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

170 Richard Schofieldconsider matters, its representative had delayed proceedings for a good halfyearby officially annexing the borderland province of Khotour en route toits first session in Mohammerah. Following this rather blatant landgrab, hewould then participate only at a distance within the commission, frequentlyleaving his three colleagues to embark upon his unilateral, fact-finding toursof the borderlands. It took some time for the mediating powers to realizethat he was playing a double game. As M. A. Gamazof (1875) would latercomment in the introduction to Colonel Tchirikof ’s travelling diary of thedemarcation survey:As regards the Ottoman commissioner, he did not arrive at Bagdad tillthe middle of June. His delay was caused by the fact that the Porte hadgiven him a preliminary mission independent of the common work ofthe mixed commission. The Turkish representative went from Constantinoplestraight to the frontier of Azerbaijan, not solely in order tomake enquiries there, as the Porte said at the time, but, as was provedby the facts, simply with the object of taking possession of Kotur andthe defile leading from Van to that strategically important place, which,the Porte asserted, had been taken from Turkey by Persia without anyright. The Porte wished in this way to get possession of something tobe made use of in future eventualities, and chose Kotur, in the first placebecause that locality, not being mentioned in the last Treaty of Erzeroum,could easily be made the subject of a false interpretation; and in thesecond place because, in the event of war, it would place in the handsof the Turkish forces concentrated at Van one of the most importantpoints of exit for an invasion of the very heart of Persia. 58Largely as the local power on the back foot, Persia had been surprisinglypragmatic and accommodating from the start, generally believing that it wouldget a better territorial deal vis-à-vis Constantinople through the treaty negotiations,borderlands survey and its aftermath than it would otherwise.After all, this was a Persian state still smarting from its humiliating territoriallosses in the Caucasus to Russia during the early nineteenth century.Pragmatism would increasingly be the watchword of its territorial policiesas, by the end of the century, it began to differentiate more clearly betweencontemporary political boundaries and the imperial Persian territorial limitsof the past, real or imagined, pre- or post-Islamic (see Eskandiari-Qajarin this volume). The defensive late nineteenth-century Qajar mindset was topolice and defend this diminished Persian state territory, just as a future projectwould soon be to more effectively Persianize its now better defined margins.59 This would be witnessed, for example, in the increasingly direct mannerby which the Persian central government wielded its authority over its coastlinein the Persian Gulf, a process that began with the abolition of semiautonomousArab rule in Lengeh at the turn of the 1880s and ended withReza Shah’s subjugation of the Sheikh of Mohammerah in the mid-1920s. 60