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THE RESHAPING OF THE MIDDLE EAST

By Benoy Kumar Sarkar

While the heat of the armageddon has forged new peoples of Europe into self-conscious statehood, the swan-song of national existence is being sung by one of the oldest peoples of the world. The slow but steady passing of Persia is probably the greatest though the most unobserved and the least talked-of event of world politics during the Great War. The imagination of mankind has indeed been fired by the emergence of Ukrainians, Czecho-Slovaks, and so forth, as more or less sovereign units in the international family. Democracy also has acquired a new lease and a new sanction for humanity through the theory of self-determination promulgated by the radicals of Bolshevist Russia and popularized by the President of the United States. But, as if to demonstrate the Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro in social evolutions, the world is silently witnessing the shades of annihilation that are fast enveloping the nearly fifteen million Shiahite (heterodox) Moslems of the Middle East.

The tragedy of Persia is not, however, an unknown phenomenon, not at any rate to the people of America. For it was an American citizen who, not long ago in 1912, exposed to the world at large the fact of the "strangling" of Persia. This honest disclosure elicited from Asia at that time a profound admiration for the American character, which was only equalled by another almost synchronous incident consisting in the official declaration of the United States that it would not participate in the Six-Power-Loan to the nascent Chinese republic on the ground that the action might necessitate intervention in the internal administration of China. But since then Persia seems to have dropped out of the conciousness of politicians in Asia and Eur-America. They are probably waiting to be startled

one day by the news that "Baytud Din," or the Home of Religion, as the land is known to its people, has formally passed into a dependency.

I. RECONSTRUCTION IN THE PERSIAN GULF

And yet, paradoxically enough, it is true that all through the war period Persia actively engaged the brains of the diplomatists and war-chiefs of the belligerents. It could not be otherwise. For it is the Persian Gulf that has ever remained the objective of all railway enterprises for connecting Asia with Europe and bringing the undeveloped regions of the East under the domination of the advanced Western races.

The war has no doubt given an undue prominence and notoriety to the almost completed Berlin-Bagdad Railway, the artery of a might-have-been Eur-Asian Empire for Germany. In reality, however, in this as in other adventures of colonial exploitation the Germans have been but the last in the field. For it was only in 1903 that the Anatolian Railway Company (German) obtained the concession for extending the Constantinople-Konia line (1872, 1888) to Bagdad, whereas England and France have been enjoying railway concessions in Asia Minor ever since the Crimean War (1857). Besides, in 1895 the thousand mile line from Cairo-Port Said to Kuweit (at the head of the Persian Gulf in Turkey) was almost on the point of being negotiated between the powers that be for an all-British route from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian and Australasian Zones. Even more important in world-politics was the Russian project of penetrating northern Persia as far as Teheran, or Hamadan (the ancient Ecbatana, the capital of the Median Empire, not far from the historic rock of Behistun which bears the inscriptions of Darius), or Yezd in Central Persia. This was to have been effected by extending the trans-Caspian line from Merv or Kushk and the trans-Caucasian railroad from Tabriz, the terminus that has been reached during the war time in 1915. The Russian scheme also contemplated reaching the warm waters of the South

Asian Seas at Bushire, or Bunder Abbas or Chahbar or Gwadur.

A rather curious fact in connection with this trans-Persian railway project of Russia is that she has had the active coöperation of England definitely since January, 1912. This seems to be inconsistent with the traditional Russophobia of the British. But it is not strange because, as is well known, Russia had recognized the "special interests" of Great Britain in the Gulf and had declared that it lay outside the scope of the Anglo-Russian Agreement of August 31, 1907.

England had also been relieved of another thorn in her side. Because the Anglo-French Entente of 1906 put a stop to France's pin-prick and obstructionist policy with regard to England, her enemy of Egyptian and Fashoda memories, in the Persian Gulf as in other spheres. Finally, in 1914 the French firmly cemented the new British friendship by surrendering, in consideration of financial compensation and new rights in Gambia (West Africa), the privileges and immunities of the traffic in arms with Maskat in the Gulf of Oman, which the Anglo-French treaty of 1862 accorded to France.

