City streets tie Belize to Iraq
The war in the Middle East appears to be rapidly coming to an end, and Belizeans, along with the rest of the world, have watched the brief campaign with varying proportions of shock and awe. For many residents of Belize City, particularly those in one southside neighbourhood, the U.S. march through Iraq has a familiar ring. Patrick Jones explains.
The names now flashing daily across our TV screens: Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, Tigris and Euphrates…are no strangers to Belizeans. We’ve been living with them for years.
Patrick Jones, Reporting
“This is Euphrates Avenue at the intersection with Mex Avenue. A lot of Belizeans in the city live in places like these, without realizing the historical significance of these names. So how did these Middle Eastern names get transplanted to Belize in the first place? A lot of the documentation have been lost over time and what currently exists is either being held at the national archives in Belmopan or with the family of the men who fought in World War One.”
Historian Charles Woods, whose uncle Eric Woods served in the first World War, says the process of establishing a local version of Mesopotamia started in 1918 with the fall of Germany and Belizean soldiers returning from the battlefields.
Charles Woods Sr., Historian
“After the first world war that ended in 1918, our contingent of British Hondurans, as they were called in those days, came back home and there was a lot of agitation to do something for these soldiers that had gone to fight in the Mesopotamia area in the first world war”
Orton Clarke, Son of WWI Veteran
“The government of the United Kingdom, England especially, decided to reward all those soldier who had served overseas by giving them a plot of land. That plot of land was to bring them into focus was named Mesopotamia from the whole area in which they were serving overseas.”
Most if not all of the Belizean soldiers who served in the Mesopotamia Theatre are either dead or no longer live in Belize. But according to records in the possession of the Ex Services League, a total of one hundred and twenty-nine men from British Honduras, took up arms and fought along side allied forces from Britain, France and the United States, against the German and Turkish forces.
Bernard Adolphus, President, Belize Ex Services League
“Some of these men work in various capacities. Infantrymen, some were axe men, some were in medical corps, some were in the bugle corps and what have you, but they assisted. They contributed and assisted. And as a result of this, when these men returned back home, certain streets were named because of the areas that they visited.”
Charles Woods Sr.
“The streets were nicely laid out. You’ll notice for Belize streets this is pretty wide and they are all in squares and when this area was being developed, it was actually first called “the dump”, because that’s how it was being filled up, by dumping up. And there was also a Catholic priest who first started Saint Ignatius Church, which is right here in the heart of Mesopotamia, Father Abling. Back in the 1920s thereabouts, there was some talk that this place might have been called “The Dump” or “Abling Heights”. But then the ex-soldiers who came back from Mesopotamia won out and the name Mesopotamia became common to this area.”
But while the returning soldiers wished to remember the place of their service, their overall experience in the army was one of second-class citizenship–a combination of racism and colonialism.
Charles Woods Sr.
“Undoubtedly they saw action, but when the soldiers came back there were a lot of complaints that they were given more menial tasks to do during the war than being on the actual front line.”
Those who did see action came back with medals to prove it. Orton Clarke’s dad Alexander Clarke fought with an Indian battalion at Cantara near Amara on the Tigris River.
Orton Clarke
“He was a rifle man. So if he shot…he said he was on the front and I feel that being the man he was, he never would have come out and said I shot somebody, since it was all in the line of duty as he would have looked on it. But if he was in the action, if he was in the front and he saw action, I would have to assume that he must have fired at some target, which would have been live targets.”
And those Belizeans in the U.S. army now firing at live targets in the Middle East should know they are not the first of their countrymen to march through the sands of Iraq. For a reminder they need only revisit the south side of Belize City. Patrick Jones, for News 5.
