Note 12 — Chapter XXIV · STATISTICAL AND POLITICAL

We may place at the kernel of the Armenian Question in Turkey the difficulties which arise from the presence of this Kurdish population upon the Armenian plateau. It is true that a considerable number among them have become industrious cultivators and subsist on the fruits of their own toil. According as the period which separates them from their former life is long or short, or the name of their more lawless kinsmen is despised or respected, these peasants will answer the traveller who inquires to what people they belong either by replying that they are Osmanli or by owning to their being Kurds. In the first case they rank themselves with the settled Turkish population; in the second they acknowledge the bond which attaches them to the free life of the tribe. But the weight of this agricultural element lies in the scale of peace; it is otherwise with those Kurds who retain to the full their tribal organisation and who pasture their flocks on the lofty highlands which extend to the plain of Erzerum. It is possible that from a remote period the nomads of Kurdistan proper may have advanced the limit of their summer journey beyond the plain of Mush, to return at the approach of winter to the neighbourhood of Diarbekr. How far their migration should be extended would be determined by the distance which separated them from their winter quarters on the lowlands, and by the degree of resistance which the settled peoples might be able to offer to their unwelcome approach. The fall of the feudal system in Turkey and the decline of the power of the Turkish beys may no doubt have contributed in a sensible manner to open breaches to the Kurds; but it appears that a powerful colony of this people were brought to their present seats in Armenia through a definite act of public policy on the part of the Turkish Power. After the defeat of the Persians in the plain of Chaldiran in 1514 it became necessary to arrive at a permanent settlement of the Kurdish provinces; and it formed part of the plan pursued by Edrisi, the distinguished Minister of Selim the First, and himself a Kurd of Bitlis, to remove a portion of this turbulent people from the country of their home and to settle them along the new frontier of Turkey in the districts bordering upon Persia and Georgia which had been acquired from the Shah. It is said that they were granted a perpetual immunity from taxation on the condition that they would act as a permanent militia upon the border which had been given them to guard.12 Neither the evidence of subsequent history nor the contemporary political situation upon the tableland can be taken to have established the wisdom of a policy which appears to have overrated the capacity of the Kurds whether for benefit or for harm. On the one hand, by adding to the area inhabited by them, the Turkish Government seems rather to have increased the difficulties which have always beset their efforts to hold this people in check; and, on the other, their experience of the value of this militia can scarcely be so pleasant a memory as their persistent continuance in a worn-out ideal might lead us to expect. During the two campaigns against Russia of 1829 and 1854 the Kurdish chiefs played off one Power against another, and are even said to have assisted the invading armies by affording a passage through their adopted country and by providing them with supplies. In the campaign of 1877 the Kurds were the most dangerous element in the Turkish army, and are described by an eye-witness of the several actions in Asia as a grotesque corps of irregular cavalry breaking into groups when resisted and altogether unfitted for the serious operations of war. Their atrocious cruelty towards the wounded and their mutilation of the dead was visited upon the heads of their afflicted protectors in a general execration of the Turkish name. Yet even the bitterness of this disappointment and the scarcely doubtful lesson of several minor wars, which within the course of the past century they have been obliged to conduct against the Kurds, seem not to have convinced the Turkish Government of the folly of endeavouring to humour a people who will never be of any assistance to Government until they shall have lost for ever the power of resistance and ranged themselves on the side of law. The reigning Sultan in his dealings with the Kurds has inclined to the old policy; he has sought at once to civilise them and to render them more efficient from a military point of view. In the wild and seldom-visited country between the plain of Alashkert and the lake of Van I was able to gain a practical acquaintance with the methods that are being pursued. In the village of Patnotz, the principal seat of the notorious tribe of Haideranli, a solid stone structure, which has been built by order of Government to serve the several purposes of a mosque, a school, and a residence for the chief, stands out from the usual cluster of mud hovels—a palace among ant-hills. In every larger Kurdish village I found a petty officer of the Turkish army bewailing the sad fate which had brought him to this exile, and his own impotence to control the slippery people and constrain them to attend his drills. A new name, that of Hamidiyeh, has been given to this irregular cavalry, and they have been liberally supplied with uniforms from the Turkish magazines. The headquarters of the corps are at Melazkert on the Eastern Euphrates or Murad Su, and over thirty regiments have already been registered over the area of the tableland. Each regiment has a nominal strength of about 600 men. But they have never yet manœuvred together, and when in 1892 a detachment from each regiment paraded at Erzerum, I am informed that the whole number did not amount to 2000, and that the sorry spectacle was presented to the Turkish general of a motley company of aged men and half-grown youths, mounted on horses which wanted muscle and had perhaps never tasted corn. It is pleasant to acknowledge the good intentions of the Sultan in endeavouring to educate the Kurds and to organise them in a more efficient manner for the purposes of serious war; the ideal which has no doubt been present to the mind of his military advisers is the example of the Russian corps of Cossacks. But the mild measures at present in favour will never attain this result; it is not under such a policy that the Kurds will be subjected to the regular discipline of a camp. Either the young men must be taken from their native or adopted provinces and trained in the armies of the Empire at a distance from their homes, or the entire people must be made to bend to the yoke of an equal civil law, of which they at present evade the provisions and defy the ministers.