the league of nations, 1924-1926

Sinan hanioglu

The eligible inhabitants in the region administered by the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government went to the ballot box on September 25, 2017 for an advisory referendum on independence from Iraq. A fortnight after the vote, Iraqi federal forces and state-backed militias launched a multi-pronged attack on the disputed areas between the federal territories and Iraqi Kurdistan and reestablished central authority. 

For the average observer in the West, this episode was yet another clash among the many ethno-religious groups in the volatile Middle East. Few references were made to the background of the referendum in northern Iraq, let alone mentioning demands for a similar plebiscite to determine the future of the region between 1923 and 1926.

The 1926 1926 Treaty of Ankara between the British mandate of Iraq and Turkey determined the fate of this region. This treaty settled the final post-World War I dispute and awarded the former Ottoman province to Iraq under a British mandate, ending without an armed confrontation. This fact, however, should not lead us to assume that the parties involved reached this settlement easily. 

Turkey wished to retain the region along with the other parts of the Ottoman Empire in which Turks and Kurds had formed a majority. The British, however, did not want to leave the oil-rich region, and categorically rejected the annexation of Mosul by Turkey. The parties could not reach an agreement at the Lausanne Peace Conference that convened in 1922-23 and consequently referred the issue to the League of Nations for settlement.

The League of Nations formed a special commission of inquiry to prepare a report on the region and make a recommendation to the Council of the League regarding the boundary between Turkey and Iraq. The special commission conducted extensive research through consultation of experts, scholars, former diplomats, and approximately 800 interviews with locals to address different aspects of this issue to make a recommendation to the Council of the League of Nations regarding the fate of the region. The final report and its numerous annexes and maps provide the most important data about the pre-1925 conditions of the region. It is an invaluable source to understand the roots of the present-day conflict in northern Iraq. Despite this fact, the scholarship on the issue has generally ignored the report and discussed the matter mainly as an international conflict over an oil-rich region.

The accepted view is that the British, desperately needing to secure oil supplies for their oil fuelled battleships, wished to keep Mosul within Iraq to exploit its resources. As an influential member of the League of Nations, Great Britain used diplomatic channels and other means at its disposal to obtain a favorable decision from the League.  In this explanation of the settlement process, the wishes of the inhabitants of the region were ignored by the British, the League, and the Commission. This judgment had been advanced before the submission of the committee’s report and has prevailed since. 

This article will challenge the accepted view and discuss the work of the commission and its final recommendation to the Council of the League. By making a thorough analysis of the work of the commission and its final report, I will demonstrate that the commission did pay attention to the will of the people in the region though this consideration did not provide the entire basis of the council’s decision. 

Mosul: From Backwater Province to International Question

The Ottoman Province of Mosul

In the late 19th century, Mosul was one of the least developed Ottoman provinces. The geographical lexicon of the empire published in 1898 stated that while the province was economically self-sufficient, it had lost its economic dynamism. In addition, Mosul housed a large number of unsettled populations; roughly 70% of the Muslims, mainly Arabs and Kurds, and almost all the Yazidis scattered throughout the province were nomadic peoples. An overwhelming majority was illiterate. A handbook comparing Ottoman provinces records a mere 7 miles (12 kilometers) of roads, making Mosul one of the least connected provinces and almost totally dependent on transportation along the Tigris River. The Berlin-Baghdad Railway, commissioned in 1903, was supposed to connect Mosul to the outside world. The Ottoman authorities prepared numerous reform projects for Mosul but could not implement any of them to completion. Instead, their main objective was the preservation of law and order.   

In a similar vein, European powers showed little interest in Mosul and its inhabitants. Unlike other provinces of the British empire, no foreign diplomats served in Mosul except for a British consular agent attached to the consul-general in Baghdad. Mosul became a center of European interest  in 1871 when a German scientific expedition reported favorably on the prospects of oil concentrated in the Mosul province. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, several foreign companies and individuals presented reports to the Sublime Porte regarding the rich oil reserves in the Kirkuk sub-province. The discovery of oil paved the way for Mosul to become an international problem.

