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

Narrowing the frontier 165A similar sense of awareness underpinned Tehran’s efforts of 1873 to claimjurisdiction over Persians resident in the Ottoman Empire by virtue ofArticle Seven of the May 1847 Treaty of Erzurum. It also explained its complaintswhen up to 10,000 Kurdish tribesmen entered what was claimed asPersian territory in June of the same year. Though Persia claimed that thistransboundary movement constituted a flagrant abuse of the August 1869status quo convention, Britain’s Ambassador in Tehran suggested it had moreto do with the keen, more rigid sense of territoriality that Britain and Russiahad effectively fostered, “the summer and winter pastures of tribes on bothsides of the Turco-Persian frontier had for some years now been a source oftension and bloodshed”. 44 The point was that while disputes might have beenacute in a localized sense, they had rarely troubled central authority seriouslyin previous decades. Britain continued to play a useful, if limited, mediatoryrole in the borderlands during this time. A minor success intemporarily settling a territorial dispute at Bagsai (Pusht-i Kuh) in July 1873,which involved each side agreeing to withdraw its sizeable troop contingentsin the area, was fairly typical. 45CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR, 1874–1876Anglo-Russian hopes in the mid-1870s that real progress would finally bemade in delimiting a Perso-Ottoman territorial divide were dashed by theuntimely outbreak of the Serbian War in July 1876. Negotiations would befurther suspended during a subsequent (and more serious) Russo-OttomanWar in 1877. At least the 1878 Treaty of Berlin had the effect of definitivelysettling the territorial status of Khotour and its occupation since 1849 bythe Ottoman Empire. With that treaty having secured its evacuation by Constantinople,a mixed Anglo-Russian commission delimited a precise boundaryfor the area two years later. 46Encouraged by Britain and Russia but delayed by further border skirmishesin the Pusht-i Kuh district and seemingly constant claims of Ottomanencroachments into Persian territory, it would not be until December 1874that Persian and Ottoman representatives met in Constantinople to get backto the business of narrowing the frontier, supposedly to sketch out a definitivedelimitation on the much corrected Identic Map. Deadlock was soonreached, however, when Persia relied upon Article Three of the 1847 ErzurumTreaty to demand a restoration of the status quo of 1843 for all parts of thefrontier not expressly mentioned in Article Two. For its part, the OttomanEmpire invoked Article Nine of the same instrument to claim the applicationof the first Erzurum Treaty (1823) and its forerunner, the 1639 ZohabTreaty to those sections of the borderlands not singled out in Article Two. 47Unable to narrow their differences, the local powers accepted renewed (January1875) Anglo-Russian offers to mediate in the dispute, though Ottomanacceptance had been contingent on an unequivocal statement that in any