Self-determination and State-building: Mosul Before the League of Nations, 1918–1932

ABSTRACTThis article reconstructs the place of ‘self-determination’ and its conjunct, ‘minorities’ rights,’ as legal languages in the history of Iraq from the British occupation until its League of Nations-supervised independence in 1932. While historians understand the development of the Arab-led mandatory regime and its relationship to international, League-mediated politics, the potential for the politics of ‘self-determination’ to have created radically different geopolitical outcomes, particularly in the northern, heterogeneous province of Mosul, has only recently been acknowledged. Rather than treat self-determination as an analytical category, this article begins from the perspective of the concept’s novelty in the Middle East in 1918. State-building in Iraq through independence, I argue, depended on manipulating the doctrinal slippages between ‘self-determination’ and ‘minorities’ rights’ as much as it did on institutional processes. Through the emergence of the mandatory regime and in two critical League Council decisions – the Mosul territorial arbitration of 1925 and Iraqi independence proceedings in 1932 – the nascent Arab state, the British Empire, and the inhabitants of Mosul contested the meaning of self-determination. Their arguments had far-reaching implications, some unintended, for the shape of inter-war international politics and constitute an important – and earlier – episode in the interplay between decolonisation and the centring of the nation-state in international law in the twentieth century.KEYWORDS: IraqMosulmandatedecolonisationinternational lawlegal historyself-determinationminoritieshuman rights Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 CAB/24/176: Memorandum (24 Dec., 1925), “The Mosul Question at the League of Nations,” Report by Leopold Amery.2 Makko, “Arbitrator in a World of Wars”.3 Amery entered politics in 1911, obtaining a seat in the House of Commons as a conservative, which he would hold until 1945. He held various positions in the War and Colonial Offices, most notably the first lordship of the Admiralty from 1922 to 1924, when he was appointed Colonial Secretary, succeeding Winston Churchill. Over the course of his career spanning journalism, intelligence, and the Admiralty, he had cultivated a near-religious devotion to the British Empire as the ‘final object of patriotic emotion and action.’ Lavin, “Amery, Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett (1873-1955),”; online ed., accessed 3 July, 2020.4 See, e.g., Amery, My Political Life – Volume 2. For more on Amery’s political thought, see, e.g., Pedersen, The Guardians; Grayson, “Leo Amery’s Imperialist Alternative to Appeasement in the 1930s,”.5 See Silverfarb, Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East, ch. 4.6 Much has been written on the history of the Kurds in Iraq, although the bulk of this scholarship focuses on the latter half of the 20th century. For broader historical perspectives, see Danilovich, Iraqi Kurdistan in Middle Eastern Politics and McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds. Nelida Fuccaro provides a good account of Kurdish mobilisation in Syria and Iraq during the mandates period in her essay, “Minorities and ethnic mobilisation,” For a recent treatment of Kurdish mobilisation in the context of broader political contestation in the Middle East during the “Long Great War,” see Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 179, 242, 279.7 For an account of the Assyrian tragedy of 1933 and its historical context, see e.g. ch.4 in Silverfarb, Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East.8 This argument is perhaps most forcefully articulated by legal scholar Antony Anghie, who, writing in the ‘Third World Approaches to International Law’ (‘TWAIL’) tradition, argues that the Mandates System encapsulates “a number of shifts in the history of international law: […] from conquest to decolonization; from colonialism to neo-colonialism; from exploitation to development.” The various global institutions that structure the relations between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ states, Anghie continues, “derive in fundamental ways from the Mandate System.” Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, 194, 263. Adom Getachew and Balakrishnan Rajagopal echo similar arguments in Worldmaking after Empire, 2019 and International Law from Below, 2003, respectively. For a more classically liberal account, see Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics. Few have substantiated these broader claims with focused case studies or, as Pedersen points out, rigorous archival research; see her critique of Anghie in her essay, “Back to the League of Nations”, AHR 112.4 (Oct. 2007), 1104. Within the international legal scholarship, Arnulf Becker Lorca argues, contra the TWAIL view of the interwar years, that ‘semi-peripheral’ or non-Western elite lawyers and scholars successfully pushed against the ‘standard of civilisation’ during this period, paving the way for a more inclusive international law framework to emerge in the mid-century. Mestizo International Law, 226.9 Donaldson, “The League of Nations, Ethiopia, and the Making of States”; Pedersen, “The Meaning of the Mandates System”; Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq – in 1932; Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States; Wheatley, “Central Europe as Ground Zero of the New International Order,” 901-903, 906-910.10 See, e.g., Silverfarb, Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East; Tripp, A History of Iraq; Luizard, La Formation de l’Irak Contemporain; Sluglett, Britain in Iraq; Dodge, Inventing Iraq; Satia, “Turning Space into Place”; Luizard, “Le Mandat britannique en Irak”; Satia, “Developing Iraq”; Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq – in 1932: The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood,” 976 (see also ch.11 of The Guardians).11 Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq – in 1932,” 976; Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 5-7, 13-20.12 Pedersen, The Guardians, ch. 11.13 This evidence parallels findings discussed in the introduction to Benjamin White’s study of French Mandate Syria, whose intervention has inspired some of the theoretical issues raised here. White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East, 2.14 Following Adom Getachew and others, this article moves beyond stable definitions of self-determination. Worldmaking after Empire. Indeed, though I disagree with her characterisation of the interwar period and her broader periodisation, I draw inspiration from her insight that examining the tensions in its definition from a diachronic perspective can lluminate the contingent historical processes by which the nation-state ‘triumphed’ following empire. See also, e.g., Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 1996; Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint”; Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation; Mantena, “Popular Sovereignty and Anti-colonialism,”, 297-319.15 Tripp, A History of Iraq, 32.16 Ibid.17 IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: memorandum (14 Dec. 1918), “Kurdistan: Note by Political Department, India Office,” 203.18 IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: memorandum (12 Sept. 1919), “Memorandum by Colonel C.N. French, Military Intelligence, Cairo.”19 Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 167.20 IOR/L/PS/10/755: telegram (28 Nov., 1918), Secretary of State for India (Montagu) to Political Dept., Baghdad.21 Manela, The Wilsonian Moment; Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 151-196.22 In the original French: “l'affranchissement complet et définitif des peuples très longtemps opprimés par les Turcs et l'établissement de gouvernements et administrations nationales puisant leur autorité dans l’initiative et le libre choix des populations indigènes.” Quoted in Henry Laurens, “1916-1920. Le grand partage,” L’Histoire; online ed., accessed 3 June, 2017. See also the translation of the King-Crane Commission given in 1919. Henry Churchill King & Charles R. Crane, The King-Crane Commission Report, August 28, 1919 (online resource hosted by Brigham Young University Libraries, World War I Document Archive, accessed 8 June, 2017).23 IOR/L/PS/10/755: memorandum (22 February, 1919), “Self-determination in Mesopotamia,” Gertrude Bell. Bell had a distinctive career in Middle East imperial politics, not least because she rose through the ranks as a woman in a nearly universally male institution. Her knowledge of several languages, which was largely self-taught, captured the respect of a wide range of imperial officials. Viceroy Lord Hardinge appointed Bell to the newly created Arab Bureau at the end of the War, a unit attached to the MEF to evaluate long-term British strategy in Mesopotamia/Iraq, among other duties. Lukitz, “Bell, Gertrude Margaret Lowthian”.24 Ibid.25 Arnold Toynbee, ‘The Settlement of Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula’, 13 Nov. 1918, quoted in Martel, ‘The Origins of the Chatham House Version’.26 Tripp, A History of Iraq, 30.27 Ibid. See also Luizard, “Le Mandat britannique en Irak,” 361–84.28 In fact, many veterans from the Indian regime found influential posts in the nascent