British Interests in Mosul and the Turkish Petroleum Company

The British representative, Lord Curzon, refuted accusations of trying to assume control of the Mesopotamian oil at the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1922. He stated that “the attitude of the British government with regard to the retention of Mosul is [not] affected by the question of oil.” The British secretary further remarked that he did not know “how much oil there may be in the neighborhood of Mosul, or whether it can be worked at a profit, or whether it may turn out after all to be a fraud.” He was not telling the truth. His letter to the London American ambassador written three years prior reveals unequivocally that he knew all the intricate details regarding the oil reserves of Mosul and their possible exploitation by a British dominated company. 

The British press reported that the political importance of the Province of Mosul far outweighed its economic significance. For the British the most important issue was not marketing revenues but regulating the price of oil and securing its constant flow and in 1902 struggled against Germany, France, and the United States to secure a position in the affairs of Mesopotamia.

After protracted and unsuccessful negotiations with the Ottoman government the British policy-makers conceived an Anglo-German-syndicate under British control to reconcile the interests of London and Berlin. Sir Ernest Cassel, a London banker, formed a British joint stock company (the Turkish Petroleum Company) with a capital of £80,000 for the purpose of acquiring oil concessions in Mosul. British and German diplomats reached an agreement in February 1914 to double the shares of this company, dividing them among the following groups: fifty per cent D’Arcy group (British), twenty-five per cent Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company (British), and twenty-five per cent Deutsche Bank (German).

The British, who received German diplomatic support from this agreement, began pressuring the Ottoman government towards a conferral of a monopoly over Mosul oil. The joint Anglo-German pressure resulted in a carefully worded note-verbale issued by the Ottoman grand vizier on June 28, 1914, a few weeks prior to the July Crisis. While the British claimed that the Ottoman government had granted a concession, legally this was “not a concession but the promise of the concession.” The British, however, regarded it as such, and thereafter exerted their best efforts to protect it.

From Sykes-Picot to Lausanne

The First World War opened a new chapter of the Mosul Question.  For the British, the fate of Mosul was of the utmost concern. They convinced Sharif Husayn of Mecca, who had agreed to launch an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, that Mosul should not be included in his future Arab kingdom. The British, however, reluctantly conceded the civil administration of Mosul to France by the Sykes-Picot agreement on May 16, 1916, awarding Mosul to a future Arab State under French Protection. 

The British had serious concerns regarding the French attitude towards the Turkish Petroleum Company. During the war, Sir Mark Sykes, one of the two architects of the agreement, remarked that “Picot had been ill-advised in taking Mosul.” The British concession was conditional. They made clear to the French that they would have “Mosul without oil;” the French grudgingly agreed. At the conclusion of the war the British decided to change the terms and took Mosul back to their zone of influence. When Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau met in early December 1918 to discuss their joint strategy in the forthcoming peace conference, the former requested Mosul and Palestine. The French premier, who wished to assure France’s security in Europe, resentfully abandoned France’s diplomatic title to Mosul. To appease their French allies, in 1920, the British gave them the 25% share that had been previously owned by Deutsche Bank. The subsequent Treaty of Sèvres signed between the Ottoman Empire and the victors of the First World War in August 1920 granted Mosul to an Iraqi state under British mandate. Seeming the best possible deal, the British would be in control of Mosul and 75% of the shares of the Turkish Petroleum Company that would be charged with the province’s oil, however they faced an unforeseen obstacle.

Although The Ottoman Government had signed the Treaty of Sèvres, the rival nationalist government refused to accept its terms. It adopted an earlier document called the National Pact (Misak-ı Millî) issued by the last Ottoman Parliament in February 1920, as their road map for the dismemberment of the empire. According this document, the Mosul province in which Turks and Kurds enjoy an overwhelming majority should be included in the new Turkish state. 

