BAGHDAD: The cemetery gate groans and the gaunt grave keeper leads the visitor along rows of broken tombs. “There she is,” Ali Mansur says pointing to a sandstone gravestone. “I take care of her. But nobody visits.”
Gertrude Bell, a British traveller, writer and linguist, was one of the most powerful women of the 1920s, an adviser to empire builders and confidante to kings.
An ‘oriental secretary’ to British governments, she is credited with drawing the boundaries of modern Iraq out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.
Now, as her colonial creation stands on the verge of breakdown because of sectarian violence, the woman dubbed the ‘Queen of Iraq’ lies in a forgotten cemetery in Baghdad.
Nearly 80 years after Bell’s death and more than three years after US forces invaded to oust Saddam Hussein, many fear Iraq’s unity is threatened by killings, roving militias and the fear that is uprooting families. Some believe the country could split into three sectarian and ethnic regions.
Prime Minister-designate Nuri Al-Maliki has pledged to put together a coalition government that would unite Iraq’s long competing communities and avert a slide into all-out sectarian and ethnic conflict.
But as history shows, modern Iraq has been a divided nation since its creation.
Bell and her fellow colonialists settled Iraq’s borders by merging the old Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, seeking to secure British interests and with scant regard for tribal and ethnic boundaries.
“I had a well spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq,” Bell, who specialised in Arabic and Persian languages, wrote to her father in 1921.
What emerged was a centralised state with three peoples with differing aims, ideals and beliefs: non-Arab Kurds in the mountainous north, Shias in the south and Sunnis in Baghdad and in the rest of the heartland.
In 1958, a group of nationalist military officers ousted the puppet monarchy Bell had helped install in a bogus referendum in 1921 that passed with 96 per cent of the vote.
She had also helped draw up many of the policies that were later taken up by Saddam’s Baath Party and which exacerbated the centuries-old tensions between Shias and Sunnis.
Kurds were denied self-rule so that London could control Kurdistan’s oil fields and build a buffer against the Russians.
When asked by a reporter recently why Iraqi politicians argued so much over a new government, President Jalal Talabani quipped: “This is the Iraq our British friends created.”
Juan Cole, professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, agreed.
“British policies unbalanced Iraq, and Gertrude Bell played a significant role in that.”
Five years before her death from an overdose of sleeping pills aged 57 in 1926, she wrote: “You may rely upon one thing — I’ll never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain.”
When she was buried, thousands thronged the streets to watch her casket pass as it headed toward the British cemetery in Baghdad’s Bab Al-Sharji district.—Reuters
