INDEPENDENCE OF IRAQ.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21772, 11 October 1932, Page 8

INDEPENDENCE OF IRAQ.

The capacity of the British as administrators of native territory has received further endorsement in the admission of Iraq to the League of Nations. Iraq has been entrusted with independence in a remarkably short space of time from the beginning of the British occupation in 1914, and is the first mandated territory to be released from supervision. It has been suggested that the early termination by Great Britain of her mandatory authority in Iraq tvas dictated by domestic policy. To a certain extent this may be the ease, since the arrangements for the recognition of the sovereignty of Iraq at the present time were completed whilst the Labour Government was in office at -Home. On the other hand, though the, relations of the native leaders and the British advisers have been friendly, the peoples of Iraq have quite naturally desired the abrogation of the mandate. It must be recognised that Great Britain does not, with the termination of her responsibility to the League for the administration of Iraq, sever her connections with the territory. The mandate is replaced, according to previous arrangement, by a treaty in which both signatories are recognised as equal partners. The treaty provides that five years from the date of Iraq’s admission to the League of Nations all British forces will be withdrawn. Great Britain undertakes to assist Iraq in time of Trouble, and in some British quarters this provision is viewed with concern'. The Royal Air Force, it is said, is the only real guarantee of the maintenance of good order in Iraq. The Iraq Army only this year proved itself inefficient when, after a minor clash with a troublesome sheik, “several of its officers were court-martialled for cowardice, and a section of it had actually to be rescued by the Royal Air Force, so elementary had been its notions of commissariat and communications.” For five years, therefore, while the Iraq army is acquiring morale and the Iraq Air Force is being brought into being, the services of the R.A.F. are likely to be called on in the event of trouble. There is some ground, certainly, for distrust of an agreement by which Great Britain accepts a share of the responsibility for the maintenance of order in the territory of what has now become an independent foreign Power. The interests of Great Britain in Mesopotamia are, however, very considerable, and this treaty not only provides, perhaps, the only guarantee that these interests will receive adequate protection, but, from the point of view of the peoples of Iraq, may be regarded as the quid pro quo for concessions which have been granted to Great Britain. It is to be hoped that by 1937, when under the treaty terns the Royal Air Force will be withdrawn and the Mesopotamian bases of the air route to India are placed under the sole protection of Iraq troops which will be maintained at the British expense, the native administration will be in a position fully to assert its authority. • |

.THE FIRE RISK. The destruction by fire of a considerable area of afforestation atJSVaipori involves the City Corporation in the loss of the results of a great deal of labour and of three years’ growth of timber that would in the course of time have become a valuable municipal asset. The risk of fire is the one great menace to the success of afforestation schemes in this country. The risk can be eliminated onlythrough the observance of great;care and through the exercise of common sense on the part of visitors to the afforested areas. None but a criminally malicious person, or a person of unbalanced mind, would deliberately start a fire that might conceivably sweep a whole countryside and cause very serious damage, but a heedless individual may by a single act of neglect or lack of thought produce similarly disastrous consequences. The lighting of fires in an afforestation area is always dangerous. The. careless use of matches during a dry spell of weather is attended with risk. It is to be hoped that the occurrence of last Sunday will have the effect of impressing the whole community with a sense of the need for the scrupulous avoidance of any act that might endanger the safety of the municipal afforested areas. This is a matter both of self-interest with the city ratepayer and of civic pride with the resident of Dunedin. The tree-planting which has been carried on by the City Council has clothed many hundreds of acres of land with a. luxuriant growth and has established an asset which as time passes is likely to be of yery great importance.