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

Narrowing the frontier 167and accept any line within the zone laid down by the Mediating delegates”. 50It will be recalled that a half a decade earlier, a pragmatic Tehran had signalleda similar readiness. By now, Britain was confident a settlement mightfinally be broached and the Foreign Office produced a series of memorandapinpointing the remaining issues of contention that would need to beresolved en route to settlement. 51 Having convened during June andSeptember 1875 to establish the procedural basis upon which delimitationmight be accomplished, the commission met up in January 1876, supposedlyto review the respective boundary claims of the Ottoman and Persian governments.It would prove to be its last sitting. Here Dervish Pasha duly presenteda tracing (in gold) of the frontier claimed by Constantinople with anexplanatory memorandum, “but, owing to a misapprehension on the part ofthe Persian Commissioner, the Persian Memorandum and tracing were notready”. 52 And they would not be for a further six months (when a boundaryclaim traced in silver was received) by which time the Serbian War wasabout to break out. This subsequently absorbed all the Ottoman government’senergies and, frustratingly, halted the proceedings of the commission, justwhen it appeared they were making real headway. Yet the mediating commissionershad to carry the blame themselves to a certain extent, taking aneternity to get the aforesaid Ottoman and Persian memoranda translated (seebelow). Kemball would himself state during February 1877 that there wasno prospect of the commission resuming its activities for the indefinitefuture. A later letter from Kemball, dated 14 March 1848, effectively windingup the commission, also embodies British frustrations:As desired by your Excellency, I have the honour to state, in the matterof the progress made in the settlement of the Turco-Persian boundary,that the labours of the Joint Commission had reached their finalstage, when they were suspended by the outbreak of war with Servia.After many sittings, which remained without effect in reconciling the longstandingdifferences between the two countries, the Turkish and PersianCommissioners had consented respectively to embody their pleas inmemoranda to be submitted to the appreciation of the Delegates of themediating Powers, but the preparation of the certified translations of thesememoranda (which by my Russian colleague was deemed to be indispensable)had been so much delayed as to prevent our considering seriatimthe matters involved, and recording our conclusions regardingthem in an official form. 53Whether or not Kemball and Zelenoi ever got the memoranda translated totheir ultimate satisfaction remains unclear but privately, at least, they didcome up with a compromize line of their own that bisected the boundaryline claims of the local powers within the mapped borderlands. They hadreservations about their achievement that was never broached to the localpowers. As Kemball later commented in June 1880: