IN KURDISTAN
The last phase--Dunsterforce ceases to exist--The end of Turkish
opposition--Off to Bijar--The Kurdish tribes--Raids on Bijar--Moved
on by a policeman--Governor and poet.
It was in South-Western Kurdistan that I saw the last phase of the
war between the Turks and ourselves.
At the end of September, Dunsterforce had ceased to exist, at any
rate under that name. Dunsterville himself had gone down to Bagdad
to discuss the whole Caucasian and North Persian situation with
General Headquarters, and the officers of Dunsterforce had either
gone back to their units in France, Salonika, and Egypt, or had been
absorbed by the North Persian force which was concentrating under
General Thompson at Enzeli for a fresh smack at the Turk in Baku.
After his capture of the oilfields' port, the enemy seemed to have
reached the last stages of physical exhaustion, and to be incapable
of further effort. His push through from Tabriz towards Zinjan and
Kasvin had been finally arrested, and he had been driven back to his
entrenchments on the Kuflan Kuh Pass, where he was well content to
sit down to {226} a peaceful, inoffensive life, smoke his
hubble-bubble, nurse his blistered feet lacerated by long marches on
unfriendly Persian roads, and, in general, by his exemplary behaviour
earn "good conduct" marks from the inhabitants of the zone of
occupation.
But in the country to the west of Mianeh and south of Lake Urumia the
enemy was still inclined to spasmodic activity. It was in this
region that he had harried the Nestorian Army as it was fighting its
way to the south and to safety. At the beginning of October, 1918,
the Turks held Sauj Bulagh, the local capital of the Kurds of
Azerbaijan, Sakiz, Sain Kaleh, and Takan Teppeh, all of which were in
more or less precarious touch with Kowanduz on the western slopes of
the Kurdistan Range, and thence with the main and sole surviving
Turkish Mesopotamian Army which was clinging tenaciously to Mosul.
Their occupation of these several strategic points on the Persian
side of the frontier enabled the Turks to threaten the British post
at Bijar, on the confines of South-Western Kurdistan, and in a sense
to menace the British occupation of Hamadan.
[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE SCENE FOLLOWING THE ARMENIAN
RETIREMENT.]
But Allenby's smashing blow at the Turk in Palestine had its
repercussion in the remote highlands of Persia and in the remoter
region of the Caspian Sea. Its effect was instantaneous. It broke
the Turkish grip on Baku and appreciably loosened his hold on
Azerbaijan. He withdrew from Mianeh and made ready to evacuate
Tabriz and retire into his own territory in an eleventh-hour effort
to {227} buttress up his remaining Asiatic provinces which, one after
the other, were tottering beneath the sledgehammer blows of the
British.
Early in October the wheel of fate and the illness of a brother
officer led to my being transferred from Caspian Headquarters to
Bijar, as Assistant Political Officer and Intelligence Officer. I
looked it up on the map and started. It was a long and interesting
zigzag trek across Persia, first south-west to Hamadan, then
north-west to Bijar and the wild country of the Kurdish tribes.
Few Europeans can lay claim to any intimate knowledge of Kurdistan
and its predatory but fascinating people. It is distinctly remote
from the beaten tourist track. Russian and German travellers and
scholars have nibbled at the ethnological and philological problems
which it presents, and, much more recently, our own Major Soane in
his remarkable book, "Through Kurdistan in Disguise," draws aside the
veil a little, and we are able to take a peep at Kurdish life and
manners naturally portrayed.
Kurdistan cannot be said to possess either natural or political
boundaries, for it embraces both Persian and Turkish territory, and
in it live people who are not racially Kurds. Broadly speaking, it
may be said to stretch from Turkish Armenia on the north to the
Luristan Mountains on the south, and the Turkish-Persian frontier
cuts it into two longitudinal sections. Persian Kurdistan, then, is
bounded by Azerbaijan on the north, the Turkish frontier on the {228}
west, Kermanshah on the south, and Khamseh and Hamadan on the east.
Its old administrative capital is Sinneh.
Its geographical outline is one of bold and rugged mountains which in
winter are covered deep in snow. Narrow valleys run far into the
flank of the towering hills, and it is here, taking advantage of
these natural barriers, that the villages cluster and the inhabitants
attempt to keep warm during the long, bitter, and often fireless,
winter months.
A nonsense rhymester who evidently knew something of the proclivities
of the Kurds once scored a palpable bull's-eye on the target of truth
when he wrote:
"The hippo's a dull but honest old bird;
I wish I could say the same of the Kurd."
