A Peace to End all Peace (52 page)

A British Intelligence chief warned the Foreign Secretary in London in 1919 that the Arab government in Damascus and Kemal’s movement in Turkey were preparing to enter into an alliance.
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But the Arab and Turkish movements were not as alike as he supposed: Kemal was a nationalist in the western sense of the word, while in Arab Damascus, though everybody now spoke the fashionable language of nationalism, it was not a native tongue. Of the Arabic-speaking leaders who governed from Damascus in 1919, most—perhaps four out of five—had not been adherents of an Arab national identity or of Arab independence as late as 1918.
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The Syrians among them were mostly from landowning families, with a stake in maintaining the established order. An analysis of the occupational groups from which they were drawn
¹³
shows the leadership made up in large part of Ottoman soldiers and officials, many of them from Iraq and Palestine, who were out of a job. Most of them had remained loyal to Turkey during the war with Britain.

In the year since the Ottoman army had left Damascus, and under the noses of the distracted British, who were thinking about France, the Ottoman Arabs who had opposed them during the war had taken back control of the liberated province. The Ottoman Arabs, however, were fragmented along geographical lines in their current political concerns. Those from communities like Jerusalem denounced Zionism in Palestine; those from Baghdad complained of the British in Mesopotamia; and the Syrians wanted to expel the French from their seacoast and from Lebanon. Meanwhile, leaders of the traditional pro-Ottoman anti-Feisal ruling families were pitted against ambitious young militants seeking their political fortunes. Behind the rhetoric of the political parties and the renascent secret societies lay obscure family and local conflicts. It was a confused and confusing political situation, in which Feisal’s position was secured essentially by the support of Britain, visibly represented by General Allenby’s armies, and by the common Arab supposition that because of Feisal, Britain would oppose the colonialist designs of France.

In retrospect it can be seen that Britain entered 1919 with a period of grace of less than nine months in which to bluff France into backing down; by the summer of 1919 financial pressures and social unrest forced Lloyd George and the War Office to recognize that a timetable for British withdrawal from Syria could no longer be postponed. On 4 September 1919 the Prime Minister convened a conference of his advisers at the vacation house of his friend Lord Riddell, near Trouville on France’s Normandy coast, to consider what should be done about the Middle East. Only a few days before Riddell had recorded in his diary that Lloyd George was “angry with the French for their attitude concerning Syria. He said that the Syrians would not have the French, and asked how the Allies could compel them to accept mandatories who were distasteful…His attitude to the French has changed greatly…He continually refers to their greed.”
¹⁴
Yet he and his advisers saw no alternative but to abandon the field to the French.

On 13 September 1919 the British government announced that withdrawal would take place in November, leaving the French and Feisal to settle matters between themselves. According to the British leaders, they thereby honored their commitments both to France and to the Arabs. It was a disingenuous claim. The British had pretended that Feisal headed a great Arab army in Syria, but government officials were aware that this was a pretense without substance. For the British army to leave was to leave Feisal to the mercy of the French. To Kitchener’s followers in Britain and the Middle East, this meant a betrayal of all they had worked for; while to the French, the nine-month attempt to face them down, even though it was abandoned, was unforgivable.

For Feisal, the nervous prince with the worry-bead fingers, the British announcement of withdrawal was another sudden turning in the labyrinth of deception through which he tried to wend his way. There was, however, a teasing, tantalizing possibility that briefly opened up before him. Clemenceau, willing as always to accommodate British preferences in the Middle East—if politically possible—was prepared to let Feisal be king of Syria (since that is what Britain wanted) if Feisal would meet him halfway. The French Premier agreed to enter once again into negotiations with the Arab leader, aimed at securing recognition of France’s minimum terms: that France would rule a Greater Lebanon, and that Syria, though independent, would become a French client state. But these French terms placed Feisal in the middle, between colliding forces. The militant Arabs of Damascus who claimed to be his followers, but who had no particular attachment to him, were prepared to allow him to call himself their ruler only so long as he could keep the French out; while the French were prepared to let him rule only if he could succeed in bringing them in. Feisal, a stranger in the land of Syria, was in no position to do anything but mediate. All he could do was obtain concessions from Clemenceau and then try to obtain concessions from the Arab militants in Damascus.

