Baghdad: At the mercy of the mob, July 1958

          Early on Monday 14 July we were awakened by the sound of gunfire and the roar of tanks tearing up the road surface.  The radio station was broadcasting patriotic Islamic songs mixed with martial music (Allahu akbar! . . . Allahu akbar!).  It was obvious that the long-awaited revolution was taking place, so I bolted my cornflakes and drove to the embassy through streets crowded with men carrying sticks and makeshift weapons.  Not until I reached my office in the Chancery building did I learn that the king and royal family had been massacred and the army had seized power.

          It was not entirely a surprise.  All that year tension had been high, the Suez debacle was a recent memory, and Nasserist revolution was in the air.  Indeed, I had spent part of the week-end on a working party clearing away undergrowth from inside the embassy walls in order to give our military guards a clear field of fire in the event of rioters scaling the walls.

           The ambassador’s splendid nineteenth-century residence and the Chancery building stood side-by-side on the Tigris in an enclosed compound about eight acres in extent. The area around the embassy, called Karkh, was poor, almost a slum, in unhappy contrast with the grandeur of the embassy buildings.  Access to the embassy was from a long drive through great iron entrance gates, outside which stood a life-size equestrian statue of General Maude, conqueror of Baghdad in the first world war.

(picture: General Maude’s entry into Baghdad)

          The two-storey Chancery surrounded an inner courtyard in the Turkish style. One of the rooms which gave onto the courtyard was  a so-called sirdab or cellar, which would have been used by the building’s former Turkish occupants as a refuge from the heat of summer.  It was reached by a short flight of steps down from the courtyard, and was protected by an iron grille from floor to ceiling.  The embassy used the main part of the sirdab as a registry, and within it were also the typing pool and communications centre.  It was in this room that all the staff, including the ambassador’s personal servants from the burning residence next door, were now assembling.

          At about eleven o’clock the military guard at the gate reported heavy pressure from a large and growing mob, which had already unhorsed General Maude.  Shortly afterwards the mob broke through the gates, and  proceeded to sack and burn the ambassador’s residence, before turning their attention to the Chancery building.  This, unlike the residence, was protected by grilles on all doors and windows.  Eventually, however, the rioters got through, flooded into the courtyard, and from there into all the surrounding offices, where they helped themselves to anything that was portable and destroyed or vandalised anything that was not.  Boats were brought up the river to take away the heavier furniture  Many of the rioters were now armed with rifles taken from the dispersed military guards, and were firing indiscriminately.  They managed to hit and  kill an elderly attaché on the ambassador’s personal staff as he watched the rioters from the first floor balcony of the Chancery building.

          Fortunately, we were able to take advantage of the rioters’ preoccupation with booty, and  ferried some female members of staff, who had been destroying  documents in offices on the river-front, across the courtyard into the comparative safety of the sirdab.  A courageous Diplomatic Wireless Service operator transmitting from an office on the first floor continued to pass reports  to the Foreign Office until rioters burst into his room and forced him to stop. He got away with his life, but only just.

          A crowd of rioters then descended the flight of steps to the sirdab, and harangued the embassy’s Arabists, eyeball to eyeball through the grille, demanding that we should open it.  They believed we were sheltering Nuri al Said, the veteran Prime Minister, and other members of the old regime, and that we had a store of arms there.  They would not accept our assurances to the contrary, and when we refused to open threatened to burn us out. Perhaps  to demonstrate the seriousness of their intent, one man produced a jerrycan of petrol and others pushed burning newspapers through the grill.

          The ambassador was finally persuaded that we should risk being torn to pieces rather than burned  to death, so we locked the doors of the inner rooms and formed a scrum which would have done England credit at Twickenham, with the ambassador and Lady Wright at the centre.  We then unlocked the grill of the sirdab and slowly pushed our way out through the screaming, spitting, furious mob,  by now hundreds strong, who lashed us with sticks and ripped watches, wallets and the like out of our pockets or off our wrists.  Although this was a relatively painful process, they did us no lasting harm, and, still surrounded by the mob, we inched our way out to the lawn in front, usually reserved for events such as the Queen’s Birthday Party, where an army unit was watching the mob burn down the residence.  The soldiers made no attempt to stop the rioters, but dealt with what they evidently regarded as the main danger by moving up three or four tanks to surround the pathetic group of cowed and bloody British prisoners with their guns pointed inwards.

