HIGHLY revealing details of the late Aga Khan III’s (b.1877: d.1958) bold bid to save the Ottoman Empire from defeat and disintegration in the First World War (1914-18) have surfaced in British archives in London. He offered his services to the British government to work for detaching the Ottoman Empire from its war-time alliance with Kaiser’s Germany provided the British-led Allied Powers offered Turkey honourable peace terms that would maintain its territorial integrity and the Ottoman Caliphate based in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
There is circumstantial evidence to support the view that the late Aga Khan’s proposal was sabotaged by the Zionist lobby in the UK which had extracted a pledge from the British government that it would, after defeating the Ottoman Empire, set up a national homeland for the Jews in Arab-majority Palestine in the Middle East. This was later on confirmed by the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, formally embodied the British government’s tacit commitment to the international Jewry.
The Balfour Declaration was by all tokens a shameful repudiation of the 1915 British pledge to the Arabs to create an Arab State, including Palestine, if they revolted against the Ottoman Empire in support of the Allied Powers. The Arab rebellion, aided by the British Army, against Ottoman rule was successful but the British reneged on their pledge to the Arabs in the hour of victory.
On the third floor of the new British Library building near the Euston Railway station in Central London have been treasured the huge records of the old India Office Library which until a few years ago was located on Blackfriars Road near the River Thames. In a docket labelled L/P & S/11/104 lies a most confidential three-page handwritten letter of the Aga Khan from the Ritz Hotel in Paris bearing the date of March 16, 1916, together with typed memoranda on Turkey and Persia spread over a score of pages, addressed to a senior officer of the India Office in London for submission to the British Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain. The officer was Sir Thomas Holderness, a friend of (late) Aga Khan III.
One of the important handwritten notes on the Aga Khan’s letter from Paris to the India Office in London is that of Sir Arthur Hirtzel, Secretary in charge of the Political Department of the India Office in London. Hirtzel, a Jew, was well known to a brilliant Jewish scientist, Chaim Weizman, a leader of the Zionist movement, who was developing synthetic acetone for making highly destructive explosives for the British armed forces. Of Russian origin, Weizmann had become a British citizen in 1910 and secretly worked in British war-time laboratories to manufacture more lethal weapons for Britain in its war against Germany and its allies, including the Ottoman Empire.
A leading figure in the first World Zionist Congress called at Basel in Switzerland in 1897 by Theodor Herzl, Weizmann’s importance as a leader of the international Zionist Movement had increased in the 1910s and he succeeded in extracting a secret promise from the British war-time cabinet for turning Palestine into a Jewish State after defeating the Germans and the Ottomans.
In 1948, Chaim Weizmann became the first President of the Zionist State of Israel following the UN’s decision to partition Palestine into two Arab and Israeli States. Besides the Jewish gift of synthetic acetone to the British, Britain was becoming increasingly indebted to the Europe-wide Jewish banking House of Rothschild which bestowed big loans on the warring nations, including Germany, France and Britain. Baron Rothschild supported the Zionist demand for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. So did the USA’s Zionist leaders.
In his memorandum on Turkey sent to Secretary Chamberlain in London, the Aga Khan proposed that through an internal revolution in Turkey, the pro-German Prime Minister, Enver Pasha, could be dislodged by a neutralist Turkish leader, Talat Pasha. The groundwork for such a coup in Turkey would have to be done, according to the Aga Khan’s scheme, by non-government British intermediaries negotiating with notables of anti-War groups in Turkey in Switzerland. But the Aga Khan insisted that such an enterprise could be undertaken only if a separate peace accord, preserving the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman Caliphate, was offered to Turkey by the Allied Powers. The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, had his eyes on the hidden oil wealth in Turkey’s Arab possessions.
In his handwritten letter from Paris’s Ritz Hotel, the Aga Khan wrote that he was sending the memoranda on Turkey and Persia, as promised, for the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain “to do as he likes and show them and use them with any other Minister or Ministers or departments. I am entirely at government’s service if anything is to be done or attempted, now or later”, wrote the Aga Khan.
In March 1916, when the Aga Khan submitted his plan for detaching the Ottoman Empire from its alliance with Germany’s Central Powers, the war was not going too well for the British-led Allied Powers. France and Britain were preparing for an offensive in the Somme; the Allies suffered reverses in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia due to bad planning and the tenacity of the Ottoman Army.
The Aga Khan, in his note on Turkey, stressed that his proposal stemmed from his desire to help “restrict the cost and duration of the War without infringing the fulfilment of its vital purpose.” The Aga Khan thought that France, Russia and Italy may be under financial strain and may have to seek loans from the British if the War was prolonged. In such a situation, Turkey’s withdrawal from the War would lessen the military and financial strain on the Allies, according to his assessment. Besides, Turkey’s exit from the War would mitigate the adverse reaction among India’s Muslims who felt agitated over Britain being locked in a war with the Ottoman empire. The Aga Khan’s analysis was that the Ottoman Emperor had been “jockeyed” into a war alliance with Germany much against his own wishes by pro-German Enver Pasha.
