British assurances to Hussein

On 4 February 1918 the British Foreign Office telegraphed to Cairo, to the High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Reginald Wingate, a message from the government for the King of the Hejaz, Hussein. In it the government assured him that Britain and her allies would support the Arabs in their struggle for freedom, and reaffirmed its former pledge regarding the liberation of the Arab peoples. This is the date of the declaration given in the British official chronology of the war. Wingate passed the content to the king by telegram, and a formal note with the text of the message was handed to Hussein in Jeddah by the acting British agent, Lieutenant-Colonel J. R. Bassett. The note was dated 8 February, which is why the whole reply is known in the literature as the “Bassett letter”.

Hussein had been waiting for it for several weeks. At the end of 1917 the Bolsheviks had published secret documents of tsarist diplomacy, among them the Sykes–Picot Agreement on the partition of Turkey’s Asian possessions. The Turks at once used it in their propaganda. Djemal Pasha, in the last weeks of his rule in Syria, sent a secret emissary to Aqaba with letters dated 26 November to the king’s son, Emir Faisal, and to the commander of the Arab regular troops, Ja’far al-Askari. He argued that the promises of Arab independence had proved a lie, since the Entente wanted to hand Syria to the French, Iraq to the British and Palestine to an international administration. He proposed negotiations, full autonomy for the Arab provinces and a German guarantee. On 4 December, at a banquet in Beirut, Djemal announced publicly that he had made Hussein such an offer. Faisal did not reply and sent the letters on to his father. The king told him to reject the proposal curtly and forwarded the whole correspondence to Wingate, asking for an explanation of the agreement Djemal had written about. His questions about Zionism and Palestine had already been answered in January by Commander Hogarth.

The reply from London skilfully avoided the heart of the matter. According to the Arab historian George Antonius, who published its text in 1938, Wingate wrote to the king that the documents found by the Bolsheviks in Petrograd were not a concluded agreement but a record of provisional understandings and conversations between Britain, France and Russia in the early years of the war, before the Arab revolt. Djemal had, out of ignorance or malice, distorted them and left out the provisos about the consent of the population and the protection of its interests, while the successes of the revolt and Russia’s withdrawal from the war had long since created an entirely new situation. The Bassett note did not mention the agreement at all. It thanked the king for his loyalty, presented Djemal’s offer as a Turkish ruse intended to sow distrust between the Arabs and the Allies, and ended with the assurance that the British government and its allies “stand steadfastly” by every cause aiming at the liberation of the oppressed nations and wished to help the Arab peoples build a world in which law would replace Ottoman injustice. The government reaffirmed its former pledge and promised to protect the Arabs already liberated and to help the others to obtain their freedom.

In reality the Sykes–Picot Agreement had been formally concluded in 1916, and Britain and France still regarded it as binding, although some British officials in Cairo and London already considered it obsolete. Antonius called the message sent in the name of the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, “deliberately ambiguous” and indeed dishonest, because it neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the documents, while suggesting that Djemal’s version was another Turkish intrigue. For the time being the assurances sufficed. Hussein remained loyal to the alliance, and his sons fought on against the Turks east of the Dead Sea. The dispute over what the British had actually promised the Arabs returned in full force after the war.