War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

Narrowing the frontier 155And the State of Turkey also firmly undertakes that the town and seaportof Mohammerah, and the island of El Khizr, and the anchorage place,and also the lands of the eastern bank, i.e. the left side of the Shatt-el-Arab, which are in the possession of tribes acknowledgely attached (subjected)to Persia, shall be in the possession of the State of Persia, in fullsovereignty. And besides this, Persian ships shall have the right to navigatethe said river in full liberty, from the place where it flows into thesea, as far as the point of junction of the frontiers of the two parties. 20Most of the land boundary further north was based upon the aforementionedcrude identification of the status quo pertaining in 1843, which in itself supposedlycorresponded loosely to earlier vague Perso-Ottoman treaties, exceptfor the specific arrangements earmarked for Sulaymaniyeah and Zohab (seeabove). Article Three of the May 1847 treaty had stipulated the formationof a four-party commission, whose task was to refine the delimitation introducedby that document and to map and mark it on the basis of a surveythey would undertake of the whole length of the borderlands. Clarifying thetask to be performed by this commission at the outset, Palmerston establishedthat, as far as the mediating commissioners were concerned, territorialrestitution would be confined to Mohammerah, Zohab and Sulaymaniyeah,in accordance with the 1847 treaty and that otherwise, the status quo as approximatedin 1843 along the borderlands should be established on the ground.Yet such an undertaking, performed between 1850 and 1852, would proveimpossible, predictably in light of the Erzurum Treaty’s inexactitude and thelimited mediatory powers of Britain and Russia. For both the local powerswould adopt widely divergent and essentially irreconcilable interpretationsof what had been introduced in 1847, as we shall witness.THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF THETURCO-PERSIAN BOUNDARY DELIMITATIONCOMMISSION, 1850–1852By November 1848 representatives of both the local and mediating powershad been appointed to the delimitation commission. Colonel FenwickWilliams, who had been chief representative during the Erzurum negotiations,was appointed British Commissioner and Colonel Y. I. Tchirikof, theRussian Commissioner, with Mirza Jaafar Khan and Dervish Pasha theirlocal Persian and Ottoman counterparts. In light of the commission’s subsequentfailures, the last paragraph of Sir Stratford Canning’s instructionsto Williams of December 1848 seemed particularly ironic: “I leave the subjecthere, with a confident hope that the same success which ultimately crownedyour negotiations at Erzurum will, after an interval less protracted byunavoidable incidents, attend your present duties.” 21In the early months of 1849 the work of the delimitation commission wasto be gravely compromized before it had even assembled. While ostensibly