Baba Ali Barzandschi

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Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji with his son

Sheikh Baba ʿAli (actually ʿAli Baba ) Mahmud al-Barzanji (* around 1912 or around 1915 in Barzinjah, Sanjak as-Sulaimaniya, then Ottoman Empire ), occasionally also transcribed as Barzanji, Barzinji or Barzinja , was a Kurdish politician in Iraq . He was one of the three sons of Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji (Mehmûd Berzincî). Between 1946 and 1963, Baba Ali was brief minister of the Iraqi central government three times - in the kingdom , in Qasim's republic and in al-Bakr's first Ba'ath cabinet .

Academic years

Probritic opponents of Mahmud, but also the fathers of Baba Ali's classmates: the Hashimite kings Faisal I of Iraq (right), Abdallah of Transjordan (center) and Ali of Hejaz (left)

His father Mahmud, an influential large landowner in the northern Iraqi province of Sulaimaniya and self-proclaimed " King of Kurdistan ", had led several unsuccessful uprisings against the British colonial power since 1919 and in 1927 fled to Persia (Iran). For permission to return to Iraq, Sheikh Mahmud agreed to place his son Baba Ali hostage in the care of the British. In 1928 the British sent Baba Ali to the renowned Victoria College in Alexandria , Egypt , where he studied together with the Hashimite princes Nayif ibn Abdallah of Jordan and Abd ul-Ilah ibn Ali of Hejaz, among others . British plans to study Baba Ali in the UK at Royal Air Force College Cranwell and pursue a career in the newly created Iraqi Air Force opposed both Sheikh Mahmud and the Iraqi Home Office; and while Baba Ali was studying in Egypt with the Hashimite princes, his father led another uprising in Iraq in 1930/31 against the pro-British Hashimite king Faisal I , which was finally put down with the help of the Royal Air Force .

After graduating from Victoria College in 1932, Baba Ali first studied medicine in Baghdad (where his dispossessed father had since been exiled), but was then sent to Columbia University in New York in 1933 to study political economy. After his return he took over a position in the railway sector in 1938, which he gave up again soon afterwards, whereupon he initially retired to the Barzanji family estates in the Sulaimaniya province.

Political career

One of Baba Ali's opponents was the Shiite Salih Jabr . He had Baba Ali arrested in 1943 and became Prime Minister in 1947.
July Revolution 1958: Radical republicans with the mutilated corpse of Abd ul-Ilah , the former regent and fellow student of Baba Ali. In the subsequently formed first republican government, Baba Ali became a minister.
Abd al-Karim Qasim (right) with Mustafa Barzani (1959)

In July 1943, Baba Ali sharply criticized the government's increasingly anti-Kurdish policies, especially the (Shiite) interior minister Salih Jabr (Ğabr), and was arrested. After Jabr's replacement, Baba Ali was released again in November 1943, but continued his criticism, above all of the conditions in his home province of Sulaimaniya, where, for example, he endeavored to develop tobacco cultivation and to protect the Kurdish forests (not least the former Forests that belonged to the family).

From spring 1946, Baba Ali supported preparations for the establishment of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), his brother Latif became a founding member and vice president of the party. In Baghdad, Baba Ali's efforts to obtain permission to return for the exiled KDP leader Mustafa Barzani were unsuccessful, but in June 1946 he was accepted into the Iraqi government by Prime Minister Assad al-Omari as Minister of Economics and initially retained this post al-Omari's successor, Nuri al-Said (from November 1946). After Nuri al-Said's resignation in March 1947, Baba Ali became a member of the Iraqi parliament, where he joined the opposition to the anti-Kurdish policies of al-Said's successor Salih Jabr. Jabr was finally overthrown in 1948 by a popular uprising.

The final overthrow of the pro-British Hashimite monarchy came with the July Revolution of 1958 . In Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim's first republican cabinet, Baba Ali became Minister of Communications and Public Works; from February to July 1959 he was then only Minister for Public Works. Baba Ali successfully negotiated the return of Mustafa Barzani on Qasim's behalf. After the Kirkuk massacre in July 1959, however, Qassim increasingly distanced himself from both the Kurds, who were making ever far-reaching demands for autonomy, and the communists, who had previously supported his regime against the Pan-Arabists (Nasserists, Baathists). After the break between Qasim and Barzani, there was another Kurdish uprising and Iraqi-Kurdish fighting in 1961.

Barzani then supported the pan-Arabists, who finally overthrew Qasim in February 1963. In the new cabinet of the Baathist Prime Minister Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr , Baba Ali was once again Minister of Agriculture, but lost this office again when the Baathists were overthrown by the Nasserists surrounding President Abd al-Salam Arif in the military coup of November 18, 1963 . Nevertheless, in December 1963, Baba Ali also mediated between the new pro-Nassist government and Barzani. Arif continued the war against Barzani's Kurds, but after Arif's accidental death in April 1966, Prime Minister Abd ar-Rahman al-Bazzaz tried to resolve the conflict. In this context, Baba Ali is said to have briefly been discussed as a possible Vice President of Iraq.

