantities of oil in the concessions of both of them make it now impossible to abandon control of Iraq without damaging important British and foreign interests. It was very different when the existence of oil was doubtful, as it was when the last Anglo-Iraqi treaty was discussed. ”20
To conclude the story: by September 1929, Britain had agreed to recommend Iraq unconditionally for League of Nations membership in 1932. Britain insisted on maintaining the RAF in Iraq to ensure the security of imperial communications (and also, indirectly, to ensure that no Iraqi government could step too far out of line) and on an assurance that all foreign officials should be British. The question of conscription for the Iraqi army was allowed to lapse quietly, and was eventually imposed in 1934. A year later – there was some, but not an exclusive, causal connection – there was a major rising of the southern tribes, which threatened to overthrow the government and required RAF help to put down.
Perhaps the main conclusion that emerges from this episode is that Britain’s general though evidently somewhat tortured desire to rid itself of the problems posed by the lack of integration of the Iraqi state led it, from the very beginning, to adopt policies which, although cheap to implement, promoted coercion over ‘administration’. I have shown elsewhere how the RAF was used to police both the Kurds and the southern tribes, and how tribes which would not submit to the government, in reality tribes which refused to pay taxes, were bombed for non-payment21. In the same way, the British occupation administration, and later the government of Iraq, awarded substantial tax remissions to tribal shaykhs in return for the shaykhs’ taking administrative charge over the areas which they controlled. Hence aerial policing on the one hand, and grants of judicial and administrative authority to shaykhs and their private armies on the other, had the obvious effect of separating, and often alienating, ‘the people’ from ‘the state.’
The course of events in Syria was entirely different, although in many important ways the end results were the same. In brief, the French in Syria were not faced with the widespread opposition to the intrusion of government that confronted either the British in many of the remoter parts of rural or mountainous Iraq, or their own compatriots in, say, Morocco, where the imposition of order, known as pacification, was not completed until the middle 1930s. This is not a reference to ‘nationalist movements’ but rather to varying forms of resistance on the part of substantial areas of the countries concerned to being required to submit to central government, generally for the first time – the Kurdish areas and the southern marshes of Iraq and the remoter parts of the High Atlas and the Moroccan Rif being obvious examples. Such conditions did not exist in Syria, and in addition Syria was not surrounded by potentially hostile neighbours – for instance, Turkey’s occasional sabre-rattling on the northern frontier of Iraq, or the activities of the Ikhwan of Najd on the Sa‘udi/Iraqi border until their defeat by the RAF and the Sa‘udis at the end of the 1920s.
Some characteristics of Middle Eastern politics in the mandate and immediately post-mandate periods
Finally, let me make some generalisations about the ‘colonial legacy’. On the positive side, both France and Britain attempted to introduce meritocratic civil services in the mandated states, which founded, or in some cases continued, traditions of public service of lasting value. Technical services or government departments connected with public works, agriculture, education, medicine and public health, the cadastre and land registration were either founded during the mandate or carried over from the late Ottoman period. Of course, there were also a number of very negative aspects to the process. The state responsible for the mandated territory was supposed to act in loco parentis until the territory could ‘stand alone’, but neither political structures or other institutions of civil society in Iraq and Syria were developed in ways which would indicate that either mandatory power had made any very assiduous preparations for this eventuality. The post-colonial histories of Iraq and Syria are, not to put too fine a point on it, both fairly dismal; there is an absence both of stability and of effective institutions of civil society.
Britain left Iraq in 1932, but British influence (and interference) lingered on until the overthrow of the ancien régime in 1958. One official in Baghdad in 1946 famously remarked that ‘with the old gang in power this country cannot hope to progress very far’22, but, as in Egypt, the ‘old gang’ were so securely in place that it proved remarkably difficult to nudge them out. This was because the politico-administrative machinery which had been installed did not allow for, or could not accommodate, the peaceful transfer of power from ‘government’ to ‘opposition’ (such as took place, to however limited an extent, in post-war Turkey). In Iraq, what one might call the ‘permitted political arena’ was very narrow, with the result that ‘politics’ became almost irrelevant to, and generally did not represent the interests of, the rising middle class of bureaucrats, school teachers, junior officers and ‘petit bourgeois’ that emerged in the 1950s. The rise of Nasser and widening social inequalities produced new political agendas which existing mechanisms could repress but not satisfy. Communist, Arab nationalist, and Islamic parties were not permitted to function, and existed in conditions of clandestinity and conspiracy. Britain’s creation of relatively efficient armed services in Iraq facilitated coups d’état rather than democratic transitions, and the monarchy, and whatever tradition of “bourgeois democracy’ there may have been, collapsed quickly in the face of a military challenge on 14 July 1958.
Although the French stayed longer in Syria, the evacuation of French troops in 1946 represented a more final break than Britain’s departure from Iraq in 1932, partly, perhaps, because of the escalating violence and profound ill feeling of the last eighteen months of the French presence. France had never established much of a client base beyond the ranks of her ‘traditional supporters’, but had been obliged to allow relatively free elections since the early 1930s. The Bloc National, which represented a mild form of Syrian nationalism, had been in and out of office since the Blum government’s offer23 of treaty negotiations in 1936. It had somehow weathered the collapse of those negotiations as well as loss of the sanjak of Alexandretta, and in the elections of July 1943 it experienced something of a renaissance under the leadership of Shukri al-Quwwatli.
Although conditions were very different from those in Iraq, ‘bourgeois democracy’ failed equally spectacularly in Syria. Military coups were to feature regularly in the late 1940s and 1950s, although the ‘old social classes’ returned to power at various moments, notably between 1961 and 1963. Both Iraq and Syria entered a period of military rule and one party (or one family) dictatorship, from which, and from whose consequences, neither country has yet entirely emerged. What emerged in both Iraq and Syria is a structure familiar to us from other formerly colonised territories, that of the ‘relative autonomy of the state’. As an institution, the state is not deeply rooted in society, and its generally repressive nature means that it enjoys little popular support. As far as they are able to do so, its citizens turn their backs upon it and try to do without it, exploiting networks of family, kin, tribe, village, ethnicity and so on. In addition, although articulate and relatively diversified, the middle classes remain economically weak, and are unable to develop and establish their own ideology and aspirations (in terms of capitalism) as those of the nation as a whole. Other institutions of civil society (parliaments, labour unions, ‘authentic’ political parties, professional and civic associations) are largely absent, or if present, exist only in symbolic or complicit form. However long they have been in power in both countries, governments or regimes are essentially unstable because of their shallow roots; longevity should not be confused with stability. As we are only too painfully aware, the ‘post-revolutionary states’ of the Middle East have still to attain the higher ground of post-dictatorship democracy attained, however shakily, by many of the states of Latin America in the latter years of the twentieth century24.
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Notes de bas de page :
Pour citer cet article :
Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée [En ligne],
N° 117-118 - L'Irak en perspective, juillet 2007.
Pagination : 33-49
Mis en ligne le : 27 juillet 2007
Disponible sur : http://remmm.revues.org/document3271.html.