When the Lausanne Peace Conference convened in the aftermath of the Turkish War of Independence, Turkish representatives requested the implementation of the National Pact. This prompted an impasse and negotiations broke down in February 1923. The conference adjourned two months later, and Turkey continued to insist on a plebiscite to determine the future of the former Ottoman province of Mosul. The British, who did not wish to leave the region to Turkey, rejected this proposal. Lord Curzon maintained that the “poor Kurds . . . do not even know what it [plebiscite] means,” and the issue was nothing but border determination.  Thanks to the American diplomatic support, Turkey also rejected all proposals for recognizing the Turkish Petroleum Company’s rights for exploration. The parties could not reach an agreement in the second round of negotiations as well, and the Allies and Turkey signed a peace treaty that left the Mosul question unanswered, the third article of which stipulated that “the frontier between Turkey and Iraq shall be laid down in friendly arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within nine months. In the event of no agreement being reached between the two governments . . . the dispute shall be referred to the League of Nations.”

The Mosul Question

Theses of the Parties 

As stipulated by the peace treaty, the conflicting parties met in Istanbul in May 1924. At this meeting, the Haliç (Golden Horne) Conference, the Turkish delegation, requested the restoration of the former Ottoman province of Mosul to Turkey in its entirety.  In response, the British representatives proposed a Nestorian autonomous region. There was no room for negotiations and after exchanging diplomatic notes and maps, the parties terminated the conference and referred the matter to the League of Nations. 

At the Council meeting held in Geneva in September 1924, both sides reiterated their theses. The British representative Lord Parmoor restated that the work to be done by the League was “the definition of the frontier line between Turkey and Iraq.” The Turkish representative Fethi Bey, in response, maintained that the point in dispute was not one of a frontier line, but “whether the Province of Mosul as a whole should, or should not return to Turkey.” He, on behalf of the Kurdish and Turkish populations of Mosul, requested the restoration of the entire province, as delimited by the Sublime Porte in 1879, to Turkey. 

The parties then submitted memoranda marshalling the demographic, political, geographic, historical, economic, and strategic reasons on which they based their claim. The Turkish side maintained that the Kurds and Turks ( 263,830 and 146,960 respectively) formed an overwhelming majority in Mosul, while the Arabs with a mere population of 43,210 and non-Muslims with a population of 31,000 constituted minorities. The Mosul province formed an integral part of Eastern Turkey in which the population consisted of Turco-Kurdish elements, whereas the territory of the state of Iraq was peopled by Arabs. According to Turkish authorities, Mosul geographically constituted an indivisible part of Anatolia and presented climatic conditions identical with those prevailing in Asia Minor. Historically, the Turkish side claimed, Mosul had been ruled by Turkish administrators since the Abbasid Caliphate,  highlighting the economic relations of the province with Anatolia and stated that leaving Mosul to Iraq put Turkey in a weaker position from a strategic viewpoint as well.

The British drew a diametrically opposite picture. Their memorandum submitted to the Council provided different demographic figures giving the Arab population as 185,700, Kurds as 454,700, Turks and Turkomans as 65,800, and non-Muslims as 83,800.  According to the British, one-twelfth of the population in the area was politically and racially allied to Turkey whereas nearly five-twelfths, the Arabs, Yazidis, and Christians, were “emphatically desirous of inclusion within Iraq.” The remaining half was a separate people with different leanings. According to the British, Mosul geographically formed an indivisible part of Iraq, historically being ruled by Arab administrators in Baghdad for centuries, and from an economic viewpoint, the economic hinterland of Iraq.  Finally, the British claimed that Baghdad and Basra would be at the mercy of the Turkish army in Mosul if it became a part of Turkey.

Composition of the Commission

Having examined the arguments of the parties, the Council formed a commission of inquiry and sent it to Mosul, to ascertain the sentiments of the local populations, consult the three governments concerned, and submit a recommendation to the League. 

The Council took selecting this body’s members seriously. It prevented the inclusion of individuals from countries that had close relationships and alliances with the two parties involved. It also decided not to appoint an American representative due to their expressed interest in Mosul oil. As a result, the Council set up a commission composed of Carl Einar Thure af Wirsén, a former Swedish army officer and diploma (chosen as the chairman), Count Pál Teleki, a renowned expert in geography and the former Prime Minister of Hungary, and Colonel Albert Paulis, a former Belgian officer and colonial administrator.  The criticism of not including “a Muslim member” makes sense; however, the Council could not appoint an Arab or a Turk. In addition, the Soviet Union became a member in 1934, thus, appointing a Muslim from one of its socialist republics was not a viable option, and in the 1920’s the rest of the Muslim world was either under direct colonial rule or de facto control of the British and their allies. 

