Gandhi & Churchill (48 page)

As 1921 dawned, Gandhi threw the chapters into nonviolent battle with the Evil Empire. India’s millions of Muslims and Hindus, he wrote on January 2, “are staunch in their faith, have God ever on their lips, and would welcome death in His name.”
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But almost before the campaign began, Winston Churchill had spoiled Gandhi’s chances of forcing the British out of India.

Anyone who assumed that Churchill’s speech on Amritsar signaled a softening of his views on India would have been badly mistaken.

“I am an Imperialist,” he had proudly told Winfred Blunt that fateful autumn of 1909. He agreed with Blunt then that British rule in India had severe problems and that in general the domination of nonwhites by whites was wrong. But his real concern was England and its impoverished masses. “I would give my life,” Churchill said, “to see them put on a right footing in regard to their lives and means of living.”
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Winston insisted that that was why the Raj existed in the first place: to provide markets for British industry and job opportunities for Britain’s poor. His belief in imperial dominion over India was not a contradiction of his progressive social views but an extension of them.
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India must be kept as part of the British Empire; the Raj must remain in control. “We have not defended our empire all these years,” Winston told his Dundee constituents in February 1920, to loud cheers, “in order to surrender it piecemeal at the hysterical dictation of the foolish, the feeble-minded, and the flighty.” Britons had to realize that they could not bring “democratic institutions to backward races which had no capacity for self-government.” On the contrary, “we must strengthen our position in India.”
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As war secretary and then colonial secretary in the early 1920s, Churchill would do whatever he could to ensure that India remained British, including redrawing the entire map of the Middle East.

The Allied victory in the Great War had shattered the Turkish Empire beyond repair, leaving a hopeless political tangle from the Persian Gulf to Constantinople. Victorious British and French occupiers pushed to reestablish some kind of order, while local populations in places like Arabia, Armenia, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia, along with Kurds and Greeks, pulled for autonomy and self-rule.

On June 10, 1920, Churchill told Lloyd George that matters “are now approaching a climax.” This tense tug-of-war could not continue: “We cannot go on sprawled out over these vast regions at ruinous expense and ever-increasing military risk,” Churchill told the prime minister.
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In Churchill’s mind, two priorities were uppermost in the new post-Ottoman Middle East. The first was to protect India and the gateway to India, Suez. The second was to avoid any further costly extension of British responsibilities in the region. The question was how to secure the one without endangering the other.

The answer was the Indian Army. In May 1920, in the former Ottoman region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers called Mesopotamia, the test came. British and Indian troops had occupied Basra on the Persian Gulf in 1914 and marched into Baghdad in 1917. As Turkish authority collapsed, Indian troops had taken on more and more of the duties of maintaining order and preventing civil unrest in the province, much as they were doing in Egypt and Palestine.
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In April 1920 Britain formally received the League of Nations mandate for control over the region.

The honeymoon between the British and the locals was short. One day in May British troops in the town of Tel Afar arrested a local sheikh for failing to pay his debts. A riot broke out. Locals hurled stones and bricks, and four British soldiers were killed. Reinforcements arrived, including two armored cars. But the rioters, spurred on by radical Islamic clerics, rose up and counterattacked. Two officers and fourteen men were killed; the British commanding officers ordered Tel Afar cleared of all inhabitants.

Instead of quelling the trouble, the order only expanded it. In the nearby town of Mosul, the British crews of a pair of armored cars were lynched by another angry mob, who dragged their bodies through the dirt streets. One hundred and fifty saber-wielding
sowars
from the Eleventh King Edward’s Lancers (Probyn’s Horse) charged in and, with the help of infantry and an artillery battery, managed to restore order, but only temporarily.
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By July, as Muslim clerics in Karbala declared a holy war against the British, all of Mesopotamia was in revolt.
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It was the nightmare that Americans would come to know in the same place, eighty years later. Churchill responded with his usual furious energy. There could be no question of negotiation. He needed troops to crush the rebellion, but everywhere forces were stretched. Ireland was descending into sectarian civil war; Arab riots had broken out in Jerusalem. British and Indian troops were even fighting Russian-backed insurgents in Persia, while terrorist attacks and bombings took place every day in Egypt.

The only place to get more men was India. At the end of August Winston ordered fourteen Indian battalions and six British to be transferred from India to Mosul, the heart of the revolt. The commanding officer in Mosul, as it happened, was his old cellmate from South Africa, General Aylmer Haldane. “The Cabinet have decided that the rebels must be quelled effectively,” he wrote to Haldane, “and I will endeavor to meet all your requirements.”
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Haldane already had 7,000 British and 53,000 Indian troops on the ground, but he complained even twenty new battalions was not enough. Sunnis and Shiites had joined forces and were forcing his men back. He warned Churchill that the conditions were much like fighting the Boers, except in temperatures soaring to 125 degrees. Without more soldiers, he worried he might have to evacuate Baghdad. Churchill told him there were no more soldiers to be had.
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There was, however, the Royal Air Force. Churchill immediately ordered its chief, Sir Hugh Trenchard, to mobilize squadrons to attack the desert rebels. Bombs alone might not be enough, Churchill believed. “I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs,” he told Trenchard, “especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them.”
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In his Amritsar speech Churchill had condemned the use of murderous force against an
unarmed
crowd as “frightfulness.” Such force against an armed one goaded on by radical mullahs was another matter. In the end, the gas was not used. But RAF planes did regularly bomb Arab villages, killing terrorists and civilians alike. In Churchill’s mind, it was all about teaching “those Arabs on the Lower Euphrates a good lesson.” And his tactics did help to turn the tide. Another 3,000 British and 13,000 Indian troops were soon in country along with Haldane’s forces. Some of the fiercest fighting took place west of Baghdad near the town of Fallujah, while around Samawa, to the south, rebels managed to derail a British armored train. Indian troopers from Hodson’s Horse had to attack on foot to retake the train, slashing and shooting their way from one carriage to the next until all the insurgents were either dead or had fled.

