(If you ever wondered who the idiot was who decided how the borders of Iraq were drawn, here's your answer.)
11 May 2006 01:03:12 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Ibon Villelabeitia
BAGHDAD, May 11 (Reuters) - 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 World War One. 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....
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...OTTOMAN PROVINCES
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, Shi'ite Muslims in the south and Sunni Arabs 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 percent of the vote....
(more at link)
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