ARAB LINE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 July 1941, Page 2

ARAB LINE

EXPERTS ASSIST ALLIES MIDDLE EAST CAMPAIGN. SIR KINAHAN CORNWALLIS’S GREAT WORK. In the present crisis in the Middle East, Britain has no greater assets than the highly trained civil servants who know the leaders of the Arab and Moslem world through long years of service, writes William Yale, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, and former military observer attached to General Allenby’s staff, in the “Christian Science Monitor.” Among these officers one of the most able and distinguished is Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, present British Ambassador to Iraq, who has had the main burden of meeting the Rashicl Ali revolt against British influence. "Britain is fortunate in having a group of men like Sir Kinahan to deal with Arabs who value above all the character and integrity that men of this stamp can show. Nothing so commands Arab respect and admiration as honesty and courage. » As Special Agent of the Department of State in Egypt, I first came into contact with Sir Kinahan at Cairo during the autumn, of 1917. He was then Director of the Arab Bureau, that branch of the British Political Intelligence Service made famous by Colonel T. E. Lawrence in the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” Under the guidance of Sir Kinahan the Arab Bureau gathered secret information about the Arab and Moslem world from the four corners of the earth. CLOSE WATCH ON ARABS. Sitting in a musty office in Cairo reading the Arab Bulletin, confidential publication of the Arab Bureau, I was amazed to find that Sir Kinahan and his staff were keeping as close watch of the Arabs in South America and the United States as of Arab activities in Egypt, India, and the Arab Lands in Asia. At that time in 1917 Sir Kinahan already had spent eight years in the Sudan and three years in Egypt as a member, first of the Suden Civil Service and then of the Egyptian Civil Service. He was comparatively youthful when he became Director of the Arab Bureau in 1916. He was a tall, largeframed, powerfully built young man, his hands and face bronzed by years of exposure to the sun of the Sudan. He was an inscrutable looking person who struck me as resembling that type of American Indian idealised by Remington in his famous statues. One could, not keep from speculating on whether he had Indian blood in his veins.

Instinctively I knew I had met a man who could be trusted when he first greeted, me at the Arab Bureau. My political work brought me into contact with him on many occasions between 1917 and November, 1919. I discovered that my original judgment had been correct; he was a man of integrity, who could be trusted.

Despite a passionate intensity which one sensed without his giving any tangible evidence, Sir Kinahan remained always outwardly cold, hard, imperturbable. In his “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” Lawrence has drawn an unforgettable portrait of Sir Kinahan. Lawrence writes of him: “A man rude to look upon, but apparently forged from one of those incredible metals with a melting point of thousands of degrees. So he could remain for months hotter than other men’s white heat, and yet look cold and hard.”

During the tumultuous weeks and| months which followed the Britishj conquest of northern Palestine and, Syria' in 1918, when rival Arab groups' fought one another in Damascus, when Arab nationalism first came to grips with French imperialism in western Syria and with Zionism in Palestine, Sir Kinahan played an important, but little-known, role. His cool, balanced judgment did much to allay' the turbulent passions of those hectic times. In the summer of 1919 when the American Section of the International Commission on Mandates in Turkey, known as the King-Crane Commission, arrived in Palestine and Syria, the Arabs were seething with nationalism, fanned to the explosion point by President Wilson’s philosophy of selfdetermination. It was then that I was most impressed by the honesty and the well-balance judgment of Sir Kinahan, at the time a colonel in the British Military Intelligence.

Convinced by my own investigation as Technical Adviser to the KingCrane Commission, that the Arab government in Damascus was’carrying on a widespread propaganda against the French, I put the question up to Sir Kinahan in Damascus. He knew I had no documentary proof of my suspicions, he could have said they were baseless. Instead he said: ‘“Yale, your deductions are absolutely correct; but we the British, have had nothing to do with the Arab propaganda against our Allies.”

I knew he \yas speaking the truth. SOLUTION SOUGHT.

In the autumn of 1919 when I went to London with the vain hope of solving the Arab problem by what has been called in “The Letters of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Yale Plan,” the man whose judgment I most depended upon was Sir Kinahan. He, I knew, was conversant with every aspect of the situation. He, I was convinced, was the man best fitted to pass judgment upon the solution of the Arab problem. In 1921 Sir Kinahan accompanied Emir Feisal to the Iraq after the fiasco in Syria. When Feisal became King of the Iraq, Sir Kinahan was made Adviser to the Ministry of the Interior where ho had his finger on the very pulse of the political life of the Iraq throughout those years when the new Arab Kingdom was going through the tribulations of infancy. In 1935 Sir Kinahan retired and settled down on a country estate in England, his strenuous career seemingly at an end. But on the outbreak of war in 1939 he was recalled to the Foreign Office where he served until it became apparent that an experienced diplomat was needed at Bagdad. On February 12. 1941, Sir Kinahan was appointed his Majesty’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Iraq.

The British Government could not have made a wiser choice, for no Britisher has had a wider experience in the Arab world than Sir Kinahan; no Englishman is better known to and so fully trusted by the Arabs as he. It is also fortunate that, just at this time, the British Government has at last consulted H. St. John Philby, whose knowledge of Arabia is wider than that of any European, Mr Philby,

who was under dark suspicion until recently, was taken into protective custody by the British when he left Riyadh, capital of his friend, King Ibn Saud. Recently Mr Philby was able to present before a Home Office Committee his analysis of the situation in the Arab world. As a result, the British Government is in a better position to cope with the crisis in the Arab lands and to understand the problems which confront the Ambassador at Bagdad. If the British successfully meet this crisis in the Iraq and are able to retain the support of the Arab and Moslem world, it will be clue largely to the knowledge, experience, and moral integrity of such men as Sir Kinahan Cornwallis and H. St. John Philby.