          There we remained for about four hours in the midday sun, without water or shade, the butt of coarse jokes from the military and the mob. Eventually a senior Iraqi officer came along, saw the absurdity of the situation, and ordered the tanks to withdraw.

          By this time the scrum which had left the sirdab  about fifty strong had been whittled down to no more than twenty as locally-employed and household staff  drifted away to their homes.  All our cars had been set on fire by the mob outside the Chancery, but the Iraqi army organised transport to take the Wrights and other staff to the Baghdad Hotel, which effectively became the embassy until we could clear some working space amid the debris of the Chancery.  Two diplomatic colleagues and I remained in the wreckage of the looted Chancery for the next three days, sleeping on camp-beds, to protect what was left of the embassy’s secrets, but it was weeks before we could use it as an office again. The ambassador’s residence, which had been seriously damaged by fire, was never used again.

          Sir Michael and Lady Wright left Baghdad a few days later, and never returned.  The new ambassador, Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, later Lord Trevelyan , spent the first two years of his stay negotiating compensation for the damage to the embassy.  He records in his memoirs (The Middle East in Revolution) that he asked for £200,000, and the Iraqi leader, General Abdul Karim Qasim,  offered £55,000.  They compromised on £120,000.

Christopher Herdon
June 2006 

Baghdad Nights, Summer 1958

          In a piece in The Observer recently the rebel MP George Galloway said “the best place I’ve been to is Baghdad.  I first visited it in 1993, and fell in love with it, head over heels”.  

          George, your political beliefs are mistaken, your opinions frequently absurd and your choice of friends sometimes disastrous.  But you recognise something about Iraq which few others have seen. I too fell in love with it at first sight in 1957, and have remained in love with its memory ever since.

          In 1958 the Iraqi army murdered King Faisal and most of his court and family and took over the government of the country.  Since then the Iraqi people have endured a succession of appalling dictators of unrivalled barbarity.  It took an allegedly civilised American president and his British side-kick to launch an attack on Iraq far more destructive than any since the fourteenth century Mongol leader Tamerlane constructed 120 towers of the skulls of Arabs he had killed.  Even Saddam could not beat that, though Bush may.

          The people of Iraq are a mixture of civilisations, races, nationalities, religions, sects, tribes such as you would not find anywhere else in the region or, indeed, the world : Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrians, Baluchi, Iranian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Yazidi, Sabaean, Kurdish, Turkmen, Turkish, Shia, Sunni and many, many others.  This produces an amalgam of clashing characteristics not always easy to like or admire, but certainly original and unforgettable.

          Baghdad is not a city for tourists.  As you approach it by air you can hardly see the earth through the thick screen of dust which enshrouds everything.  When they finally open the door of the aircraft you suddenly encounter the heat which hits you like a burning wall, so intense that you would not have thought humans could exist in it.

          They always used to say of Baghdad, even before the coalition forces made their contribution, that half of it was always being rebuilt, while the other half was being knocked down. It is true that apart from a few Abbasid remains there is very little in Baghdad before the 19^th century, and in its present state nobody could call it attractive.  ”Imagine a vast sprawling city on a flat and featureless plain. . .  A huge brown river idles sluggishly between low banks. . . The sky is huge, the land never ending.  At the centre of the city is a vast vaulted market, leprous with beggars, flies and muck, the stench overpowering, the noise cacophonous.  It is a city made for violence, the broad streets fed by stinking side alleys, the drains running down the middle of the street.  Dust in summer, mud in winter.  The tired palms that fill the empty spaces seem no more than a trite sarcasm aimed at the desperate shabbiness and poverty of the city”.  That is a description from March 1962.  It is probably still true of those parts that are still standing.