civil administration in Iraq, including Percy Cox, Arnold Wilson, and Edward Noel, all of whom we shall shortly meet.29 IOR/L/PS/10/755: telegram (10 Dec., 1918) Civil Commissioner (Wilson) to Secretary of State for India (Montagu).30 IOR/L/PS/18/B332: memorandum (27 Aug., 1919), “Mesopotamia: British Relations with Kurdistan,” Political Dept., India Office. Mahmud was a kind of communal figurehead – a ‘tribal leader,’ as the British understood it – in Sulaimaniyya who would play a central role in the British Kurdistan policy.31 For the bureaucratic structure of the initial British administration in Iraq, and the influence of paradigms of rule borrowed from India, see Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 13-17; Tripp, A History of Iraq, 36-39.32 IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: memorandum (14 Dec., 1918): “Kurdistan: Note by Political Dept., India Office”.33 The Kurds were ‘strongly anti-Arab,’ the Political Officer of Mosul observed as early as December of 1918. IOR/L/PS/10/755: telegram (26 Dec., 1918), Political Dept., Baghdad to Secretary of State for India (Montagu). By the summer of the next year, officers such as Colonel C.N. French argued that the ‘inclusion of the Southern Kurdistan States in Mesopotamia would cause friction with Kurds and might create frontier country necessitating permanent military expense. IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: memorandum (12 Sept. 1919), “Memorandum by Colonel C.N. French, Military Intelligence, Cairo.”34 See Marsden & Hopkins, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier; Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 277.35 Tripp, A history of Iraq, 34, 53; Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 77-78.36 Ibid.37 E.J.R, Precis of Affairs in Southern Kurdistan during the Great War (Baghdad: Printed at Government Press, 1919), 6.38 For more on the 1897–98 ‘Frontier War,’ see Agha, “Sub-imperialism and the Loss of the Khyber,”: Lord Curzon considered his 1901 legislation creating the North West Frontier Province as one of his major policy achievements. It survives to this day as an administrative entity, re-constituted as the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan in 2010. See e.g. Marsden & Hopkins, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier; Haroon, Frontier of Faith.39 IOR/L/PS/10/781/2: meeting minutes (20 Aug., 1919), “Inter-departmental Conference on Middle East Affairs, Minutes of Meeting held at the Foreign Office, Whitehall.”40 Grilled by Labour and Tory MPs alike, War Office Financial Secretary Forster promised in a Commons sitting on 6 November, 1919 that ‘we are doing our best to bring back [our armies] as rapidly as possible.’ United Kingdom: Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th series (Thursday, 6th November, 1919).41 IOR/L/PS/10/755: telegram (22 Nov., 1918), Secretary of State for India (Montagu) to Civil Commissioner, Baghdad (Wilson)42 IOR/L/PS/10/755: telegram (8 Dec., 1918) Civil Commissioner, Baghdad to Secretary of State for India.43 IOR/L/PS/10/755: telegram (10 Dec., 1918) Civil Commissioner, Baghdad to Secretary of State for India.44 IOR/L/PS/10/755: dossier/report (Jan., 1918) “Self-Determination in Iraq,” ed. Arnold Wilson.45 IOR/L/PS/10/755: memorandum (22 February, 1919), “Self-determination in Mesopotamia,” Gertrude Bell.46 Not to be confused with the ‘Cairo Conference,’ which convened in 1921.47 IOR/L/PS/10/755: meeting minutes (Jan., 1919), “War Cabinet: Eastern Committee Resolutions Regarding the Disposal of Middle East Territories.” 48 IOR/L/PS/10/755: telegram (14 Feb 1919), Secretary of State for India to Political Dept., Baghdad. Emphasis mine.49 See IOR/L/PS/10/781/2: memoranda (4 Sep 1919), “Secretary’s Note on the Situation in Kurdistan, Inter-departmental Conference on ME Affairs.” See also E.J.R, Precis of Affairs in Southern Kurdistan during the Great War (Baghdad: Printed at Government Press, 1919), 18. An elusive figure, Noel was cut in the mould of Edwardian spies who valorised interpersonal, relational, and intuitive forms of intelligence gathering, rather than overtly empirical forms of knowledge-making. British Library, “Edward William Charles Noel – political officer and spy,” British Library Untold Lives Blog (14 April, 2016), online ed., accessed 5 June, 2017; see also ch.3 in Satia, Spies in Arabia. For a broader overview of imperial security services during the inter-war period in the Middle East, see Thomas, Empires of Intelligence. Notably, Britain’s program of spies on the ground cultivating ‘local knowledge’ would form the epistemological foundation for its later, violent efforts to pacify the Iraqi