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| The National Police Journal 9:1 (January, 1922), 5. This image illustrates an article on "Philadelphia's Department of Experts." |
In the last week of December, 1949, the Iraqi police in Baghdad
received their first shipment of tear gas from the United States. Purchased for
twenty-one thousand dollars by the Iraqi Embassy in Washington D.C, it was the
first time the Iraqi police had gotten their hands on the chemical weapon. The
gas had been acquired on the advice of the British authorities. Although nominally independent
since 1932, the tremendous British political and military presence in Iraq
belied any notion that the Arab state was actually sovereign. Born out of rebellion, from the end
of the Great War until the overthrow of the British-backed Hashemite monarchy in 1958, Iraq was no stranger to protests, strikes, riots, coups d'état, and all kinds of intifadat.
The arrival of the tear gas is recounted in a file from the India
Office Records. The Portsmouth Treaty, which extended the British occupation of
Iraq, sparked a mass insurrection in January 1948. Known as al-Wathba or "the Leap," the students, workers, communists, and nationalists involved in the revolt were met by state violence and mass arrests. Hundreds were killed and
many more imprisoned. It was in the
aftermath of these events that the British recommended to the Iraqi police they
acquire some tear gas. The British Embassy in Baghdad advised the Iraqis on the
“usefulness of tear gas” having observed that the Iraqi police had “shown
themselves incapable of dealing with mob violence and this affects stability of
Government.”
As Anna Feigenbaum has demonstrated in her recent account of tear gas’
global proliferation over the twentieth century, the gas—which is actually a powder and induces far more than tears—was regularly deployed, endorsed, and advertised by the United
States and the British themselves as a civilizing and certainly a pacifying
weapon.¹ Across its
empire, Britain tear-gassed those who threatened its authority in the days of
anti-colonial insurgency. And in the 1920s, local and federal police across the
United States began to regularly deploy the gas against striking workers or
“race riots.”
Though armed with the chemicals, the Iraqis had no idea how to use the new
weaponry. An “expert” was needed. In the year before the gas was delivered, the
Iraqis and the British worked to obtain some of the requisite expertise. On
behalf of the police, the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the British
to help them “obtain the services of an expert in tear gases.” “The ideal man
for the job,” reasoned the British in their correspondence among themselves,
“would be an Englishman who has seen service in India or some other country in
which tear gas is used in climatic conditions similar to those prevailing here.
If such a man cannot be found, the next choice would be an Englishman who knew
about tear gas in general; and failing that, the Iraqis would accept a
Pakistani Moslem police officer with the necessary specialist knowledge.” Even
in its waning days, the British Empire sought to exploit its corps of
colonial administrators around the world.
Neither a British nor a Pakistani expert could initially be recruited
for the job. A seemingly eager U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, however, “suggested
that if we [the British] cannot provide an expert we might consider asking for
an American.”
“They think they could get one seconded free of charge from the 'riot
squad' of the New York or Detroit police.”²
The British were not keen on this American intervention, for it broke
with well established norms and networks: “We consider it important that the
British and Indian tradition in the Iraqi Police should be preserved as long as
possible.” But in the end, it was a British air force officer who had “recently
attended a course at the Army Gas School in England” and an officer from the
American Military Attache “who knows something about tear gas” who were arranged to train the Iraqi police
in matters of chemical warfare.
The correspondence ends there, but Hanna Batatu offers a postscript in
the form of a prison revolt. It is clear that by June of 1953, at least, the
Iraqi police had figured out how to use the tear gas. That month, communists
imprisoned in the Baghdad citadel were going to be taken out of the city to
Ba‘qubah, for the Baghdadi prison “was found to offer too many opportunities
for clandestine communication with the underground.” Fearing transfer to Nurqat
al-Salman, a remote fortress in the middle of the Southern Desert,
the prisoners refused to move and, according to the chief of police of Baghdad province, shut themselves in the wards, turning into a weapon everything they could lay their hands on—bottles, water pipes, kitchen utensils, and bricks that they plucked up from the corridors. Detachments of mobile and local police rushed to the scene and took up positions on roof tops, in the prison yard, and the adjacent streets. They began by using tear gas in the hope of forcing the Communists out, but to no avail. Streams of water next directed at the wards from a fire fighting engine, but the Communists answered only with antigovernment cries that now rang sharply and persistently through the prison. Eventually, however, under the pressure of water and the battering of the police and the wardens, the gate gave way. A shower of bricks and bottled held the assailants in check, but only momentarily. Reinforced, they hurled forward, cutting their way with clubs or the buts of rifles. But, on the official version, the resistance that they met was so furious that they had in the end to open fire. Seven prisoners were killed, including Ismail Ahmad, a candidate member of the Center Committee in the time of Fahd [Yusuf Salman Yusuf, first secretary of the Iraqi Communist Party], and Hadi Abu-ur-Rida, a liaison official of the Communist party center in 1948. Eighty-one others were wounded, one of whom subsequently died in hospital. Seventy-four policemen and warders suffered injuries.³
All quotations of the British
correspondence are from: "Pol Ext
6453/49 Tear-gas expert for Iraqi police: suggested appointment of Pakistani
officer," British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers,
IOR/L/PS/12/1384, in Qatar Digital
Library https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100000000517.0x00034b
¹. Anna Feigenbaum, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WW1 to the Streets of Today (London:
Verso, 2017).
².
In the years to come, the travel of American counterinsurgency methods,
materials, and experts between the colonized world and the urban United States,
would become a regular practice. See: Tracy Tullis, “A Vietnam at Home:
Policing the Ghettos in the Counterinsurgency Era,” (PhD Diss., New York
University, 1999); Mico Seigel, “Objects of Police History,” Journal of American History, 102:1 (June
2015), pp. 152–161; Stuart Schrader, “To Secure the Global Great Society:
Participation in Pacification,” Humanity:
An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 7:2
(Summer 2016), pp. 225-253.
3. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary
Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of
Its Communists, Ba'thists, and Free Officers (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979), 691-692.