          But heat and dust and dirt are the concomitants of living in Iraq and you get used to them, even make a virtue of them; you learn to ignore them and to love the city and country especially for those times when you are not afflicted by them.  I used to ride back through the desert past the black tents of the Bedouin as evening was falling, with gentle breezes taking the edge off the day’s frightful heat, the colours of the desert scrub – purple, green and gold transforming the harsh reality of daytime into unutterable beauty so that you hardly dared to gaze for fear it would fade away.  My friend Henry used to say that the beauty of the desert could only be truly appreciated from the back of a horse. “If I were a painter” he said “I would have my easel up here”.  In a country of extreme heat the night takes on an enchanted quality.  Most Baghdadis used to sleep on the roof in summer, under a sky full of stars (except when the khamsin brought the dust in from the desert). But many of the younger ones, like their one-time caliph Haroun al Rashid whose habit it was to roam the city by night in disguise, looked on the night as the time for pleasure.  They used to go down to the mighty Tigris to find or make their own entertainment in the bars, chaikhanas and cabarets of Abu Nawas Street.  In the heat of summer the Tigris dwindles to a muddy stream, and the great area where the river normally flows is given up to straw huts and market stalls, foremost among which are the sellers of samak masguf, big flat fish sliced lengthwise in two then hung on a lattice-work of fragrant twigs around a fire which slowly cooks the fish while you sip your cloudy arak in impatient expectation and watch the people stroll lazily past… You listen to the music of the belly-dancers in the clubs or the blind singers in the open-fronted cabarets, or sit in the chaikhanah playing tric-trac talking poetry or politics while “smelling the breezes”.                 

          The night is never long enough down on the bed of the Tigris.  With the sweet smell of masguf smoke, the plangent tones of the oudh and the words of Abu Nawas robbing you of your senses it is easy to imagine that you too are a poet back in Abbasid Baghdad nine centuries ago:

I saw silver in the fountain,
Still the picture lingers,
     When the pale girl’s little mountain,
     Slipped between the fingers,
     Sleek and prominent and hairless.
If I had my wish,
I’d be water, I‘d be careless
I would be a fish. . . . .

You begin to understand why the city was then renowned for its beauty and culture, and known as the city of peace , Dar-as-Salaam.  And you pray that one day it will again be so.

Christopher Herdon
April 2006

Baghdad Days, July 1958

  
          The revolution of 14 July 1958 was over very quickly. There was no opposition from the army or police, and the Shammar and Dulaimi tribes did not sweep down on Baghdad to save the Hashemite regime as they had always promised they would. The king and most of his family and court were killed, along with many of the palace guards. The hated Crown Prince was crucified over the entrance to the Ministry of Defence, with his genitals stuffed in his mouth, and the veteran politician Nuri al Said was shot while making his escape dressed as a woman; his body was dragged through the streets together with those of several innocent American businessmen who had just arrived from the airport. None was found again. The British Embassy was sacked, and an elderly attache was killed, possibly by a stray bullet. A lot of Iraqis – ministers, senior army officers and civil servants, politicians, journalists – were rounded up and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib, some for a few days and others for many months, but on the whole it was a relatively bloodless affair, and after a few weeks of turmoil Baghdad settled down again to its usual summer stupor.

         As for us in the British embassy, our wives and children were evacuated, while the business community took their usual summer holidays.  Iraqis steered clear of their foreign friends, and diplomats were reduced to entertaining each other.  The only exception was the Indian embassy which insisted on holding its usual national day on the embassy’s lawn, with the heavily guarded Beloved Leader Abdul Karim Qasim and his honchos on show for the first time since the revolution.  A guard inadvertently let off his submachine gun, and the assembled guests, guards and waiters flung themselves to the ground or disappeared into the shrubbery.  It was reported that some days later a bewildered Bulgarian attaché emerged from a first-floor filing cabinet and asked if the shooting had yet stopped.

