Arshad al-Omari

Assad Pasha al-Omari

Assad Pasha al-Omari ( Arabic أرشد العمري, DMG Aršad al-ʿUmarī ; * April 8, 1888 in Mosul , Vilâyet Mosul ; died November 4, 1978 in Baghdad ) was an Ottoman engineer and politician in the Kingdom of Iraq .

Time in Mosul and Constantinople

Assad al-Omari's father was the mayor of Mosul. After arshad finished secondary school in Mosul in 1904 at the age of 16, he traveled 40 days on horseback via Aleppo to Alexandrette to take a steamer to Constantinople . In Constantinople he studied architecture at the engineering college of the Sultan until 1908 and worked in the municipal administration of Constantinople. During the First World War , Arschad Pasha worked as an engineer for the Ministry of Defense and returned to Constantinople after the end of the war in 1918. There he worked for the mayor Jamil Pasha Topuslu . Assad Pasha married Rafi'a Chanim , the younger sister of Jamil Pasha, and had four children: Suad, Frozan (Suzy), Issam and Imad.

In 1919 Omari returned to Mosul with his wife and worked until 1924 as the chief engineer of the community. He was then elected member of the first Iraqi parliament after the country was unified under King Faisal I. From 1925 to 1931 he was Director General for Post and Telegraphs, and from 1931 to 1933 Lord Mayor of the new capital, Baghdad. From 1933 Omari was General Director of Irrigation and from 1934 to 1935 Minister of Public Works. During his tenure, the Kirkuk pipeline to the Mediterranean Sea was opened. When the Red Crescent was founded, he was elected President of what he remained until the bloody coup of 1958 under Abd al-Karim Qasim . In 1935 he became the general director of the municipalities, and from 1936 to 1944 he was mayor of Baghdad for a second time.

Minister and Prime Minister

On June 4, 1944, he was elected Foreign Minister and Deputy Minister for Defense and Supply. During this time he established relations with the Soviet Union , while on September 11, 1944, Omari had lively correspondence with Vyacheslav Molotov . Omari signed the founding charter of the Arab League on March 22, 1945 . But when Omari on April 12, 1945 in San Francisco ( CA ) to sign the Charter of the United Nations arrived (UN), who died in American President Franklin D. Roosevelt . Omari then led the Iraqi delegation at his funeral on April 14th. Because of the plans to partition the British Palestine Mandate , Arshad al-Omari refused to sign the charter and returned to Iraq on June 13, 1945.

On August 25, 1945, Omari resigned as Foreign Minister, but was appointed Prime Minister of Iraq on June 4, 1946. He only held this office until December 14th of that year. Through his policy of repression against the opposition, he quickly made himself unpopular on all sides. He also suppressed the strike in the Kirkuk oil fields in July 1946, in which a number of people were killed, only adding to the riot. During his short term in office, he accepted the Kurdish clan representative Baba Ali Barzandschi into the government in order to integrate the newly founded Democratic Party of Kurdistan , which was supposed to counterbalance the communist organizations of oil workers. After martial law was declared before the elections, the regent and the British forced him to resign. After the suppression of the anti -British al-Wathbah uprising and the resignation of the first Shiite Prime Minister Salih Jabr , he was Minister of Defense from January 29 to June 23, 1948. In 1952 he was appointed Executive Vice President of the Development Board. In this role he was responsible for numerous dam construction and irrigation projects and the construction of highways, hospitals and schools. On April 29, 1954, he became Prime Minister for a second time, which he only stayed until August 4. After the coup in 1958 , Omari retired to his favorite city of Istanbul in Turkey and only returned to Iraq after the Ba'ath Party came to power in 1968. After his death he was buried in the family grave in Mosul.

swell

• Harris M. Lentz III: Heads of States and Governments: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Over 2,300 Leaders, 1945 through 1992. McFarland & Company, Inc., 1994, p. 411. ISBN 0-89950-926-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles Tripp: A history of Iraq. Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 117 f.