The Kurds themselves have more traducers than friends outside their
own country. As the great majority of them are Sunni Moslems, it has
been pointed out, and with a certain element of truth, that the root
of the Persian-Kurdish Question is the religious hatred between Sunni
and Shi'ah, just as the root of the Turkish problem is the undying
hatred between Moslems and Christians. Kurmanji, the main Kurdish
language, has been incorrectly described as a corrupt dialect of
Persian, whereas it is really a distinct philological entity, tracing
an unbroken descent from the ancient Medic or Avestic tongue of Iran.
I had a good deal to do officially with several of {229} the
principal Kurdish tribes, such as the Mukhri, Mandumi, and Galbaghi,
while I was stationed at Bijar, and I cannot agree with the generally
accepted estimate of their character as "a lazy, good-for-nothing set
of thieves." They are admittedly fierce and intractable, of noted
predatory habits, and ready to prey with equal impartiality upon
Persian or Christian neighbour. On the other hand, I found that they
were neither cruel nor treacherous; they are never lacking in
courage, and possess a rude, but well-defined sense of hospitality
and chivalry.
Unarmed, save for a riding-crop, and accompanied only by a few
Sowars, I have gone into their villages in search of raiders--not
always a pleasant task amongst Asiatic hill tribes--and the
inhabitants would be amiability itself. Here one saw the happier
side of these wild, free people who, revelling in the unrestrained
life and the health-giving ozone of their native mountains, find the
trammelling yoke of modern civilization about as irksome and fearful
an infliction as a bit and saddle are to an unbroken colt.
What I liked about the Kurds was their habit--the common inheritance
of most free men--of looking their interlocutor straight in the face.
Their women, many possessing great physical beauty, and glorious
creatures all, would crowd round to do the honours to those visiting
their village. Amongst the Kurds the women are allowed a great deal
of freedom. They shoot and ride like so many Amazons. It is true
they are the hewers of wood and the drawers of {230} water in the
village or community, but, save for lacking parliamentary
enfranchisement, they do not seem to have many grievances against the
masculine portion of the Kurdish world. They always go unveiled, are
not a bit "man-shy," and, unlike their Moslem sisters in Turkey and
Persia, do not consider themselves spiritually defiled when their
faces are gazed upon by some Infidel whom chance has thrown across
their path.
From this I do not wish it to be inferred that the Kurdish women are
immodest in conduct, or of what might be described as "flighty
morals." Far from it.
These self-same tribesmen who received us so hospitably in their
villages, and gave us entertainment of their best--treating us in
friendly fashion according to their laws, because we had come
trusting to their honour in the guise of friends and without hostile
intent--would, when they took the "war path" and raided a British
post, put up a spirited fight, fully bent on killing or being killed.
Persian Kurds are largely pastoral and nomadic. There are the
sedentary tribes who are the tillers of the soil and never move very
far away from home. The nomads, on the other hand, roam with their
flocks and herds and womenfolk from winter to summer quarters and
vice versa, and it is during these periodical migrations that the
inherited predatory instincts of the Kurds are given free rein. Many
are the armed forays made on a peaceful {231} Persian neighbour's
stock. Often there is resistance, and occasionally an attempt at
reprisals; so a respectably-sized Persian-Kurdish hill-war may have
had as its origin the theft of half a dozen goats by Kurdish robbers.
Stray bands of brigands who had made life more than usually
interesting for some Persian village or other, if pursuit became too
vigorous and they were threatened with capture, were always able to
escape the consequences of their depredations by slipping over the
frontier and seeking bast (sanctuary) in Turkish territory.
Whether the Kurds are, or are not, the descendants of those
first-class fighting men of long ago who opposed the retreat of the
Ten Thousand through the bleak mountain passes of Kurdistan, they
undeniably are imbued with a certain pride of ancestry which
manifests itself in various little ways. No pure nomadic Kurd will
ever engage in manual labour, which he looks upon as a disgrace, and
a job fit only for helots, nor will he become a Charvadar (muleteer).
The Kurd undoubtedly possesses an unenviable reputation for
lawlessness amongst the more law-abiding Persians and Turks of this
wild and turbulent frontier land. He is handicapped, perhaps, to
this extent, that, being an alien to the Turk in language, and to the
Persian in religion, he is looked upon as a pariah, and the hand of
both is ever raised against him. Being resentful and overbearing, if
not arrogant, in manner, and knowing no legal code beyond that which
a rifle imposes, he seeks to enforce his {232} own arbitrary
ready-made justice, to call it by that name. So the merry game goes
on, and up amongst the snows of Kurdistan Persian and Kurd and Turk
kill each other on the slightest pretext, and often for no
ascertainable cause.
The Kurd is always well armed, and usually well mounted--often at the
expense of some lowland Persian villager. He invariably affects the
national costume, which is an abbreviated coat and enormous baggy
trousers, with a capacious Kamarband of coloured silk in which he
carries pipe, knife, and odds and ends.
