Ghosts of Empire (11 page)

Nuri, despite his political skill, was losing his touch too. He had become even more secretive and suspicious. He was by now nearly seventy years old. He confided in fewer and fewer associates; he never used documents; no records were taken of his meetings. He relied more than ever on his extraordinary memory and kept a revolver close at hand. The conclusion of the Baghdad Pact, or the Pact of Mutual Co-operation between Iraq and Turkey, signed on 24 February 1955, was a watershed. Pakistan, Iran and Great Britain later joined the Pact. Egypt objected, and across the Cairo airwaves radio announcers appealed to the Arab masses ‘in the name of millions of Arabs' to save ‘Arabs from the menace of military alliances'.
³⁷
The 1956 Suez debacle, the year after the Baghdad Pact was signed, embarrassed the British and further damaged the reputation of Nuri As-Said.

When Suez broke, the Iraqi ruling order seemed to be decadent and obsolete. There was a general feeling that the Hashemites were passing slowly but decisively from the Iraqi scene. It had been only in 1953 that young Faisal II had taken over his kingdom, and the Iraqi Cabinet, resplendent in evening tails, had greeted the young King at the end of his oath-taking ceremony. That year he had been given a pair of silver candelabra from the Duke of Gloucester on behalf of the young Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.
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By 1957, this all seemed like a distant memory, as restless and volatile crowds gathered menacingly in the streets of Baghdad.

There had been uprisings in the Iraqi capital before. In 1948 and 1952, there had been demonstrations, with protesters complaining about increased living costs and poor wages. These had been quelled, although hundreds had been killed. In 1956, a further uprising had been sparked by the attack on Egypt by Britain, France and Israel in October that year, an external event, which had provoked a large proportion of urban opinion. On 1 November 1956, martial law was declared in Baghdad, and there had been serious riots in Najaf and Mosul, as well as in the capital itself. Nuri now controlled the police, the army and the press. His paranoia was such that he was wary of giving the army the ammunition it needed. He resorted to ‘a judicious distribution of ammunition' in order to ‘hold the army in check'.
³⁹

The revolution that eventually broke out in Iraq in July 1958 has been aptly described as a ‘landmark in the history of the Middle East'.
⁴⁰
In May, civil war erupted in Lebanon which Hussein, King of Jordan, Faisal II's cousin and Harrow contemporary, feared would spread to his kingdom. Hussein requested that Iraqi troops be sent to Jordan to protect its borders. Nuri and Faisal II agreed to send two brigades, and these were promptly ordered to begin their march west to that country. Nuri, perhaps reluctantly, agreed to issue the brigades with the ammunition which would be needed to fulfil King Hussein's request. The relevant army units, based in barracks seventy miles to the north of Baghdad, were ordered to march southwards to the trans-desert road. One brigade was under the command of Brigadier Abdul Karim al-Qasim, an austere, non-smoking bachelor.
The other was under Colonel Abdul Salam Arif. The two brigades marched south and converged on Baghdad in the early hours of 14 July.
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The night of 13 July was a leisurely affair at the Qasr al-Rihab, the Royal Palace in Baghdad. The King and his court were watching a private performance of the musical
The Pajama Game
, a silly romance, set in a pyjama factory, which enjoyed wide popularity in the 1950s. At about five o'clock in the morning, Colonel Arif's tanks arrived at the palace. Behind them, a crowd of young men started to congregate. The palace was surrounded, but for a while the guards resisted. On hearing gunfire, the King, the Crown Prince and other family members and servants came down into the courtyard to face their enemies. The barber who went daily to the palace to shave the King and the Crown Prince had been admitted at a side door as usual, but escaped as soon as he saw the King and Crown Prince talking in the courtyard to a semicircle of officers on the other side. It was now about 7.45 in the morning. As the royal entourage chattered, a captain of Arif's brigade emerged from the front entrance with a submachine gun in his hand and fired a volley of shots. This prompted a ‘burst of bullets from every direction'. The King, the Crown Prince and two servants fell, mortally wounded, to the ground. Two of the revolutionary officers also fell.
⁴²

