Kurdistan During the First World War

by Kamalmadhar Ahmad



In spite of the promises made by the Allied powers in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, the Kurds have so far failed to secure their national independence - a goal achieved by the Arabs and other nations in the region. This book shows how, before and during World War I, the "political manoeuvring" of the Allied powers, particularly Britain, concentrated on securing easy access to the region's oilfields and thus ignored the rights of the Kurds. The role and involvement of Germany and Russia are also discussed in detail. Of major importance are the chapters examining the role of the Kurds in the Armenian massacres. In his dispassionate analysis of this sensitive issue, the author sheds new light on the involvement of the Kurds in the tragedy of the Armenian people under Ottoman rule.


Saqi Books

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

By Margaret Macmillan and Richard Holbrooke (foreword)



A joke circulating in Paris early in 1919 held that the peacemaking Council of Four, representing Britain, France, the U.S. and Italy, was busy preparing a "just and lasting war." Six months of parleying concluded on June 28 with Germany's coerced agreement to a treaty no Allied statesman had fully read, according to MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, in this vivid account. Although President Wilson had insisted on a League of Nations, even his own Senate would vote the league down and refuse the treaty. As a rush to make expedient settlements replaced initial negotiating inertia, appeals by many nationalities for Wilsonian self-determination would be overwhelmed by rhetoric justifying national avarice. The Italians, who hadn't won a battle, and the French, who'd been saved from catastrophe, were the greediest, says MacMillan; the Japanese plucked Pacific islands that had been German and a colony in China known for German beer. The austere and unlikable Wilson got nothing; returning home, he suffered a debilitating stroke. The council's other members horse-traded for spoils, as did Greece, Poland and the new Yugoslavia. There was, Wilson declared, "disgust with the old order of things," but in most decisions the old order in fact prevailed, and corrosive problems, like Bolshevism, were shelved. Hitler would blame Versailles for more ills than it created, but the signatories often could not enforce their writ. MacMillan's lucid prose brings her participants to colorful and quotable life, and the grand sweep of her narrative encompasses all the continents the peacemakers vainly carved up. 16 pages of photos, maps.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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The Creation of Iraq, 1914-1921

By Gary Sick, Reeva Spector Simon, Eleanor H. Tejirian




With the U.S.-led Operation Iraqi Freedom, we are reminded that almost one hundred years ago, Great Britain undertook a similar process of regime change and territorial reorganization in the same region of the world. In the thick of world conflict, with its strategic interests in the balance, the British had to begin planning for the aftermath of the World War that permitted the redrawing of borders and the creation of new political entities. One year after the beginning of World War I, preparations for a new strategic order in the Middle East were already underway. For the Allies -- Britain, France, and Russia -- the task was different from that of the United States today. Yet unlike the Coalition forces that in 2003 proclaimed the territorial integrity of Iraq, the British began from scratch: until 1921, the country of Iraq did not exist. How did this actually come about? And what were the reactions of the peoples living in that contested territory?

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