THE MESOPOTAMIANS.

Hokitika Guardian, 30 October 1920, Page 4

THE MESOPOTAMIANS.

A PEOPLE IN A STRANGE STATE. (By Ferdinand Tuohy). By all accounts we seem to have lost control of the Mesopotamians. Colonel Lawrence, our greatest living expert on the Arab, refers ominously in the Sunday Times to those whose control and understanding of the local population might have been more enlightened. Certainly no people emerging from the war needed more delicate handling than the Mesopotamians, Imagine a million odd Arabs suddenly jerked from their sensual slumber of the ages into a fevered modern world. That was what happened with our coming to the land of the Twin Rivers. Imagine the steam engine, the ocean liner) the {cinema, the camera, the telephone, the motor-car, the newspaper, wireless, the aeroplane, the gramophone, electric light—imagine all these -things, slowly grafted on to us in the West through several gpneratjpps, suddenly sprung upon you in the course of a few years, even months! I remember Colonel Leachpian, who for ten years had studied the native on the spot and was recently treacherously shot, frequently harping on this aspect of the question in his reports and emphasising the hectic state of development in which he found many of the tribes along the Tigris and Euphrates. Becaps e Vi' e need to remember that for two thousand years and more these people, living where (he ,wor|d began, had been marking time, jiving parochially, seeing little farther than the neighbouring tribe, illiterate, without ambition, entirely sensual, and self, centred, talking only of the produce of the soil and pf the bargaining of the, market place, and thinking only of what new deal they epujd do or of what new wife they could buy. Under the Turk the Mesopotamian saw »jo light, and merely lived for gain. We switched on the light, and now our nomad friends are out tp “realise their national aspirations.” I do not know if that vast political intelligence organisation. “The White Tabs'’ still exists as composed during the war, but Intelligence must certainly he the most vital section of the Gen- j era! Staff in Mesopotamia at the. pre-; sent time. Unless we know exactly j what is happening in each of the sixty tribes comprising the native population our far-flung garrisons may at any moment he smothered in the sudden descent of several thousand of the fleetest and most savage horsemen in the world, j Unfortunately we armed many of the more reliable tribes during the war—at least they were reliable at that time—and we must not envisage any likely shortage of desert arms among the cn'emy. About half the population are nomads, the rest sedentary. The nomads live in tents and are ever on. the move,'now into the desert, now back to the Tigris. They flourish in little self-contained communities of a

hundred or so, sowing a crop here, passing on, returning to reap it, and then passing to reap it, and Hiqn pu.ssp'igA p)i onp more. All the timq the qotnqd .'gqqtj-qn breeding his livestock)’ Ygqsjts,’ sheep’-, camels,* cattle nqul|f.f, sglii|ig them, once for barter, iigW for gold, antppsfjijng on. j The nomads are ofstern stuff, loving i a “scrap” yet seldom attacking unless assured, by {heir numbers, of a slash-j ing success'.’” They are divided into tribes and sub-tribes and pay tribute to sheikhs and lesser sheikhs. Often a sheikh rjiay have a following of four or fiye -thousand .foot and a thopsanejjitij’se—(die finest horsemen ip (>]ie lyiclp world. The tribes of Mesopotamia used always lo be bordering on a state of hostilities with, one another, chiefly owing. to religious differences. But one fears that to-day the Mesopotamians are all irpjted under 1 p. common banrjcr and are being inipelled forward 1 by that blind fanaticism known only to Ismm.