Chapter XXXII: Appendix: II

THE AKABAH QUARREL

MR. BLUNT TO SIR EDWARD GREY, 9TH MAY, 1906

SIR,

“The demand made on the Ottoman Government within the limit of ten days to evacuate Tabah and other points in the neighbourhood of Akabah is so serious a matter that, as one acquainted with the district in dispute and interested for thirty years in Egyptian affairs, I feel it my duty to lay before you my reasons for thinking that the demand is an excessive one and due to a serious mistake as to facts.

“I am, of course, ignorant of the secret reasons which may possibly be impelling His Majesty’s Government at the present moment to force on a quarrel with the Sultan, and if there are such what I have to say will necessarily pass unheeded. I notice that the chief organs of the Liberal press seem to regard the quarrel somewhat in the light of a crusade. But I am unwilling to believe that any such thought inspires the attitude taken by the Government, and am inclined rather to the view that they would be glad to avoid a violent issue. I therefore venture to make the following observations:

“(1) His Majesty’s Government, believing their case to be a just one, probably calculate that, inasmuch as the Sultan has on several occasions yielded to pressure vigorously applied by European Powers, the same result will now be obtained. It is possible that it may be so, but the chances, I think, are otherwise. In the cases of Dulcigno, Smyrna, and Crete, to take typical examples, it was the rights and interests of Christians that were in question, and the Ottoman Government has always acknowledged a certain moral, if not legal, right in Christendom to intervene for their protection. In the present instance, however, there is no question of Christians being oppressed. It is a matter purely domestic and purely Mohammedan, and one in which the Sultan doubtless feels that the whole moral right no less than the legal right is his. The positions occupied in the neighbourhood of Akabah are closely connected with the pilgrim road and the facilities of pilgrimage to Mecca, and in Mohammedan eyes it is the Sultan’s right and duty to guard them. If, therefore, the dispute with England should lead to hostilities the Sultan knows that he will be enthusiastically backed by the all but universal approbation of his coreligionists. It is almost impossible, indeed, without abandoning his whole religious claim to leadership, that he should yield to Christian menace without fighting.

“(2) I believe from an examination of printed documents and from matters within my personal knowledge that the case of His Majesty’s Government is technically less strong than they perhaps understand it. The delay in publishing recent correspondence prevents me, of course, from knowing what has passed lately between the Foreign Office and the Ottoman Government, but, taking the older documents as they stand with the statement made by you yesterday in the House of Commons, I think it not difficult to show that the position taken up by Lord Cromer in 1892 was founded on a double error both as to these and as to the local facts.

“Lord Cromer’s contention originally was that the Sinai Peninsula, in which he seems to have included not only the geographical triangle known as Tor Sina, but the desert lands north of the pilgrim road between the Suez Canal and the Syrian frontier, was part of the old Pashalik of Egypt, and he made appeal to its “ancient boundaries.” But a closer examination of historical documents has shown that this was an error, and I observe that the reference to ancient boundaries has been abandoned by His Majesty’s Government in favour of another hardly better founded.

“The contention now is that the district in question has been administered by the successive Viceroys since Mohammed Ali’s time in such a way as to constitute a territorial right. This I believe to be a wholly untenable view, in accordance neither with the facts of the case nor with a right interpretation of the political situation. With regard to the facts, my recollection of the district as it was in the time of Ismail Pasha and later in that of Tewfik is clear. My first visit to it was made in the spring of 1876, and I have continued ever since in touch with the Arab tribes who are its almost sole inhabitants. At that date there certainly existed nothing in the way of civil administration, and military authority was only represented by a score of soldiers holding the small isolated fort of Nakhl, seventy miles eastward from Suez on the pilgrim road, whose sole duty it was to prevent Bedouin interference with the highway for the protection of travellers. Civil authority there was none. No taxes were collected, no justice was dispensed, no conscription was enforced. I believe I am right in saying that no part of the Peninsula was included in any Egyptian mudirieh. With the exception of the monks in the Mount Sinai convent and a few persons, principally Greeks, at the port of Tor, connected with it, there was absolutely no settled population. The few Bedouin tribes, grouped principally in the south, governed themselves precisely as in Arabia, according to tribal custom—and so long as they did not interfere with the pilgrim road or molest travellers they were free to all Government interference. There was not a soldier or policeman except at Nakhl.

“As to the Gulf of Akabah, I travelled up its western shore from Mount Sinai to the fort of Akabah, a distance of some seventy miles, and found not a living soul on my way, except one naked Arab, who had his home under a tussock of rough grass and was living on shellfish. I can testify, if necessary on oath, that neither the island of Faraoun nor the well of Tabah possessed a single inhabitant. It was only at the head of the Gulf, in the Wady Akabah, that I found any Bedouins. The eastern half of the Peninsula is without camel pasturage, and the Sinai Bedouins do not frequent it. The talk, therefore, of this shore as having been at any time administered has really no meaning. The commandant of the fort of Akabah would no doubt have dealt with any disturbance at the head of the Gulf threatening the pilgrim road either at Tabah or elsewhere, but the disturbance would not have come from the Peninsula, but from the Bedouin tribes north and east. There was no military force westwards nearer than Nakhl, eighty miles away. The contention, therefore, of the Ottoman Government that Tabah, within seven miles of the fort, is included in the military radius of Akabah is perfectly correct.