In October the British reoccupied Mosul. The fighting dragged on until the following February; by then some 450 soldiers, British and Indian, had been killed and 1,600 wounded.
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But Haldane and Churchill had defeated the Sunni and Shiite insurgency. Baghdad and Basra, which together formed the gateway to the oil fields of Persia and India’s western flank, were safe.

But the cost was high enough that no one, least of all Churchill, was willing to pay it again. Already in August the
Times
of London had asked, “How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?”
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Churchill asked himself the same question. “Pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts” could not continue, he wrote to Lloyd George. “The burden of carrying out the present policy at Constantinople, in Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia is beyond the strength of the British Army.”

It was also producing a backlash in the Indian Army, “upon which we are compelled to rely.”
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The bulk of India’s fighting men were Muslims from Sind, Baluchistan, and the Punjab. They resented having to fight and kill fellow Muslims, especially when the fate of their holy places was still up in the air. Roiled by the unrest over the Khilafat question, and by growing nationalist as well as pan-Islamic feeling, the Indian Army was an ideological ticking time bomb.

But, it was more indispensable than ever. Hundreds of thousands of its soldiers had fought in the trenches in France and Flanders; endured the heat and flies of Kut-al-Amara; held down the beaches at Gallipoli and the mountains of Salonika; and marched into Baghdad, all to enable the Allies to win the First World War. Now Indian soldiers were needed to hold on to the peace as well. Churchill’s War Office shifted ultimate control of the Indian Army from New Delhi to London—to the fury of Indian nationalists, who resented having to pay for an army so that Britain could play international policeman, but also to the anger of the viceroy and the India Office.

But “the only sound and economical method of imperial defence is to regard the forces of any portion of the Empire as being available for use in any other,” the War Office informed the India Office in June 1920.
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Nonetheless the time had clearly come for a more permanent solution to the problem of keeping order in the Middle East.

As war secretary, Churchill could do little to devise such a solution. That was the task of the colonial secretary. Late in the year he asked Lloyd George for the job, and after much hemming and hawing, the prime minister gave way.

On February 14, 1921, Winston strode into the same neoclassical Colonial Office building in Downing Street where he had begun his career. In 1906, when he met Gandhi, Churchill had been the brash baby-faced young parliamentarian eager to make his mark on the world. Now in 1921 he was the balding red-faced middle-aged statesman, carefully choosing his commitments, as he tried to find a way to save Britain’s Middle East empire before it gave way at the seams.

Policy-setting in the Arabian peninsula had always been the prerogative of the viceroy of India, whose representatives in the courts of the Gulf sheikhs were in effect the overseers of Arab affairs.
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Churchill had taken control of the Indian Army from New Delhi; now he took away its control over the Middle East, with a more lasting impact.

Winston decided he would go and see the situation for himself. He demanded every detailed map of the region and ordered one-page briefings from all his resident experts—almost exactly as he would do when he took over 10 Downing Street in 1940.
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His principal assistant on Middle East policy, John Evelyn Shuckburgh, was an old India hand. But Churchill had another formidable figure at his elbow, T. E. Lawrence or Lawrence of Arabia himself, whom he made a special assistant secretary.

In early March, together with Lawrence and Air Force chief Trenchard, Churchill set off for Cairo, picking up Clementine in Marseilles on the way. He told her to be sure to bring her tennis racket. But this was hardly to be a vacation. Cairo was in perpetual unrest; placards on cars and taxis read, “Down with Churchill.” When he went to the Cairo train station to visit Palestine, a mob of fifteen thousand Arabs, furious about the Balfour Declaration,
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screamed “Death to the Jews!” and waved their fists. Churchill understood not a word of Arabic. He smiled and waved back; he thought they were seeing him off.
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Churchill and his team then settled into the plush Semiramis Hotel and began deliberations on March 12, 1921. Over the next ten days they redrew the entire map of the Middle East. The most pressing problem was Mesopotamia. Churchill’s solution was to lump the disparate ethnic groups living there—Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, and Jews—into a single country, which was christened Iraq. T. E. Lawrence’s comrade in arms, the Arab prince Faisal, was offered the throne of Iraq, even though he had never set foot in the country. Lawrence had told Churchill that Faisal would make a reliable British client. To Churchill’s mind, Arab princes were largely interchangeable.
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Most important, the creation of a formally independent Iraq allowed British and Indian troops to withdraw, leaving a string of air bases from Cairo to Baghdad to ensure security in the region and to keep Iraq in the British orbit. In March 1922 Churchill was able to boast in the House of Commons that the Iraq garrison had been reduced to four Indian battalions, while eight air force squadrons, one-third of the RAF’s total strength, were stationed around Baghdad. “There is nothing like it elsewhere in the British Empire,” Churchill said proudly.
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Meanwhile, Faisal’s brother Abdullah received the throne of an Arab state carved out of Palestine, to be called Transjordan. Jews and Arabs living on the other side of the river were promised their own future states.
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Churchill never guessed at the trouble he had sown; Jews and Arabs would be at each other’s throats for the next eighty years. The same was true in Iraq. By lumping together populations that had nothing in common under an alien ruler, Churchill guaranteed eight decades of instability and a cycle of violence that is still going on today. For the region’s Kurds, the Cairo Conference brought especially bad news. Churchill had thought about creating an independent Kurdistan as a buffer state between Turkey and Iraq.
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But instead he left the Kurdish people to suffer under both Turkish and Iraqi masters. The notion of a Kurdish homeland would become only a dream.