Papers of the Interdepartmental Conference on Middle Eastern Affairs [‎132r] (263/290)

9
Colonel Wilson had his own idea of what a mandate should be.
We, on the other hand, had been proceeding with the idea of an
identical mandate for Syria and Mesopotamia. He had been reading
that day the French draft of the proposed identical mandate, which
had caused him some surprise and apprehension. It was easier to
apply to Mesopotamia than to Syria, and this was no doubt why the
French wished to make His Majesty’s Government accept it. The
more backward state of the people of Mesopotamia would enable a
British mandatory to exercise a measure of control which the French
Government would never be able to institute in Syria without the
sanction of the Peace Conference and the League of Nations. The
french draft gave the go-by to all the schemes which were at
present under consideration in Bagdad. It blew the provisional
government out of the water. It proposed the formation of an
organic law after a period of one year. The mandatory was to
control foreign relations and to set up mixed tribunals. The native
ruler was to have no regular troops, but only gendarmes. Did
anyone imagine that leisal would accept for one moment a mandate
of this kind ? It was obviously absurd for us to set our hands to it,
at any rate, as far as Syria was concerned. It had been drafted a
year ago under very different conditions, and was now in his opinion
entirely obsolete. He asked whether each mandatory Power should not
make its own mandate, and suggested that this should take the form
of an agreement between the mandatory and the people of the country.
Orientals were perfectly happy it we treated them as independent
parties. This was the cause of our success in Persia, and a some
what similar procedure was under consideration in the case of
1 he French should be told that the Syrian mandate was a
question between them and the people of Syria with which we had
no concern, and that similarly the Mesopotamian mandate was a
question between us and the people of Mesopotamia in which French
concurrence was not necessary.
Mr. Montagu said that the question of the nature of a
mandate should, he thought, be discussed before considering con
stitutional details. He cordially agreed with the Chairman’s
opinion that the mandate should take the form of an agreement
between the mandatory and the people of the country. This
would certainly be better for Mesopotamia, and if he might bring
in an outside consideration, would also be better from the point of
view of India. As the Conference were aware, a certain section of
Mahommedan opinion in India was putting forward the claim that,
on religious grounds, Mesopotamia should remain under Turkish
suzerainty. This contention was of course absurd, but the fact that
the Shiah holy places lay in Mesopotam a rendered it desirable that
the religious sentiments of Indian Shi.di Mahommedans should be
considered. I he word “mandate” was utterly discredited. He
did not know who had invented it, he thought it was General
Smuts, but if proof were needed that it had come to assume a
meaning which was not originally intended, it would be found in
Colonel Wilson’s telegram of the L5th May. He could not imagine
a more astonishing reading of the mandatory idea than was presented
in the last sentence of this telegram, in which Colonel Wilson
expressed the opinion that the mandate system introduced by the
League of Nations had introduced a conception of government
which transcended those associated with “ sovereignty.” If. it were
accepted that the mandate should take the form of an agreement
between the mandatory and the people of the country, the°question
arose with whom the mandatory was to make this agreement In
the case of Mesopotamia, he would have preferred that the people
should be represented by an Arab ruler. The only possible candidate
appeared to be Abdullah, about whom all he heard was increasingly
unfavourable. I he advice which he had received from Mesopotamia,
notably from Miss Bell, and from Mr. Garbett, who represented Mesopo-
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