In his memorandum on Turkey, the Aga Khan analysed the overall political situation there and named four parties in the scenario: First, a pro-Allies section represented by such notables as Cherif Pasha in Paris but they were considered in Turkey as unpatriotic; Second, the members of the deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid regime who leaned towards the Allies but who were too small and mostly unpopular; Third, the Middle Class with many young Turks and some members of the Royal family who would not want to be under Prussian domination in the event of a German victory. They would be well disposed to a separate peace with the Allies if the Allies offered terms that would retain the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate; Fourth, the pro-German party of Enver Pasha who was in power since 1913.
The Aga Khan proposed in his memorandum to the British Secretary of State for India that if he was agreeable to the proposal, the Aga Khan would take his British friend, Lord D’Abernon, who had served for many years as head of the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Constantinople, to Switzerland and establish contact with the Third Party in Turkey in an effort to have the neutralist Talaat Pasha take over the reins of power from the pro-German Enver Pasha and make Turkey withdraw from the War. The Aga Khan ended his memorandum with these warning words: “But I cannot too strongly emphasise the conclusion that all conversations for bringing about a separate peace would be foredoomed to failure if the offer made to the Porte (Turkey) left her in a position of dependence like another Egypt and deprived her of real authority in Constantinople and the Muslim provinces”.
In his note to Secretary of State Chamberlain, Hirtzl informed him that he had thanked the Aga Khan for his letter. In respect of Persia, Hirtzl said that the line of action suggested by the Aga Khan was the one on which the British were moving ahead. But the Aga Khan’s suggestion vis a vis Turkey, calling for “a pacific arrangement”, postulated “an internal revolution.”
Although no further noting on the Aga Khan’s memoranda appear in these documents in the British Library, seemingly no serious action was taken on his proposal regarding Turkey. The British government’s commitment to the Zionist leaders for giving them a national homeland in Palestine was so firm and categorical that the total defeat of the Ottoman Empire, followed by the gobbling up of its territories in Asia and Europe by the victors, became one of the prime objectives of the Allied Powers’ military strategy and operations in 1917 and 1918.
Under the post-War arrangements, Palestine became a British mandate and Jews from Europe made a beeline for it, buying up Arab-owned lands and planting Jewish colonies in the Arab heartland. During the Second World War and in the years following its end, Jewish immigration from Europe to Palestine surged ominously for the Arabs. In 1917, British General Allenby’s British Indian Army had occupied Jerusalem, ending some seven centuries of Muslim rule. In 1948, the British surrendered their mandate over Palestine to the UN in New York and the UN hastened to impose partition on it. The Israeli State was born but an Arab state in the area given to the Arabs by the UN under the partition plan never came into being.
The Aga Khan’s note of March 16, 1916 on Persia to the British Secretary of State for India suggested administrative changes in Southern Iran. The British were anxious to protect the oil wells of the Anglo-Iranian oil company there and the British government wielded influence over the country’s affairs and its Persian ruler. As the head of the Ismaili community of Muslims in Iran, the Aga Khan had a vested interest in peace and stability in Persia. The Aga Khan proposed to Secretary of State Chamberlain that Britain should ask the Shah to appoint Zil-es-Sultan as Viceroy of the Southern region in Iran, covering Yazd, Ispahan, Shiraz, Kerman and Persian Balochistan. The Aga Khan advised the British government to loan a contingent of the Indian Army to the Persian Ruler for security duties in the region and a group of British officers from India to be posted there in an advisory role.
He even suggested Colonel Sir Percy Sykes, a British resident in Udaipur State in India, as one of the advisers for Iran. Concerned over corruption in the Shah’s administration in Persia, the Aga Khan urged curbs on the squandering of money by the government officers in Tehran and injecting a reasonable order into the State finances there. The Aga Khan explained in his letter to Chamberlain that his followers in Persia would follow his instruction only if the letters containing them bore his personal seal which was kept with his Agent in Bombay in India and who would affix it only on his specific orders. The Aga Khan’s Ismaili followers were spread in many parts of Iran, India, East Africa, the Gulf region, Burma and Central Asia. The Aga Khan wrote that he would ask his mother to instruct his Agent in Bombay to affix his seal on the letters meant for his followers in Iran and hand them over to the government in Bombay for transmission to Persia.
HIGHLY revealing details of the late Aga Khan III’s (b.1877: d.1958) bold bid to save the Ottoman Empire from defeat and disintegration in the First World War (1914-18) have surfaced in British archives in London. He offered his services to the British government to work for detaching the Ottoman Empire from its war-time alliance with Kaiser’s Germany provided the British-led Allied Powers offered Turkey honourable peace terms that would maintain its territorial integrity and the Ottoman Caliphate based in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
