THE MESOPOTAMIANS.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 November 1920, Page 12 (Supplement)

THE MESOPOTAMIANS.

A PEOPLE IN A STRANGE STATE. ])y all accounts we scorn to have lost control of the Mesopotamians, wrote Ferdinand Tiiohy, in the London Daily Mail a few weeks ago. Colonel Eaw ; | rence, our greatest living expert on tlie j Arab, refers ominously in the SumUy ; Times to those in control, whose nn- j derslanding of the local population j might have been more enlightened. | Certainly no people emerging from the j war needed more dclic.ite handling than j the Mesopotamians. Imagine a million odd Arabs suddenly jerked from llieir sensual slumber of the ages into a levered modern world. Thai was what happened with our coming to the laud of the Twin Kivers. Imagine the steam engine, the ocean liner, the kineuia, the camera, the telephone, the. motor-car the newspaper, wireless, tie aeroplane, the gramophone, electric light—imagine all these things, slowly grafted on to us in the West through several generations, suddenly sprung upon you in the course of a few years, even months! 1 remember Colonel Leachninn, who Jin' ten years had studied the native on the spot, and was recently treacherously shot, frequently harping on this aspect of the-, quest ion in his reports, and emphasising (he hectic slate of de.vclonment in which he found many of the tribes along the Tigris and Euphrates. Because we need to remember that for two thousand years and more these people, living whore the world began, had been marking time, living parochially, seeing little further than the neighbouring tribe, illiterate, without ambition, entirely sensual and selfcentred, talking only of the produce of the soil and of the bargaining of the market 'Jilace, an.', thinking only of what new deal they could do or of what new wife they could buy. Under the Turk the Mesopotamians saw no light, and merely lived for gain. We switched on the light, and now our nomad friends are out to "realise their national aspirations." I do not know if that vast political inlelligv v organisation "The White Tabs" .-.lill exists as composed during the war. but Intelligence must certainly be the most vital section of the General Stall' in Mesopotamia at the present time. Unless we know exactly what is happening in each of the sixty tribes comprising the native population our far-flung garrisons may at any moment be smothered in the sudden descent of several thousand of the fleetest and most savage horsemen in the world. 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 shortag"-.' of desert arms among the enemy. Aliout half the population are nomads,' the rest sedentary. The nomads live in tents and are ever on the move, now into the desert, nowback to the Tigris. They flourish in little self-contained communities of a hundred or so, sowing a crop here, parsing on once more. All the time the nomad goes on breeding bis live stock goats, sheep, camels, cattle, poultry, selling them, once for barter, now for gold, and passing on. The nomads are of stern stuff, loving n ''scrap," yet seldom attacking unless assured by their numbers, of a slashing success. They are divided into tribes and subtribes, and pay tribute to sheikhs and lesser sheikhs. Often a sheikh may have a following of four or five thoii-

sand foot and a thousand horse—the finest horsemen in the wide world. The tribes of Mesopotamia used always to be bordering on a state of hostilities with one another, chiefly owing to religious differences. But one fears that to-day the Mesopotamiaus arc all united under a common banner, and are being impelled forward by that blind fanaticism known only to Islam.