Early in January 1920, Feisal and Clemenceau arrived at a secret accord—secret, because Clemenceau, seeking to become President of France, did not want his opponents to be able to claim he had been weak on Syria—permitting Feisal’s Arab state its independence, but with exclusively French advisers. The accord was designed to lead to a French Mandate, but only of the loosest sort. Feisal then left for Damascus to see if he could persuade the Arab leadership there to accept its relatively mild terms; but his mission proved to be another blind turn in the political labyrinth for on 17 January Clemenceau, rejected in his bid for the presidency, gave up his political career. Alexandre Millerand, Clemenceau’s successor as Premier, lacked his inclination to save Britain’s face in the Middle East, and therefore saw no need either to allow Syria her independence or to let Feisal mount her throne.

V

At the beginning of 1920, with Britain no longer blocking French ambitions in Syria, the way was clear for the two Allies finally to formulate the terms they would impose upon the defeated Ottoman Empire. The terms upon which they then agreed were that the Arabic-speaking portions of the empire were to be detached and divided between the two European powers, with Palestine and Mesopotamia to be kept by Britain; Arabia was to remain independent under British-influenced monarchs, Egypt and the Gulf coast already having been taken by Britain; and Syria, including Lebanon, was to go to France. Palestine, including Transjordan; Syria, including Lebanon; and Iraq were all destined for eventual independence, if one believed the language of the League of Nations Mandates, pursuant to which the Allies awarded these territories to themselves. But France, in particular, regarded the pledge of independence as window-dressing, and approached Syria and Lebanon in an annexationist spirit.

Apart from the Dodecanese islands, most of the Aegean islands and European Turkey (eastern Thrace) were ceded to Greece. Smyrna, and the district of western Anatolia of which it was the leading city, were to be administered by Greece for five years, after which a plebiscite would be taken, presumably leading to incorporation of the area within the Kingdom of Greece. The Dardanelles, where the Royal Navy could make itself felt, were placed under international control, and along with Constantinople became hostages guaranteeing Turkey’s good behavior in such matters as the treatment of Christian minorities. In eastern Anatolia, Armenia was granted independence, and Kurdistan was given autonomy. Turkish finances were placed under British, French, and Italian supervision. Within these limits, and subject to these restrictions, what little remained of Turkish-speaking Anatolia was to remain nominally independent under the Ottoman Sultan.

Such were the terms, agreed upon in London and San Remo in the first half of 1920, that were dictated to the Sultan’s government—which reluctantly signed the treaty imposed upon it in August 1920, in the French suburban city of Sèvres. As only France’s Poincaré seems to have noticed, it was an inauspicious choice for the site of a treaty upon which Europe intended to rely; Sèvres was known for its china, which was fragile and easily broken.

Lloyd George was the only one of the original Big Four who remained in his position when the final peace treaty was signed. He was also the only British Cabinet minister at the beginning of the First World War who remained in the Cabinet throughout the war until its conclusion. The only British politician to survive the war, he was the only Allied leader to survive the peace; but the Ottoman settlement, of which he was so proud, was to prove his undoing.

When the British armed forces occupied the Middle East at the end of the war, the region was passive. But soon troubles began. They began in Egypt, with demands for independence in 1918 followed by rioting in 1919. Next—though there was no immediately apparent connection—war broke out in 1919 in Afghanistan, on the Indian frontier. At about the same time, British policy in Arabia began to come apart. It was possible to believe that it was just bad luck that caused one thing after another to go wrong for Britain in the Middle East; and one could have continued to believe that when tribal disturbances brought disorder to Transjordan or, in the spring of 1920, when Arabs rioted against Jews in western Palestine, or in the summer of 1920, when Iraq flamed into revolt. An obvious explanation for the disorders, and arguably the correct one, was that, after the war, Britain’s garrisons in the Middle East were so undermanned as to embolden Britain’s local opponents everywhere to defy her.

The French, weakened in the Middle East, as were the British, by pressures to economize and demobilize, were similarly defied by Arab politicians, against whom they finally went to war in Syria. Russia, defeated in the war and crippled by revolutions and civil war, also faced Moslem revolts and independence movements in Central Asia, her domain in the Middle East. But both the French and Russians, instead of finding common cause with Britain, intrigued to undermine her position in the Middle East, thus confusing the issue by making it plausible to suppose that they were causing (rather than merely adding to) Britain’s difficulties.