Despite briefly occupying the Åland islands with the Germans, Sweden remained a neutral power during the First World War. Thus, choosing a chairman from Sweden seemed appropriate.  Wirsén had served in many Eastern European capitals including Constantinople as the Swedish military attaché. He had no interest in the disputed area, and believing that “the political, economic, geographic, and ethnic situations were so complicated that finding a solution would be almost impossible,” he did not want to be involved. Only at the Swedish government’s insistence did he reluctantly agree to serve. 

In contrast to Wirsén, Count Pál Teleki had served as the prime minister of a defeated Central Power that tried to resist fragmentation after the conclusion of the Treaty of Trianon. Having served as a statesman who attempted to restore lost territories after defeat, he did not seem the best candidate to task with deciding whether a lost province should be restored. There was yet another issue that made the British protest Teleki’s appointment. He had been a member, then president, of the Turan Society during the first decade of the nineteenth century. This society promoted a Turkic origin of the Hungarians and proposed closer cultural and political relations with the Turks. As the editor-in-chief of Turan’s journal, Teleki visited Constantinople on several occasions and became a Turkophile. During this period, he led initiatives to bring Turkish students to Hungarian schools in order to bolster ties between the Ottoman Empire and Hungary. 

Albert Paulis served on the Western front and as such he too could not be considered impartial.  Marc Dassier, who closely examined Paulis’ diaries kept during the commission work, maintained that the Belgian colonel did not take sides, and was mainly concerned with the security of the Christian minority in Mosul.

Gertrude Bell, who gained fame as the Desert Queen and served as an advisor to the Iraqi King, met with members of the commission, remarking that “the President Mr de Wirsen, a Swede, [was] honest, fat, and unintelligent.” According to her, “the live wire [was] Count Teleki, a Hungarian―he is also the danger,” and “Colonel Paulis, a Belgian, half way between the two others in intelligence and well meaning.” Bell further commented that “I’m convinced, I’m positive, that he [Teleki] is definitely pro-Turk and that he is going to do his damnedest to get the Commission to give recommendations which will be pleasing to the Turks.”

The League seemed to have worked hard to form a commission that would not quickly accept the British Thesis and draw a boundary accordingly. This undertaking of the League helps challenge the frequently repeated thesis that the British had won Mosul at the Lausanne Conference in 1923, and that what happened afterward does not merit attention. 

Possibility of a Plebiscite

The commission rejected the British thesis that “a plebiscite would be impossible because the question at issue is a frontier problem and not the fate of the Vilayet of Mosul.” The lines proposed by the conflicting parties were too large for it to be said that the question was merely one of boundary drawing, containing over 800,000 inhabitants of different ethnic and religious groups. Hence, they attempted to gauge the sentiments of the people much to the dismay of the British, who sought a quick resolution based on available records. 

The commission considered a plebiscite in the region to be the simplest way to determine what the inhabitants really wanted until their arrival in the territory when they realized the difficulties of holding a full referendum. The area was under British occupation and therefore the neutrality of the administration could not be secured. Unlike the plebiscites that had taken place in Europe, more than half of the population in Mosul was nomadic and had no registration or identity cards. In Mosul, even if a plebiscite was successfully held, a majority of the nomadic people would follow the vote of their tribal chiefs or land-owners on which they were dependent. 

Despite not choosing the most direct medium to understand what the inhabitants of Mosul wanted, the final report of the commission is not overly Orientalist. Only in one section does it make remarks on the “character and affinities of the various races.” Here, the report attempted to differentiate nomadic and settled people and refrained from tiresome Orientalist clichés like barbarian, savage, uncivilized, and fanatical. The final report criticizes the region’s living conditions rather than its  people and their culture. 

It should be remembered that by 1925 significant concerns had arisen regarding the practicality of plebiscites, and the League had cancelled a number of referenda due to regional difficulties and lack of a sufficient forces. In Teschen, for example, for a mere 880 square miles which contained 420,000 individuals in highly industrialized centers, 3,000 neutral troops and an additional police force were requested. The size of the disputed area in Mosul was 35,000 square miles and had a scattered population of 800,000. The decision was not radical in light of the realities on the ground and in the context of the 1920s.