          Within weeks Iraq established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and a number of other communist states . Forlorn groups of bulky Slavs and other Eastern Europeans began to appear on the broiling streets, or in the souk negotiating dourly for bargains. Short of money and without transport, they seemed to move on foot in blocks of ten or twelve, and it was a standing complaint among Coca Cola sellers that one bottle had to be shared between three.  To sceptical Iraqis, accustomed to trading with western countries, they introduced the ways and products of eastern markets, not always with outstanding success.  At a trade fair one such product was exhibited in a mountain of tins misleadingly labelled CRAP.

          One of the minor annoyances of the post-revolution period was the Popular Resistance Front (PRF) , a sort of juvenile Dad’s Army whose main duty was to police the curfew.  As evening fell they appeared in clusters on the main streets, toting rifles that seemed much too big for them, and stopped passing traffic by sticking their guns through the driver’s window. Since the authorities were always changing the curfew hours, and the PRF punks were the last to be informed, there was some confusion. After a few weeks people began giving curfew parties that lasted from 6 pm to 6am, and an additional PRF duty was that of getting the hosts to keep the noise down. After a few months the accident rate from PRF friendly fire became unacceptably high, and they disappeared.

         Among the novelties brought into being by the revolution were popular demonstrations organised by political parties which sprang into being after Nuri went. I reckoned it was part of an Oriental Secretary’s job to keep a finger on the pulse of political expression, so, dressed appropriately in jeans and a tee-shirt with a revolutionary slogan, I would plod along with the banner-waving rentacrowd chanting the prescribed slogans.  When it was over I would slope back to where I had left my car and return to real life. I thought my luck had run out one day when the demonstration took an unexpected turn and overran my car, with me in it.  I couldn’t see anything because of the press of bodies, but I could hear the crowd muttering “Haya siyasiyya, shu hadha?” (Diplomatic Corps, what’s that ?) as they read my number plate. Then I realised they had lifted up my borrowed Fiat 500 and were carrying me in the direction of the South Gate bridge.  While I was trying to remember how to get out of a sinking car they gently deposited me beyond the main stream of the demonstration and cheerfully went to rejoin their companions: “fi aman Allah, ya haya siyasiyya”“goodbye, diplomatic corps”, they shouted in farewell.

          Although there were moments of relaxation and amusement, the atmosphere was tense. Iraq was isolated from the outside world while foreign governments decided how to deal with the new situation, and the rumour-mill, fed by Nasserist news agencies in Cairo and Damascus, churned out ever more frightful and bloodthirsty stories.  Lacking normal contact with Iraqi officialdom we were cut off from our usual sources of information, and found ourselves relying on the ambassador’s driver to bring us the latest word from the souk. Telephones only worked spasmodically, and the same was true of government offices, services or employees.  The wave of Iraqi arrests continued throughout the summer, to be followed by show trials of leading supporters of the old regime in the autumn..

          Most of the frequent rifle-fire could be ascribed to joie de vivre or PRF enthusiasm, but there were also unexplained fusillades, especially in the neighbourhood of the embassy, where they were probably quarrelling over the loot stolen from the ambassador’s residence on 14 July (in the ambassador’s words “nothing was ever recovered, not one teaspoon”).  We were concerned for the fate of the considerable British community all over Iraq, since the revolution was directed as much as anything against British influence which had persisted since the days of the Mandate.  Our fears were misplaced – apart from the elderly embassy attache no one was harmed, and for most it became a case of business as usual….

          One day the Doura oil refinery, on the outskirts of the city, was set ablaze, and for 36 hours treacly black smoke was blown over us. But this was marginally better than the suffocating red sand that we had had for the previous week when the khamsin brought in the stinging, blinding sand from the desert.  In fact, we were equally grateful for the revolution and the khamsin since each took one’s mind off the other.

Christopher Herdon.
April 2006