countryside through its RAF aerial bombing campaigns. Satia, “The Defense of Inhumanity,”.50 The exception is a small diary he kept. He was famously terse in his personal writings, and this diary is largely a receipt of expenses he incurred. IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: report (Aug., 1919), Note on the Kurdish Situation, Major E.W.C. Noel.51 Ibid, 3.52 IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: memorandum (12 Sept. 1919), “Memorandum by Colonel C.N. French, Military Intelligence, Cairo.”53 IOR/L/PS/10/781/2: meeting minutes (17 Nov., 1919), “Inter-Departmental Conference on Middle Eastern Affairs.”54 Ibid.55 Ibid.56 See IOR/L/PS/10/781/2: telegram (7 Dec., 1919), Political Office, Baghdad to Secretary of State for India.57 This thought is perhaps best captured by Lord Curzon, architect of the NWFP plan, in his 1907 Romanes Lecture at Oxford: creation of the NWFP in 1901 ‘[gave] to Great Britain not a single or double but a threefold Frontier, (1) the administrative border of British India, (2), the Durand Line, or Frontier of active protection, (3) the Afghan border, which is the outer or advanced strategical Frontier.’ Reproduced online at https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/ibru/resources/links/curzon.pdf (accessed 3 July, 2020).58 IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: report (Aug., 1919), Note on the Kurdish Situation, Major E.W.C. Noel.59 See, for instance, the historical literature on the Indian princely states during before and during the British Raj. See e.g. Fisher, “Indirect Rule in the British Empire”. See also Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians.60 In contrast to, for instance, the puppet regime installed in Afghanistan in 1838, which had to be propped up by massive subsidies and no less than three full-scale invasions by the British Indian Army in eighty years. See e.g. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan.61 IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: report (Aug., 1919), Note on the Kurdish Situation, Major E.W.C. Noel.62 Ibid.63 Despite provisional agreement, the government was reluctant to announce its policy publicly; for example, in a House of Commons sitting on 23 February, 1920, when questioned by MPs on policy in Mosul, the India Office representative replied that ‘His Majesty’s Government are not yet in a position to make any statement regarding the future of Kurdistan.’ House of Commons session of 23 Feb., 1920. Quoted in IOR/L/PS/10/782: “Parliamentary Notice.” Many across Whitehall also criticized Noel’s intelligence-gathering methods as overly subjective: the High Commissioner in Constantinople, for instance, feared that ‘Noel may turn out to be a Kurdish Colonel Lawrence.’ IOR/L/PS/10/781/1: telegram (11 Aug., 1919), High Commissioner, Constantinople (de Robeck) to Secretary of State for India. Others feared that his recommendations, far from reducing British commitments, would entangle its forces further into a complicated set of local politics they in fact knew little about. IOR/L/PS/10/782: telegram (4 Feb., 1920), Civil Commissioner, Baghdad to Political Department, India Office, London.64 Montgomery, “The Making of the Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920”.65 See e.g. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, 183; or Yapp, The Near East since the First World War, 35-46. This argument has been articulated in non-academic commentary as well; see e.g. Danforth, “Forget Sykes-Picot”66 Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 35.67 Adapted from British and Turkish briefs submitted to the League Council, Aug. & Sept. 1924. For the British memorandum, see LNA C.396.1924.VII: (14 Aug., 1924), “Memorandum on the Frontier between Turkey and Irak,” 4. The Turkish memorandum can be found at LNA C.494.1924.VII: (5 Sept., 1924), “Memorandum du Gouvernement Turc sur la Frontière entre la Turquie et l'Irak,” 7.68 As Wyrtzen argues, we should remain sceptical of the argument that the interwar borders simply ‘got it wrong,’ causing subsequent conflict and political turmoil: ‘The presupposition that natural or obvious ethnonational units actually exist as primordial givens in the Middle East or elsewhere is fundamentally flawed (as is the explicit or implicit corollary presumption that borders could have been ‘correctly’ imposed around them). This paradigm blinds us from seeing how dynamically communities in the region – just like the colonial powers – were able to adapt, recalculate, and reorder their political preferences as the opportunity context shifted through the Long Great War.’ Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 49-50.69 Tripp, A History of Iraq, 41.70 Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 34-35.71 Ibid, 34-36.72 Ibid.73 Robert Pearce, “Cox, Sir Percy Zachariah (1864-1937),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), online ed., accessed 3 July, 2020.74 Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq,” 979.75 Ibid.76 The RAF had a significant impact on British security policy in the Middle East, as well as on the culture of British imperialism more broadly, which took a ‘covert’ turn as a result. Satia, Spies in Arabia, 239-262; see also ch.7 in Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 131-156. The RAF policy also heralded more violent forms of asserting central state authority for imperial interests. See Satia, “The Defense of Inhumanity.”77 Pedersen, “Getting Out of Iraq,” 979.78 CO 730/4/41616: Telegram 397 (17 August, 1921), High Commissioner, Baghdad, to Secretary of State for the Colonies.79 These included appointing personal loyalists to administrative positions; undermining pro-British communal leaders and, conversely, supporting anti-British ones; and discretely allowing the symbolic weight of his name to be used on Pan-Arab, anti-British leaflets circulating Baghdad. Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 20-21.80 Tripp, A History of Iraq, 52.81 See e.g. Pedersen, The Guardians, 264; Sluglett, Contriving Iraq, 71–7582 White, The Emergence of Minorities, 75.83 Tripp, A History of Iraq, 52–5584 Ibid, 54-55.85 White, The Emergence of Minorities, 81.86 Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 279.87 Indeed, both Faisal and the Kurds seemed to have understood this; Faisal’s selection caused intense consternation amongst the Fieldhouse (ed.), Kurds, Arabs and Britons.88 IOR/L/PS/10/782: memorandum (28 July, 1920), “Note on the Political Situation in South Kurdistan by Political Officer for Sulaymaniyah,” Major Soane.89 Ibid.90 Beck, “A Tedious and Perilous Controversy,” 256.91 Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 279.92 “TREATY OF PEACE WITH TURKEY SIGNED AT LAUSANNE, JULY 24, 1923,” in Treaties of Peace, 1919-1923, Vol. II (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924); online edition, hosted by Brigham Young University Libraries, World War I Document Archive.93 IOR/L/PS/10/782: memorandum (14 April, 1920), “Forward from Chief of Air Staff to Secretary of State for India.” Emphasis mine.94 In this regard, the dynamics described here illustrate a convergence between trajectories described in the international legal history scholarship, e.g. ch. 8 in Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law, and those described in recent historical scholarship on the region, e.g. Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, particularly with respect to the reification of territorialism and its impact on state-formation dynamics in the interwar period. On territoriality and 20th century history more broadly, see also Wheatley, “Central Europe as Ground Zero of the New International Order,” 901-903, 906-910; Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History.95 Tripp, A History of Iraq, 53-54.96 See e.g. IOR/L/PS/10/782: telegram (21 June, 1921), High Commissioner for Mesopotamia (Cox) to Secretary of State for the Colonies (Churchill); see also Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War, 188-190.97 LNA R2318/6A/655/22528: petition (23 Sept., 1930), “THE PETITION of the undersigned, ANTHONY HORMUZD RASSAM, on behalf of the Christians, Yezidi and other non-Moslem Minorities residing in Iraq,” 117 (discussing Assyrian negotiations with British officials in 1921).98 IOR/L/PS/10/782: telegram (26 Aug., 1921), High Commissioner (Iraq) to the Secretary of State for the Colonies (Churchill).99 Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 79.100 Ibid.101 Iraq Administration Reports 1922-23, 38; quoted in ibid, 81. Indeed, Cox admitted the emptiness of that promise to a concerned Faisal. See IOR/L/PS/10/782: telegram (6 Jan., 1922), High Commissioner, Iraq (Cox) to Secretary of State for the Colonies (Churchill), regarding correspondence with Faisal on Kurdistan.102 Notably, these emerging definitional shifts prefigure the modern, public international law doctrine of self-determination, though the archival record shows no evidence of jurists having participated in the British policy-making described herein. See, e.g., Reference re Secession of Quebec [1998] 2 S.C.R. 217 at para. 2. https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1643/index.do. Prong one of this doctrine consists of ‘external self-determination,’ i.e. the right to a separate state; this right emerges only in extremely limited circumstances, such as colonial