By the time, therefore, that the war began in Europe the two old competitors of the British Empire had been eliminated from the Middle East. The Persian Gulf was then a British lake. It is superfluous to add that it became necessarily a most powerful challenge to the military and naval might of the Germans, the latest of the empireseekers. The magnitude of Germany's ambition in this direction and the depth of her disappointment at failure can be intelligible only if the world fully realizes that Britannia did not rule the waves of the Irish Sea and the Bay of Bengal more securely than she did the sheet of water about 500 miles long and 200 miles wide between Arabia and Persia. The western littoral, i.e., the seacoast of Turkey in Asia was for over a quarter of a century as Britishdominated as the eastern, i.e., the Persian shore, and further on, the Mekran Coast.

At the northwest head lies Kuweit which under British influence virtually declared its independence of the Ottoman Empire in 1899. In 1914 it occupied the same status in international politics as Mongolia and Tibet with regard to China and the Powers since 1907. Contiguous to this region which was covetously looked for by the Germans as the possible sea-terminus of the Bagdad Railway lies Mohammerah in the northeast corner of the Gulf, at the mouth of the Karun River, within the jurisdiction of the Shah of Persia. This area also has long ceased to acknowledge Persian suzerainty and has been a de facto British protectorate. It is in fact the base of the British Oilfields in Persia. When the war broke out, therefore, the Shatt-elArab from its mouth as far inland as Basra, about sixty miles in Turkish territory, was a thoroughly British river.

Coming down the Arabian littoral, we have the Bahrein archipelago noted for the pearl fishery. Here since 1861, as in Cyprus since 1878 and in Egypt since 1882, the British rather than the Ottoman flag has been in the ascendant. Further down, the so-called Pirate Coast with the important port of Debai has been under the control of the British Resident at Bushire since 1853. This brings us to Cape Musandin, the tip of the Arabian Coast which juts into the Persian side at Bunder Abbas. Here indeed we have the Gibraltar of the Middle East commanding the Straits of Ormuz, the narrow entrance to this Asian Mediterranean. For, the province of Oman which is the hinterland of the Pirate Coast, as well as the island of Maskat came to recognize British guardianship during the Napoleonic wars, while Bunder Abbas is the terminus of the "British sphere" in Persia as delimited by the Anglo-Russian Agreement.

Now, on the eastern side, the littoral from Bunder Abbas to Mohammerah, i.e., the entire Persian shore of the Gulf, lies within what is technically known as the "neutral sphere" according to the same document. But actually the fine port of ingah, as one proceeds up, is under British domination, and Bushire, further up, has long been the Shanghai of this Zone, where the British Resident's will is law.

Only once was this hegemony of England in the Persian Gulf liable to be seriously threatened. In 1901 during the dark days of Great Britain while she was preoccupied with South African affairs the Russian papers were rabid in their open avowals for the seizure of Bunder Abbas as counterpoise to British Kuweit. In fact Russia did not hesitate to declare her intention of Russifying entire Persia. But the balance of power in the Middle East turned in favor of England as soon as the close of the Boer War left her energies free to attend to the situation. As against the Russian manifesto for monopolizing Persia Lord Lansdowne pronounced the British article of faith in 1903 in the following terms: "We should regard the establishment of a fortified post in the Persian Gulf by any other Power as a very grave menace to British interests which we should certainly resist with all the means at our disposal." Thus was enunciated the English Monroe Doctrine for the Persian Gulf. And this status quo was accepted by Russia in 1907 as a solution of the question.

It is not astonishing therefore that since the Anglo-Russian agreement the Turks should have automatically looked upon Germany as their natural ally, and that the Persians should have been pro-German or rather anti-ally in sympathy during the war. But the war found Germany and Turkey absolutely without any footing on the entire Ottoman littoral. For long before the war the British had succeeded in frustrating German overtures at Kuweit and at Shargarh on the Pirate Coast. Similarly Turkey's attempts to restore her suzerainty in Kuweit, Bahrein, Oman and Maskat had failed through British backing of the local Sheikhs, Sultans, Chiefs or Governors. And of course it could not take long to quell the few pro-German (Turk) upheavals in the Gulf region. The disturbances at Maskat were put down by a British Indian Army in 1915; and in 1916 a British force was posted at Bahrein to meet eventualities. On the Persian shore likewise the few Anti-British risings were sharply suppressed in 1915 and 1916. On the other hand, the tables were turned by the fall of Bagdad and the conquest of Mesopotamia in March 1917. The Turco-Ger

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