CWGC Announcement
The CWGC Basra Digital Memorial
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has just launched its Basra Digital Memorial. You can visit it directly at basra.cwgc.org/en .
This new digital site seeks to rectify a great historical wrong: the exclusion of the names of over 33,000 non-European casualties, primarily Indian Army Non-Commissioned Officers and other ranks, from the physical Basra Memorial. Until now, the Memorial named only European casualties of all ranks together with Indian Officers.
The exclusion was the result of policy decisions taken during the 1920s by the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC), in coordination with the India Office, which held that Indian troops would be commemorated “numerically”, or in registers, rather than by engraved name on the memorials themselves.
The architects of “numerical commemoration”
Three men were the primary architects of this policy:
- Major-General Sir Fabian Ware, Founder and Vice-Chairman of the IWGC, who served as its Director General and led the Commission throughout the 1920s.
- Frederick Edwin (F.E.) Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India from 1924 to 1928, under whose leadership the policy excluding Indian NCOs and other ranks from named commemoration was firmly established.
- Edward Turnour, Earl Winterton, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for India (1922–1924 and 1924–1929).
While the policy was formalised through the 1920s, its origins lay earlier, and it was under Birkenhead at the India Office that it became settled practice, with tens of thousands of Indian soldiers denied the dignity of having their names engraved on memorials such as the one at Basra.
A welcome step, but not the end of the obligation
It is good news that the CWGC is finally doing something proactive in relation to Iraq, having formally pulled out in 1990 and, in reality, having steadily reduced its activities and investment since the 1960s, leaving these sites in a deplorable state.
A digital record is genuinely welcome. But, in my view, and as a relative of a casualty buried in Basra War Cemetery, it does not remove the obligation to properly commemorate the physical graves and memorials in country. Names on a website are not a substitute for names cut in stone, beside the men who lie there.
Hopefully this represents a positive turning point for the CWGC in Iraq, and for the families of those buried and commemorated there.