The events of 14 July stirred the Baghdad crowds to new heights of fury. One witness recalled how the ‘mob arrived at the palace in buses, on lorries, on anything they could lay their hands on'; their anti-British sentiments were all too obvious: all that was required to incite them to more acts of violence was a ‘few hysterically screamed words about filthy Imperialistic British'.
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One group of enraged youths seized the Crown Prince's body and dragged it for miles. By the time it reached King Faisal Circle, the body was in shreds. What was left of it was mutilated, cut into pieces and hung from a telephone pole in front of the Ministry of Defence.
⁴⁴
But where was Nuri As-Said? When news of the revolution first broke, he had immediately gone into hiding. For a day and a night he took refuge with a friend and then, on the morning of the 15th, he left the house in a car, dressed as a woman, in a black chador. The driver was heading for another friendly house but was delayed in congested traffic. At this point, Nuri rashly decided to run for safety. He got out of the car, only
to trip in the street, whereupon–as if in grim echo of
The Pajama Game
–a boy of about fifteen glimpsed his pyjamas under the chador. No Iraqi woman would wear pyjamas beneath her chador, and the boy, in amused surprise, half jokingly cried, ‘There goes Nuri.' Nuri was immediately shot dead. The mob went wild, and the Prime Minister's body was mutilated and dragged through the streets. Thousands of Iraqis saw the headless, armless, legless trunk of a body being pulled behind a lorry. The body was believed to be Nuri's.
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The royal palace was pillaged and burned, as was Nuri's home. The British Embassy was attacked by marauding groups of young boys, ranging in age from twelve to twenty. For two days, these gangs, reinforced by older men, roamed wildly through Baghdad, without any restraint from the civil authorities.
⁴⁶

Throughout July British families left Iraq, as they no longer felt safe. The British, perhaps dazzled by Lawrence of Arabia and late Victorian romanticism, had been steadfast in their support for the royal family they had established, but Iraq had moved on. The world of the Anglo-Arab Hashemites–their well-cut suits, their Harrow School accents, their easy, urbane charm–had been brutally destroyed by a violent Baghdad mob, who knew nothing of that world. Iraq was now a republic.

A traditional Anglican service commemorating the life and legacy of the Hashemite rulers of Iraq was held on 30 July 1958 in the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy, just off the Strand. The congregation sang Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing'. The priest quoted Ecclesiasticus: ‘Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.' The Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order gathered to mourn their fallen comrades. King Faisal, Crown Prince Abdullah and General Nuri As-Said had all been honorary Knights of the Order.

In London there was a stunned reaction to the demise of the Hashemites in Iraq. In a letter addressed at the end of August to Stewart Perowne, the friend of the Iraqi royal family, the seventy-five-year-old Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, who had been ambassador to Baghdad in the crucial years 1941–5, spoke of a ‘conspiracy of silence as to what [had] happened' in Iraq. London was adapting itself to the new situation. Sir Kinahan, known as Ken, detected ‘a strong tendency to decry the old regime and to give them no credit at all in what they did'. He went on to suggest that the ‘Royal Family and Nuri and many others [had] served their country devotedly' and added, less controversially, that ‘they [had] stuck to us in bad times as well as good'. The old Ambassador recognized that London had ‘to get along with the new regime on account of oil and business and politics', but that was no reason for ‘showing ingratitude' to the old regime. Such coldness ‘disgusted' him.
¹

Other British commentators were less sentimental about the fall of the Hashemite regime. To the writer James Morris, later Jan Morris, who wrote one of his best books on the Hashemite kings, the Iraqi monarchy had been a ‘parasitical fake'. Its collapse was just a sign that the empire too
was doomed. The Hashemites provoked the young journalist's scorn and inspired some of his most impassioned prose. The Anglo-Arab monarchies, he wrote, ‘were born into the swirl of a dying Empire, in the last decades of the Viceroys and the ironclads, and they remained for forty years the friends, allies, wards, clients, pensioners or embarrassments of Great Britain. When she was powerful, they were secure; when she slid into impotence, they crumbled or lost their meaning.'
²
The special connection between Britain and the Iraqi leadership had been broken. The subsequent history of Iraq, with its instability, massacres and wars, shows how completely the attempt to establish a stable regime had failed.
³