Baba Ali was considered pro-British or “Americanized” and the protector of the Jewish minority in northern Iraq. He was therefore mainly described by Anglo-American authors and officials as "charming", "moderate" and "competent" and as an "attractive, but not very powerful personality".

Remarks

  1. ^ Occasionally also Baba Ali Sheikh Mahmud
  2. ↑ This contradicts a statement in Sluglett's Britain in Iraq (page 132), according to which Sheikh Mahmud sent his son Baba Ali to other Kurdish sheikhs in Sulaimaniya in 1930 to help prepare the uprising.
  3. ↑ Whether or when Baba Ali also became a member of the KDP (and even a member of the Politburo or Central Committee), there are different details.
  4. ↑ In clashes on the first anniversary of the revolution, communist activists and left-wing Kurds had killed dozens of conservative Turkmen, Arabs and Assyrians.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Elizabeth Warnock Fernea: Remembering Childhood in the Middle East - Memoirs from a Century of Change , 42. University of Texas Press, Austin 2010
  2. ↑ a b c d e Mideast Mirror , Volume 15, Page 6. Arab News Agency, Beirut 1963
  3. ↑ a b c Sahar Hamouda, Colin Clement: Victoria College - A history revealed , pp. 78ff and 246. American Univ. in Cairo Press, Cairo / New York 2002
  4. ↑ a b c Erhard Franz : Kurden und Kurdentum - Contemporary history of a people and its national movements , pages 126, 164f, 171f. Messages 30, German Orient Institute Hamburg 1986
  5. ↑ a b Mordechai Zaken: Jewish Subjects and Their Tribal Chieftains in Kurdistan - A Study in Survival , page 110. BRILL, Leiden 2007
  6. ↑ a b c d e Robin Leonard Bidwell : British documents on foreign affairs - reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print , Volume 9 (From the First to the Second World War. Series B, Turkey, Iran, and the Middle East, 1918-1939), page 305. University Publications of America, Michigan 1985 and
    Malcolm Yapp: British documents on foreign affairs - reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print , volume? (From 1946 through 1950. Near and Middle-East 1947. Eastern Affairs, January 1947-December 1947), pp. 49 and 56. University Publications of America, Michigan 2001
  7. ^ A b c d Edmund A. Ghareeb, Beth Dougherty: Historical Dictionary of Iraq , pages 349 and 358. The Scarecrow Press, Lanham / Oxford 2004
  8. ^ Peter Sluglett: Britain in Iraq - Contriving King and Country , p. 126. IBTauris, London / New York 2007
  9. ^ A b Kurds, Arabs and Britons - The Memoir of Wallace Lyon in Iraq 1918-1945 , page 167. IBTauris, London / New York 2001
  10. ^ Ian Philpott: The Royal Air Force , Volume 2 (An Encyclopedia of the Inter-War Years 1930-1939). Pen and Sword, Barnsley 2006
  11. ^ Ofra Bengio: Kurdish Awakening - Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland , 77. University of Texas Press, Austin 2014
  12. ^ David McDowall: A Modern History of the Kurds , p. 296. IBTauris, London / New York 2004
  13. ↑ Wadie Jwaideh: The Kurdish National Movement - Its Origins and Development , page 230. Syracuse University Press, New York 2006
  14. ↑ Kurdistan-Photolibrary.org: Photo Barzanis with Baba Ali in Iraq (1959)
  15. ↑ Henry D. Astarjian: The Struggle for Kirkuk - The Rise of Hussein, Oil, and the Death of Tolerance in Iraq , page 46. Greenwood Publishing Group, London / Westport 2007
  16. ^ Awat Asadi: The Kurdistan-Iraq conflict - the road to autonomy since the First World War , page 207. Verlag Hans Schiler, Berlin 2007
  17. ↑ Asian Recorder , Volume 12, page 7283. New Delhi 1966
  18. ^ William Eagleton: An introduction to Kurdish rugs and other weavings , p. 26. Scorpion, 1988
  19. ^ A b American Jewish Committee: Commentary, July 1958 , Volume 26, p. 198. American Jewish Committee 1958
  20. ^ Lokman I. Meho: The Kurdish Question in US Foreign Policy - A Documentary Sourcebook , page 456. Greenwood Publishing Group, London / Westport 2004
personal data
SURNAME Barzanji, Baba Ali
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Barzinji, Baba Ali
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kurdish politician and Iraqi minister
DATE OF BIRTH around 1912 or around 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Barzinjah, today's province of as-Sulaimaniya
DATE OF DEATH 20th century
Place of death Iraq