In retrospect, one sees Britain undergoing a time of troubles everywhere in the Middle East between 1919 and 1921; but it was not experienced that way, at least not in the beginning. Rioting in Egypt in 1919, for example, was seen as an Egyptian law and order problem that was then brought under control; it was not seen as a prelude to the riots that broke out in Palestine in the spring of the next year or to the revolt that spread in Iraq as spring gave way to summer. So the chapters that follow tell of the successive Middle Eastern challenges to Britain—and to the French, to whom Britain had yielded Syria—roughly in the order that they occurred, and as though they amounted merely to one separate set of difficulties after another.

Though they were not perceived at the time as coming together to constitute one large overall event, the individual intrigues and revolts against British rule were believed by a great many British officials to be instigated by a single group of conspirators; and presently it will be seen who these were believed to be. Whether the disorders and uprisings in the Middle East were indeed planned and coordinated or, on the contrary, sporadic, was a principal question confronting the Lloyd George government as the extent of the challenge to British rule in the Middle East emerged in 1919 and 1920 and stood revealed to a disenchanted British public, press, and Parliament by 1921.

The first postwar challenge to Britain’s Middle Eastern position was in Egypt, the Arabic-speaking country that she had ruled “temporarily” for decades, and whose British administrators had persuaded themselves at the outset that the Arabic-speaking peoples preferred British rule to any other. But Britain had repeatedly promised Egypt her independence and it was not unreasonable for Egyptian politicians to have believed the pledges, and thus to suppose that once the war was brought to a successful conclusion, Britain might agree to some sort of timetable leading to eventual Egyptian independence.
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At least one group of local politicians proposed to take Britain at her word. On 13 November 1918, two weeks after the Ottoman surrender aboard the
Agamemnon
, a delegation of out-of-office Egyptian political figures was granted an interview with Sir Reginald Wingate, the British High Commissioner in Cairo. The delegation had been formed and was led by Saad Zaghlul, a lawyer of about sixty, a former judge, administrator, Minister of Education, and Minister of Justice, and a leader of the Legislative Assembly, which the British had prorogued indefinitely at the beginning of the war. Zaghlul explained to Wingate that he had requested the interview in the expectation that martial law and the protectorate would soon be abolished, now that the war was over. Indicating that he expected Britain to keep her promise to grant Egypt independence, Zaghlul asked that Egypt should be heard by the Allies during their peace negotiations. He also asked to go to London to negotiate the promised changes in Egypt’s political status.

Neither negotiations nor independence were what British officials had in mind at the time. A guide to their thinking was provided by a British official’s account, some time later, of the meeting with Zaghlul. “On Nov. 13 he paid a visit to the High Commissioner and expressed the desire to go to London to put forward a programme of complete autonomy, a proposal which was rejected as calculated to serve no good object.”
²

Receiving no encouragement from Wingate, Zaghlul began that same day to try to force the issue. Perhaps acting with the secret support of the new Egyptian Sultan, Ahmed Fuad,
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he set out to organize a delegation that could win broad support from the groups and classes within Egypt whose interests he aspired to represent; which, in turn, drove rival political figures to form and head delegations of their own. On 17 November 1918 Wingate cabled the Foreign Secretary that Egyptian politicians were calling for a “programme of complete autonomy” that he had warned them against agitation; but that the Sultan and his ministers did not feel strong enough to oppose nationalist demands.
³
Indeed the Sultan’s ministers, not wanting to be viewed as Britain’s nominees, claimed that they would refuse to lead a delegation abroad unless Zaghlul and his colleagues were also allowed to proceed to Europe. In the event, Britain did not allow any delegation to go either to London or to Paris during 1918.

In January 1919, as the opening date of the Peace Conference approached, Zaghlul and his Wafd (“Delegation”) Party stepped up their activities. They were indignant to learn, on 12 January, that a delegation from Syria would be allowed to attend the Peace Conference. At a so-called General Congress of the Wafd held the next day in the home of one of its members, Zaghlul claimed the same right for Egypt, and spoke in favor of independence. Thereafter the British administration prevented Zaghlul from speaking in public; whereupon the Sultan’s ministers resigned rather than lead a delegation to Europe while Zaghlul was being silenced. The British military authorities then arrested Zaghlul and three of his principal colleagues, and, on 9 March, deported them to Malta.