The Commission’s Work on Ethnography, History, Geography, and Economy

Looking for other sources, the commission decided to carry out independent research and investigations, asking the most renowned scholars of the time to provide information regarding the demography, history, geography, and economic conditions of Mosul. In addition, the commission sent detailed questionnaires to Ankara, Baghdad, and London requesting further information. The commission’s research challenged arguments from all sides by comparing the demographic data provided by Ankara and London, concluding that both sides had inflated the figures of certain populations.  

 In fact, the Turkish authorities had fabricated statistics and submitted them as the results of the 1914 Ottoman census due to internal disturbances and difficulties in Mosul. Even if they had held a census, it would not have shown the respective Arab, Turkish, and Kurdish populations separately, as they counted individuals as members of millets (religious communities) such as Muslim or Greek Orthodox. Likewise, the British assertion that they had “counted the houses and consulted the official Turkish census documents” did not reflect reality. The commission comprehended that the huge discrepancies between the Turkish and British statistics could not be reconciled (for instance, the Turkish statistics provided the number of Turks in Sulaymaniyah as 32, 960 and the British statistics give the same figure as 2), and requested original records from the contending parties. Both Ankara and London declined to accommodate the request. 

Upon finding that “the statistics and maps provided by the two parties [were] far from accurate,” the commission used available data and information from local leaders to conclude that the number of the Arabs was slightly (on an average of 5% to 10%) exaggerated; the number of Turks should be significantly smaller, and the Kurds formed the majority of the population. The commission maintained that “if the ethnic argument alone had to be taken into account, the necessary conclusion would be that an independent Kurdish State should be created, since the Kurds form five-eighths of the population.”  By using expert information and consulting with the available material in books, geographical lexicons, and encyclopedias, the commission decided that none of these should dictate the decision. While it was proven that the area had been under Turkish rule for centuries, it was also true that this rule was exercised through Baghdad. The commission maintained that geographically the area did not constitute a distinct natural region to either to Anatolia or Baghdad and Basra. Economic considerations argued in favor of union with Iraq, though mountainous districts could be separated without inconvenience. 

After rejecting the shared British and Turkish manipulations and assumptions on historical, geographical, economic, ethnic or religious reasons, the commission decided to hold extensive rounds of interviews to grasp the sentiments of the inhabitants.  

Sensing the Pulse of the Population

The Commission invited the Turkish and British governments to appoint assessors who would provide lists of former and current officials (individuals who had served within the last twenty years), municipal council members, local notables, tribal chiefs, sheikhs, leaders of various communities, clerics, and large landowners. Holding 800 interviews, the commission endeavored to understand the local perspectives. The sample was not highly representative, only reaching approximately .067% of the 120,000 eligible voters. That said, it interviewed many of the figures most influential in forming public opinion

A British report describes the interviews held in the town of Sulaymaniyah.  This document reveals that the commission paid close attention to impartiality and examined the lists submitted by the British and Turkish assessors carefully. Furthermore, it reassured the interviewed individuals that their depositions would be kept strictly confidential. It shows that despite British objections, the commission interviewed several pro-Turkish individuals and persons who had participated in rebellions against the British. The final report of the commission provides summary information regarding the consultations undertaken in different towns and villages but does not tally exact figures for any sub-province but Mosul. Here, 53 Arab leaders voted for Turkey while 102 unconditionally for Iraq, 22 for Iraq on certain conditions, 8 were undecided, and 3 declared that they wanted a Muslim government.  In general, members of poorer classes and extreme Arab Nationalists favored Turkey as opposed to the individuals representing the middle and upper classes who wished to stay in Iraq, under foreign control.