“The same year, 1876, I went on from Akabah north-westwards to the neighbourhood of El Arish, Rafeh, and Gaza. The few tribes I met on the road, Azazimeh, Teaha, and Terrabin, belonged to Syria, if to any settled Government. In the year 1881 I again visited this Northern district, which was then almost unknown, travelling eastward from Ismailia across the sand-dunes to the hills of Magara, Hellal, Yellak, and the rest. I found Jebel Magara, which lies west of Wady Arish, occupied by the Aiaide tribe, a section of which is to be found in Egypt, and so having a certain connection with the Nile valley, but beyond the Wady, which, it may be mentioned, is held to be identical with the river of Egypt mentioned in the Bible as the boundary of ancient Egypt, the tribes owned no such connection. Jebel Hellal, almost due south of El Arish, was certainly considered by the Bedouins as within the district of Palestine. They lived, it is true, under their tribal law, and were at chronic war with each other, but taxes had at times been levied on their casual crops by the Turkish Caimakam of Gaza, and the Sheikhs of two of the tribes had been recently imprisoned by him at Jerusalem. Jebel Hellal, it may be noted, was a long way west of a line drawn from Akabah to El Arish, and still more of one to Rafeh. Certainly no part of the district had ever been administered from Egypt.

“It seems to me, therefore, that when the Sultan withdrew Akabah in 1892 from the military garrisoning by the Khedive he logically withdrew also the military control, and with it all territorial right to its uninhabited neighbourhood. The truth is that the garrisoning of Forts Akabah and Nakhl had no administrative character in a territorial sense, and had been merely entrusted to the Viceroys of Egypt in connection with the pilgrimage, and that the land pilgrimage having now been abandoned, the _raison d’être_ of the garrison at either place had ceased. I am quite sure that if you will make further inquiries you will find this to be the case.

“I am convinced also that it is a mistake to suppose ill-faith in the present instance on the Sultan’s part. The Sultan is doubtless a master of diplomatic craft, and I have never been his apologist or admirer; my sympathies having always been, on the contrary, with liberal as opposed to reactionary Islam. But I am sincerely of opinion that he has been guilty here of no trick. He is deeply interested in all matters connected with the pilgrimage, and I do not for an instant believe that his recent occupation of Tabah had any other motive than to secure the anchorage of Akabah from the possible occupation of a hostile Christian Power. He considers, doubtless, and rightly so, that the present Government of Egypt is no longer a Mohammedan but a European Government, and one therefore unfit to discharge any duty connected with the pilgrimage conflicting with the freedom of the pilgrim highway. At the same time it is wholly improbable that he should have any design of menacing either Egypt or the Suez Canal from so remote a point as Akabah, seeing that a much nearer road of invasion is already in his hands by way of the comparatively well-watered road passing through Arish, the traditional road of all invaders of Egypt. I think His Majesty’s Government is quite needlessly alarmed on this head and unduly suspicious of the Sultan’s honesty. If there has been sharp practice in these negotiations as far as they have as yet been published, it seems to me, if I may say it without offence, to be rather on the other side. The Grand Vizier’s telegram declaring that ‘in the Peninsula of Tor Sina the _status quo_ is maintained, and that it will be administered by the Khedivate in the same manner in which it has been administered in the time of Ismail Pasha and Tewfik Pasha’ cannot under the true circumstances of the case have been meant as a cession of territorial rights, at least in these uninhabited districts of Akabah. Still less can it have meant a cession of such rights in the districts north of the pilgrim road, which have never been geographically or administratively part of the Peninsula. Yet Lord Cromer twisted the phrase into an admission of such cession, and His Majesty’s Government seems now determined to hold the Sultan to his fanciful interpretation. It has, I fear, been decided that the Sultan should be coerced into an acceptance of a line of boundary never heard of in history and arbitrarily drawn ‘from a point a short distance to the east of El Arish to the head of the Gulf of Akabah.’ I need hardly point out that the fact of the English Consul-General at Cairo having communicated his interpretation of the telegram to a Minister of the Khedive at Cairo has no legal value whatever as between England and the Sultan, nor has it been asserted in any official way that the Sultan endorsed the interpretation. Lord Cromer’s logic is of a kind which no doubt is often used in dealing diplomatically with Asiatic States. But a civilized Government loses much, by resorting to it, of its moral standing when the logic leads to a quarrel. It is inconceivable that it would be supported or the case given in our favour were it submitted to arbitration.

“Under the circumstances, then, is it not unwise to press this extreme claim of the Arish-Akabah boundary and the evacuation of Tabah on the Sultan as a preliminary to all negotiations? A fair settlement would probably be to leave to the Sultan the almost uninhabited region east of Wady el Arish, the ancient Biblical boundary between Egypt and Palestine. The Sultan would doubtless be satisfied with this, as would, I am sure, be all Egyptians, who have no practical interest in the far- away region except that of the Mecca pilgrimage. To press the matter to a violent issue, when the ground of right is so very doubtful, by a formal ultimatum, which will probably be disregarded, is to run the certain risk of a religious quarrel of indefinite magnitude with the whole body of Mohammedan believers.

I am, etc.,

“WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT.”