A wave of demonstrations and strikes swept the country. The British authorities were taken by surprise. The cables sent from Cairo to London at the time suggest that the Residency had little understanding of what had been happening in Egypt during the wartime years.
⁴
It was unaware of the implications of the profound social and economic changes brought about by the war: the new classes and ambitions that had emerged, the new interests, the new resentments, and the new sources of discord and disaffection.

The Residency did know, though, that there were many Egyptians who would have been happy to see Britain lose the war against Turkey. Wingate, Clayton, and their associates, in arguing unsuccessfully that Britain ought to annex Egypt and rule the country directly, had pointed out some of the dangers that might arise if such people took control of Egypt’s destinies. Lieutenant-Commander Hogarth of the Arab Bureau, in a memorandum of 22 July 1917 supporting Clayton’s annexation proposal, had claimed that Egypt “is at present potentially an enemy country” and that the danger could be averted only by Britain’s taking responsibility for the reorganization of Egyptian society.
⁵

Within the murky world of Egyptian politics, the new Sultan, the Sultan’s ministers, and such opposition leaders as Zaghlul, all were maneuvering, sometimes for and sometimes against one another, under the cover of their respective nationalist proposals, to win the support of the various disaffected groups within the Egyptian economy and Egyptian society. Yet of these currents, undermining the structure of the protectorate and threatening one day to sweep it away, the British authorities evinced little awareness. Zaghlul was seen as a mere disgruntled office-seeker, using his political demands as leverage to obtain a government job. According to the Residency in 1917, “He is now getting old and probably desires an income.”
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Yet within a week of his arrest and deportation, demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, and other towns spread to the Delta, led to violence, and were followed by massive strikes. Railroad lines were torn up in key places, in accord, ironically, with a British wartime plan to disrupt the country in the event of an Ottoman invasion. Transport workers struck. On 16 March 1919, a week after Zaghlul’s deportation, Cairo’s railroad and telegraph communications with both the Delta and Upper Egypt were cut, while foreign colonies were besieged. The flames of disorder raged out of control.

Widespread attacks on British military personnel culminated on 18 March in the murder of eight of them—two officers, five soldiers, and an inspector of prisons—on a train from Aswan to Cairo. The High Commissioner’s administration reported that it retained “no means of regaining control in Upper Egypt, from whence there is practically no news.”
⁷
According to a recent account, the upheaval “seemed likely for a moment to lead to a revolt on a scale unparalleled in the Eastern Empire since the Indian Mutiny.”
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These fears were exaggerated—but they were sincerely felt and widely held.

What the High Commissioner’s office in the Residency found so shocking in the rebellion was its “Bolshevik tendency,” and also that the “present movement in Egypt is national in the full sense of the word. It has now the sympathy of all classes and creeds…”
⁹
Copts demonstrated alongside Moslems. Theological students demonstrated alongside students from the secular schools. Women, albeit only from the upper classes, demonstrated alongside men.
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What especially unnerved the British authorities was the involvement of the peasantry in the countryside—the placid masses on whose inertia they had counted. Unnerving, too, was the subsequent discovery that the uprising was organized. Suddenly the British were faced with a local politician who appeared to have a national following—which surprised them and may have surprised him, too.

General Allenby, who was quickly sent out to deal with the situation, arrived in Cairo on 25 March and declared his intention of putting an end to the disturbances. On 7 April he announced Zaghlul’s release. British troops gradually restored order in the spring and summer of 1919, but strikes and demonstrations continued.

At the end of 1919 London sent out a Commission of Inquiry under Lord Milner, which concluded that the British protectorate had indeed to be abolished and replaced by some new relationship, the nature of which Britain attempted to negotiate throughout 1920, 1921, and 1922.

The process proved to be frustrating, and deporting Zaghlul again proved to be of little help. The principal British fantasy about the Middle East—that it wanted to be governed by Britain, or with her assistance—ran up against a stone wall of reality. The Sultan and Egypt’s other leaders refused to accept mere autonomy or even nominal independence; they demanded full and complete independence, which Britain—dependent upon the Suez Canal—would not grant. Though British officials tried to reach some kind of agreement with Egypt’s leadership, they failed; and so in the years to come, Britain was obliged to maintain her armed presence and her hegemony in Egypt without the consent of the country’s politicians.

On the other side of the Middle East, however, in Afghanistan, a real question arose as to whether Britain
could
preserve her hegemony without the consent of local leaders.