It was only a matter of time before pressure would be applied to the Iraq Petroleum Company, the economic instrument and symbol of Britain's dominance over the country. Although the Iraqi government had, since the 1940s, enjoyed large oil revenues, it had not been allowed to acquire a stake in the IPC. This was a major grievance of the nationalists and the Iraqi people generally. The IPC had been intransigent when the government had asked it to build refineries in Iraq. By 1951, only one small refinery had been built, and that had been completed in 1927. The issue had been important to the Iraqi government. Refineries would increase the country's income, because refined oil could sell for a higher margin than the crude product. All professionals in the oil industry confirmed that it was in the marketing and refining of the product that bigger profits could be realized. Refineries would also provide employment for more workers, and would enable the Iraqis to learn the techniques necessary in the advanced stages of oil production. By the end of 1947, the IPC employed fewer than 15,000 workers, in a population of nearly 5 million. The increase in production of crude oil in Iraq had been impressive, though not as spectacular as in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Events in the Middle East in the early 1950s had altered the climate in which the IPC operated. Early in 1951, the Saudis had reached an agreement with Aramco (the state-owned national oil company of Saudi Arabia) which replaced the existing royalty payment with a 50–50 profit-sharing arrangement. This formed the basis of Iraq's own agreement with the IPC in 1952.
⁴

In Iran, the early 1950s had witnessed increasing agitation against the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company, which owned a quarter of the IPC and would later be known as British Petroleum). The nationalist leader, Mohammed Mossadeq, who had tried to nationalize Iranian oil, had been toppled in a plot organized by the CIA in 1953. Any attempt to nationalize the oil in Iraq met with serious difficulties, not least because of the lack of technical expertise among the Iraqis. The IPC had failed to train enough Iraqis to manage the oil industry. There was also a lack of financial resources, as the assumption had always been that only foreign capital could exploit Iraq's rich natural resources.
⁵

Yet, by 1960, the oil-producing countries, mainly centred in the Middle East and the developing world, were beginning to flex their muscles. It was in that year that a meeting was held in Baghdad that would change the nature of the oil industry and alter the context of Middle Eastern politics. The meeting itself lasted from 10 to 14 September, only five days, but it gave birth to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, more widely known as OPEC. Its founding members were Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela. This development weakened the grip of the Western oil companies on the setting of global oil prices.
⁶

Iraq's revolutionary regime of 1958 was led eventually by Brigadier Abdul Karim al-Qasim, the forty-four-year-old unmarried army officer who had initially shared power with Colonel Arif. Qasim was noted for his austerity, and the egalitarian character of his regime brought much social reform, especially in the system of landholding, as well as changes in the ownership of Iraq's oil resources.
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Already in the spring of 1959, the Qasim government had embarked on a series of negotiations with the IPC which lasted two and a half years. They culminated in an ultimatum which Qasim himself delivered on 11 October 1961. The Iraqi government had all along demanded a 20 per cent share in the company, as had been promised in the original San Remo Agreement in 1920. Qasim now undertook that his government would give up the demand for the 20 per cent share if the IPC relinquished 90 per cent of its concession territory and increased the share of the profits given to Iraq. The company, as was by now customary, rejected the proposal.
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On 11 December 1961, Qasim, the austere brigadier, announced Public Law 80, which dispossessed the IPC of 99.5 per cent of its concession territory.

Iraqi politics became unstable in the years following the revolution of 1958. The Ba'ath Party, which played a significant role in the subsequent history of Iraq, had been introduced from Syria in 1949 by Syrian students studying in Baghdad. By 1951 the party had only about fifty members, but it continued to gain support, particularly among young men whose families had originated in the Shia south of the country. After 1958, military officers began to be drawn to its nationalism and modernizing ideology. The Ba'aths also espoused more radical, socialistic ideas which appealed to a people that had witnessed greater disparities of wealth within society as a consequence of increasing oil money. It was these army officers, predominantly Sunni, who organized the coup that toppled Qasim's government in February 1963. The coup led to the grisly demise of Qasim, shot in front of television cameras ‘for the whole world to see'. He asked not to be blindfolded, so that he would be able to ‘see the bullet'.
⁹
It was like a gangland execution.