domination (‘blue water imperialism’). Prong two, or ‘internal self-determination,’ is more capacious. Groups of people not falling within prong one have the general right, under internal self-determination, to exercise freedoms relating to the cultural preservation of that group, such as that to association or to the use of their language. A forerunner of the modern self-determination doctrine was articulated by a panel of international law scholars convened by the League of Nations Council, roughly contemporaneously with the events described in this section, to opine on the proposed secession of the Åland Islands from Finland. “Of the International Committee of Jurists entrusted by the Council of the League of Nations with the task of giving an advisory opinion upon the legal aspects of the Åland Islands question,” League of Nations Official Journal, Spec. Supp. No. 3 (1920).103 See, for instance, Major Soane’s preface to his 1920 report: “The ideal of the League of Nations is to give to a people that form of government which the people themselves desire [emphasis mine].” IOR/L/PS/10/782: memorandum (28 July, 1920), “Note on the Political Situation in South Kurdistan by Political Officer for Sulaymaniyah,” Major Soane.104 Beck, “‘A Tedious and Perilous Controversy,’” 258-261.105 Makko, “Arbitrator in the World of Wars,” 633-634.106 LNA C.494.1924.VII: (5 Sept., 1924), “Memorandum du Gouvernement Turc sur la Frontière entre la Turquie et l’Irak,” 7-8.107 League of Nations Council, “Minutes from the Ninth Meeting, 30th Session of the Council,” (20 Sept., 1924), League of Nations Official Journal, 1322. One can speculate that the Turkish argument was picking up on (and contributing to) an emerging international legal jurisprudence that described the concept of legal personhood using the language of the body and human development. Natasha Wheatley, “Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law.108 LNA C.396.1924.VII: (14 Aug., 1924), “Memorandum on the Frontier between Turkey and Irak,” 6.109 Ibid, 6. Christians and Jews, it noted, similarly ‘desire’ the ‘permanent association’ with Iraq.110 Ibid, 1321-1323. For more on the bombing campaigns in 1923, see Tripp, A History of Iraq, 54.111 League of Nations Council, “Minutes from the 17th Meeting, 30th Session of the Council,” (30 Sept., 1924), League of Nations Official Journal, 1358-1359. The League Council appointed Sweden rapporteur of the proceedings, and thus the Swedish representative in the League became the chair of the proceedings.112 Ibid, 1359.113 The report found ‘tepid’ support for Iraq’s claims, but only if British supervision continued and if Kurdish districts were to be governed by Kurdish officials, with Kurdish remaining the language of administration, law, and education. If neither condition held, then it weakly recommended Turkish sovereignty for demographic reasons. Quoted in League of Nations Council, “Minutes of the Third Meeting, 35th Session of the Council” (3 Sept., 1925), 4-6.114 Ibid.115 Ibid.116 See e.g. Beck, “‘A Tedious and Perilous Controversy,’” 262.117 LNA R608/25888: meeting minutes (3 Sept., 1925) “Minutes of the 3rd Meeting, 35th Session of the Council.”118 Ibid.119 Ibid.120 As Fethi Bey remarked, “I am quite unable to agree to the discussion of a question which is in no way related to the question at issue and which does not arise at all.” LNA R608/25888: meeting minutes (4 Sept., 1925), “Minutes of the 5th Meeting, 35th Session of the Council.”121 LNA R608/25888: meeting minutes (3 Sept., 1925) “Minutes of the 3rd Meeting, 35th Session of the Council.”122 George Seldes, “50 000 Christians in Mosul to Flee If Turks Advance,” Washington Post, 26 October 1925.123 CAB/24/176: Memorandum (24 Dec., 1925), “The Mosul Question at the League of Nations,” Report by Leopold Amery.124 Ibid.125 Makko, “Arbitrator in the World of Wars.”126 See, e.g., Mazower, “Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe”; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others; Zahra, “The ‘Minority Problem’ and National Classification in the French”; and Watenpaugh, “Between Communal Survival and National Aspiration”.127 Pedersen, The Guardians, 281.128 Ibid, 279. The Assyrians were especially vulnerable, since not only were they seen as a potentially disruptive minority by the central state, but also increasingly eyed with mistrust by their neighbours, as they were Christians, and had either been refugees or the elite troops of the British occupation (‘Assyrian Levies’).129 LNA R2318/6A/655/22528: memorandum (17 June, 1932), “Observations of His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom on the petition submitted by the Patriarch and leaders of the