Ten armed Kurds riding into Bijar, a town of 10,000 inhabitants,
would start a panic in the Bazaar. Shutters would go up and
shopkeepers would vanish as if by magic, while the small force of
Persian police in the place, who were usually suffering from the
combined effects of malnutrition and arrears of pay, would discreetly
go to cover, and not be seen again until the visitors had departed.
Usually a British military policeman, armed with a stout stick, would
be sent to handle the delicate situation, to see that there was no
looting, and that the King's peace was preserved inviolate by these
quarrel-seeking, pilfering rascals from beyond the hills.
Bijar itself, unhappily for the peace of mind and pocket of its
shopkeeper-citizens and wealthy agriculturists, is unhealthily near
the "Bad Man's Land" of the nomad Kurds. It is built in a cup-shaped
{233} hollow surrounded by barren peaks, and its altitude (5,200
feet) gives it a rigorous winter climate. The enclosed gardens which
usually lend a touch of picturesque embellishment even to the meanest
and dirtiest of Persian towns are lacking at Bijar. It grows wheat
and corn in abundance on the long, wide plateau which stretches
unbrokenly for miles between the bare, rugged hills. The arable land
is so fertile, and its acreage so abundant, that but one-third is
cultivated yearly. The average wheat yield is enormous, yet the
people are always hovering on the border-line of starvation, the
result of mismanagement, misappropriation, and all the other evils
which may be grouped together under the head of Persian official
maladministration.
When the British marched into Bijar in the summer of 1918 anarchy and
disorder were paramount. The Persian Government is supposed to keep
a garrison here, but the oldest inhabitants had never seen it. If it
did exist, it was carefully hidden away and not allowed to meddle in
such troublesome affairs as Kurdish forays. The Turks during their
occupancy looted Bijar very thoroughly, and roving Kurds, too, when
short of supplies--and that was often--never forgot to extend their
unwelcome patronage to the local bazaars, on the principle of
"Blessed is he that taketh, for he shall not want."
The Governor was a local resident, and his office an unpaid one as
far as the Persian treasury was concerned; but his power was great
and his rule {234} arbitrary, and the post brought him considerable
emoluments. He was a timid and vacillating but well-meaning
individual, who always trembled at the knees when brought face to
face with the unusual. The mere brandishing of a loaded pistol
anywhere in his immediate vicinity would throw him into a paroxysm of
terror. He spoke halting French, and was afflicted with the
prevailing Persian mania for verse-writing. Still, he never allowed
his literary pursuits to clash with or nullify his keen commercial
instincts; and he grew daily in affluence.
But even a Persian peasant has his limits of endurance when he finds
himself being ground to fine powder in the mill of oppression and
corruption. Those of the Bijar district were no exception. After
having been systematically looted all round, by Turk, Kurd, and
dishonest local officials, they rose in revolt when a demand was made
upon them for the payment of the Government Maliat, or grain tribute.
They followed up an emphatic refusal by threatening to duck the
Governor and his coadjutor, the Tax-collector, in the local
horsepond. The latter fled the town, while as for the terrified
Governor, he promptly shut himself up, seeking bast (sanctuary) with
an ill-armed following within the sacred precincts of his serai.
From the roof, one of his retinue, using his hands for a megaphone,
sent out an urgent S.O.S. call to the British, with the result that a
compromise was effected; the Governor was rescued from his
undignified plight, and the angry peasants {235} were appeased by his
promise that the collection of the unpopular tax would rest in
abeyance until Teheran gave its decision on the subject.
Our job in sitting down in Bijar was to hold the place against the
Turks and prevent their coming back, to instil a little wholesome
respect for law and order into the minds of the plunder-loving Kurds,
and to stop them from eating up the smaller and unprotected Persian
fry. To keep the Turk at bay and hold the Kurd in awe, we had
approximately a couple of squadrons of the 14th Hussars, under
Colonel Bridges, a detachment of the Gloucesters in charge of Captain
Stephenson, machine-gun and mountain battery sections, and a couple
of hundred of Persian levies who were commanded by Captain Williams,
an Australian officer. Colonel Bridges was in command of the whole
force. The total certainly did not err on the side of numerical
superiority.
The day after I reached Bijar the Governor arrived to pay an official
call. After the usual formalities as laid down by Persian etiquette
for ceremonies of this kind had been safely negotiated, he begged my
acceptance of a manuscript copy of his poems, and incidentally hinted
that, as the district was in the throes of famine, he would have no
objection to collaborating in the purchasing of wheat with British
money in order to alleviate the prevailing distress.
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