Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

‘Then things improved for us,’ Sheikh Zaude said. ‘Sardai and Solehi left with the land reforms.’ There was no perceptible change in the mullah’s face. He had been asked about that year’s Islamic revolution but he was talking about the Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ seventeen years earlier when the monarch’s reform laws ostensibly curtailed the power of the big landowners. Private holdings were redistributed and landowners could retain only one village. Poor farmers were thereby brought into the economy, although most labourers and farm workers remained untouched. Kahak, it was clear, did not entirely benefit from the Shah’s ‘revolution’. ‘There were good things for us in the reforms,’ Sheikh Zaude said. ‘The number of sheep owned by the villagers went up from two thousand to three thousand. But the village itself, instead of being owned by two men, was now run by the government agent, a man called Darude Gilani, a capitalist from Qazvin. He was a bad man and he collected rent by demanding half of the villagers’ crops.’

There was an old man with an unshaven chin and a cataract in his left eye who now walked to the front of the villagers. From his grubby yellow shirt and broken shoes, I could not have imagined that Aziz Mahmoudi was the village headman and the largest farmer. He looked at the mullah for a moment and said, very slowly: ‘Darude Gilani is in Qazvin prison now.’ Mahmoudi walked across the village square, followed by a small throng of schoolchildren. He pointed to a crumbling, fortified mud house with two storeys, a sign of opulence amid such hardship. ‘That is where Solehi used to live,’ he said, gesturing to the broken windows. ‘Now Gilani is gone too. He will not come back.’ There was no reason why Gilani would return, even if he was released from prison. For on the first day of the revolution the previous February, when the villagers saw the imperial army surrendering in Tehran on the screen of a small black and white television set, they walked down to the fields that Gilani still owned on each side of the railway line. There they planted their own barley as a symbol that the revolution had arrived in Kahak.

Above the blackboard in the village’s tiny clay-walled schoolhouse was a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini. It depicted the Imam bending over the bars of a jail while behind him thousands of Iranian prisoners wait patiently for their freedom. One after another, the boys in the seventh-grade class stood up and recited their admiration for Khomeini. Jalol Mahmoudi was twelve but talked about corruption in the Shah’s regime, Ali Mahmoudi, who at fourteen was head of class, launched into a long speech about the Imam’s kindness to children. ‘I am very pleased with the Ayatollah because in the past regime I was not taught well – now there are three extra classes and we can stay at school longer.’ Master Ali might be expected to receive a firm clout round the back of the head from his colleagues for such schoolboy enthusiasm. But the other children remained silent until asked to speak. And I knew that if I had visited this same village in the aftermath of the 1953 coup against Mossadeq in which ‘Monty’ Woodhouse had played so prominent a part, I would have heard the fathers of these same children talking about the corruption of Mossadeq and the Shah’s kindness to children.

Karim Khalaj was a teacher in his late forties and he said little as we sat in the staff room. He poured cups of tea from a large silver urn and sweetened it by drinking the tea sip by sip and nibbling lumps of sugar at the same time. Outside, we walked across the dusty fields towards the railway line. He was briefly imprisoned in the Shah’s time. He was fired from his job for complaining about a government teacher’s bribery.

The wind was picking up and the trees in the orchard were moving. A far belt of smog moved down the horizon. Somewhere near Kahak, more than a quarter of a century earlier, ‘Monty’ Woodhouse must have buried his guns. Did any of the villagers support the Shah? I asked Khalaj. ‘None,’ he said firmly. ‘At least I never knew any who did.’ Savak never came to the village. It was too small to capture anyone’s attention. So whose picture hung above the blackboard in class seven before the Ayatollah returned to Iran? Mr Khalaj shrugged. ‘They had to put a picture there. Of course, it was the Shah’s.’

In March 1917, 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment carefully peeled a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It was a turning point in his life. He had survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 250 kilometres from its capital of Constantinople. He had then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate and enduring the ‘grim battle’ for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens’s attention was Maude’s official ‘Proclamation’ to the people of Baghdad, printed in both English and Arabic.

That same 11 by 18 inch poster – now framed in black and gold – hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this chapter. Long ago, it was stained with damp – ‘foxed’, as booksellers say – which may have been Dickens’s perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times, witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall eighty-six years later, ‘to having travelled in his knapsack for a length of time’. She called it ‘his precious document’ and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy, of the false promises of the world’s greatest empire, commitments and good intentions and words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens’s death. They read now like a funeral dirge:

PROCLAMATION

… Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Hulagu *your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers … and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile … But you, people of Baghdad … are not to understand that it is the wish of the British government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals … It is the hope and desire of the British people … that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth … Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain … so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.

(sd.) F. S. Maude, Lieutenant General,