Assyrians in ‘Iraq dated the 17th of June, 1932, to the High Commissioner for ‘Iraq with a copy to the Chairman of the Permanent Mandates Commission.”130 LNA R2316/6A/655/22413: report (Nov., 1931), “Report by M. Rappard, on Petitions Emanating: (a) from Kurds of Iraq transmitted by the British Government on February 20th, 1931; (b) from Tawfiq Wahbi Beg, dated April 19th, 1931,” William Rappard, 62.131 Ibid, 63.132 20 PMCM, 152; LNA, R2346, 6A/16601/16601, CPM 1183, “Contribution to the examination of the question of the general conditions required for the termination of the mandate regime … Note by M. Van Rees” (13 June 1931). Quoted in Pedersen, The Guardians, 282.133 See, e.g., Pedersen, The Guardians.134 LNA R2318/6A/655/22528: petition (23 Sept., 1930), “THE PETITION of the undersigned, ANTHONY HORMUZD RASSAM, on behalf of the Christians, Yezidi and other non-Moslem Minorities residing in Iraq,” Anthony Rassam, 87.135 LNA R2316/6A/655/22413: petition (24 Aug., 1930), from the Chiefs of the Kurdish Dauda Tribe and inhabitants of Kirkuk Liwa to the President of the League of Nations.136 LNA R2316/6A/655/22413: petition (28 March, 1931), from Abdul Rehman Agha to His Excellency the High Commissioner for Iraq.137 Wheatley, “Mandatory Interpretation”.138 Ibid, 248.139 I use trans-textuality in Gérard Gennette’s sense of the term: ‘all that sets the text in relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts’ – a more ‘inclusive’ term than inter-textuality. See The Architext, 1996, 83-84.140 “Les Kurdes persistèrent dans leurs reclamations et demandèrent à grands cris l’application stricte de la decision du Conseil.” R2316/6A/655/22413: petition (31 Aug., 1930), from the Comité National.141 ‘Notre peuple est éminemment conscient de sa force et de ses destinées; de plus son sens National est tellement développé que, déjà pour garder sa nationalité et sauver sa liberté, le peuple Kurde a vaillamment affronté des atroces de guerre et consenti d’énormes sacrifices.’ Ibid, 52.142 LNA R2318/6A/655/22528: petition (23 Sept., 1930), “THE PETITION of the undersigned, ANTHONY HORMUZD RASSAM, on behalf of the Christians, Yezidi and other non-Moslem Minorities residing in Iraq,” 117.143 Ibid, 195.144 Pedersen, The Guardians, 232. The norm referenced in the first sentence was that establishing that mandatory powers were not sovereign in mandated territories; it emerged in deliberations over the Tanganyika Mandate.145 Cf. Wheatley, “Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law.”146 This, of course, changed over time. Kurdish claims, according to Fuccaro, gradually emphasized more state-centric and nationalist dimensions during the Mosul Dispute in 1925. This is logical, since: 1) the framing of the decision privileged nation-states as analytical categories; and 2) it portended a new level of state intrusion into the lives of Kurds themselves, since it legitimated Iraqi state authority where it had previously been contested. The League proceedings of 1930-32, I suggest, were another such turning point. Fuccaro, “Minorities and Ethnic Mobilisation,” 580-581, 586.147 LNA R2318/6A/655/22528: petition (23 Sept., 1930), “THE PETITION of the undersigned, ANTHONY HORMUZD RASSAM, on behalf of the Christians, Yezidi and other non-Moslem Minorities residing in Iraq.”148 Take, for instance, the example of Syrian independence. Far from provide a model for later independence proceedings, the events that transpired following Iraqi independence convinced a distressed Rappard to veto any movements towards Syrian independence. Pedersen, The Guardians, 286. Moreover, some of the frustrations with the minorities’ protection schemes of the League of Nations would lay the intellectual groundwork for more radical visions of ‘rights’ in international law. See e.g. Mazower, “Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe,” 56-59.149 See, e.g., Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire; Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq – in 1932: The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood,” 1000; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa; Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint: African Independence in Historical Perspective”; Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960; Karuna Mantena, “Popular Sovereignty and Anti-colonialism.”150 See Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 26–29 (which discusses broader debates around anticolonial nationalism); Pedersen, “Getting out of Iraq – in 1932,” 1000; “ see also recent revisionist scholarship on (human) rights in the 20th century, e.g., Moyn, The Last Utopia; Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History”.