In the sub-provinces of Arbil, Kirkuk, Rawandiz, and Sulaimaniyah, a majority of the Kurds interviewed expressed a strong desire for an independent Kurdish state under a European, preferably British, mandate. When informed that this was not an option, they voiced demands for Kurdish local autonomy and the prolongation of British control. The majority of the Turkish declared their wish to join Turkey, though a significant minority declared they prefered Iraq on economic grounds.  The Yazidis were divided equally as pro-Turk and pro-Iraq. Finally, most Nestorians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans, and Jews were primarily in favor of an Arab government under European control but preferred to become part of Turkey were the European mandate to end.

This was a quite complex picture as the desires of the inhabitants of Mosul did not coincide with ethnic lines. Instead of counting votes, the commission made an in-depth analysis, and submitted its recommendations to the Council of the League.

The Recommendations of the Commission and the League’s Decision

Looking at the question from the viewpoint of local populations and assigning a relative value to economic, geographical, political, and strategic arguments, the commission recommended that Mosul remain in Iraq on the following two conditions:

1. “The territory must remain under the effective mandate of the League . . for. . . twenty-five years.

2. Regard must be paid to the desires expressed by the Kurds that officials of Kurdish race should be appointed for the administration of their country, the dispensation of justice, and teaching in schools, and that Kurdish should be the official language of these services.”

The commission further counseled local autonomy for the Assyrians, and advised that all the other Christians, Jews, and Yazidis would enjoy religious freedom and minority rights. 

The Council of the League of Nations, with the exception of the Turkish government, unanimously accepted these recommendations. Turkey protested the decision and recalled its representative from the Council. On December 16, 1925, the Council decided that the frontier between Turkey and Iraq should be drawn along the Brussels Line, as soon as the aforementioned two conditions were fulfilled: Britain and Iraq jointly undertaking the mandatory regime for twenty-five years, and the Kurds in Iraq receiving administrative and cultural autonomy from it.

The British at once accepted both conditions, and announced the measures to be implemented for the Kurdish districts; however, the Iraqi King, who declared that “among the first duties of every real Iraqi will be to encourage his brother, the Iraqi Kurd, to cling on his nationality and to join him under the Iraqi flag,” never applied them. On June 5, 1926, representatives of Turkey, Iraq, and Great Britain signed a treaty confirming the new frontier.  

Conclusion

In his essay entitled “But the Alternative Is Despair,” Nathaniel Berman discusses the tension between the advocates of subjective self-determination and proponents of minority protection in the international arena during the interwar period.  The former maintained that nationalist disputes would best be resolved through institutionalizing the principle of plebiscite. In contrast, the latter rejected the notion that ethnic groups could enjoy formal international legal standing.

As Berman argues, the international law of the interwar period sought novel and innovative solutions to the inter-state disputes such as plebiscites and treaties protecting minorities and their rights. The work and final recommendations of the commission duly reflect this tension. It proposed a settlement not based on a plebiscite, while not totally ignoring local preferences, endeavoring to find the middle ground between subjective self-determination and minority protection.

The recommendations of the commission were not only avant-garde in the standards of the 1920s, but they were also impartial. The commission concluded that the people who had not been given a third option should become citizens of a nation-state with cultural and limited administrative autonomy under a European mandate. In reaching this conclusion, the commission did not pay any heed to British economic interests. The British resolved that aspect of the issue separately through the Red Line Agreement of 1928.  

A high-ranking British official remarked in 1925 that the “enquiries of the commission . . . may have left the seeds of trouble for the future.” He was right. Instead of simply drawing a line of demarcation and awarding a region to a state, the commission requested autonomy and protection for the Kurds and Christians in Mosul.  For these minorities that had not been officially recognized, the special protection rights offered a major chance for their societal and communal transition into the new political age. The Arab nationalists in Baghdad announced a new administrative scheme for the areas heavily populated by the Kurds. Had they even partially implemented these schemes and fulfilled their promises, things could have unfolded differently. The culpability should not be placed on the shoulders of the League or the Commission, but on the policy-makers in Baghdad and London.

A close examination shows that while the League of Nations did not live up to its great expectations and provide collective security, it did serve as an impartial arbiter in the settlement of the Mosul question. By taking the desiderata of the inhabitants of this region into serious consideration, the League gave them a voice and made meaningful recommendations for future administration. Unfortunately, the policy-makers on the ground paid no heed to them and planted the seeds of the modern-day disputes in this region.

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