Policing Persia: Swedes Very far From Home

In the early 20th century, some forces in Persia were pushing to modernise the country which had, in regards to organisation and government, changed very little in the past few hundred years.

The Shah of Persia arriving in Ourmiah, 1911 (source: Library of Congress)

In July 1910, the Democrats came to power and one part of their modernisation program was the construction of a national gendarmerie - a sort of paramilitarian force that was part police force and part armed force aimed at keeping the peace by any means necessary. While events soon lead to the program being dropped, the idea of a gendarmerie survived, partly likely because it was in the interest of the two super-powers in the region - Russia and Great Britain - to ensure safe passage through the notoriously dangerous region. As an example, Mr Smart, the British Consul at Shiraz, was attacked in the neighbourhood of Kazerun in December 1912. Grazed by a bullet, and trapped under his wounded horse, he was only saved due to the efficiency of the troop of the Central India Horse that escorted him and the kind care of some of the locals, and the incident led to considerable diplomatic tension. In fact, the Gendarmerie was to be in great part funded by Britain and Russia – for example, in may 1913, the British Government advanced a sum of £100,000 to the Persian government for this purpose, following the Smart-incident.

However, in order to build such a force, Persia needed help from the outside since the country lacked officers with the relevant sort of training. The question was which country to turn to? In 1907, Russia and Great Britain had, much to the outrage of the Persians, divided the country into two speheres of influence; one Russian and one Britain. Naturally, it was unthinkable for either side to allow the other party to organise a national armed Persian force, and they also vetoed Teheran's first choice Italy, because Italy was viewed to be too much of a power in itself.

Sweden, however... Let's face it; while the Russians may once have been trounced by Swedish forces in battles such as Narva, Sweden in the early 20th century was not that impressive. In fact, she had just voluntarily granted Norway independence and was now only a small fraction of the Baltic power she had once been. Nobody needed fear the Swedes – least of all super-powers like Russia and Britain.

Hence, in August 1911, Colonel Harald O. Hjalmarson (helpful tip: 'hj' is pronounced as an English 'y', so he would be 'Yalmarson')  arrived and with the help of several other Swedish officers, began the laborious task of organising a gendarmerie, aimed at maintaining security on the highways and roads. It was called the Persian Central Governemt Gendarmerie (or in Persian, Zhandarmiri-yi Dawlati).

 General Harald Hjalmarson (source: Wikipedia)

The Swedish officers were to a large degree Swedish aristocrats, and the Persian officers were also drawn from the higher social strata and well-educated – many of them spoke French, for instance. At the end of 1912 the Gendarmerie consisted of 21 Swedes and nearly 3,000 Persian officers and men. By the end of 1913, the number of Swedish officers had risen to 36 while nearly 6,000 Persians were employed. According to an article in The Times, around 2,000 of them were mounted, and they were organised in six regiments, or more accurately, nine battalions.

The outbreak of World War I led to a distinct shift in policy. First of all, Sweden recalled all the officers who were on the roll for active duty. Second, Persia was in a very delicate position, finding itself between Germany's ally Turkey and British India. Both sides wooed the Persians, who nominally remained neutral. However, the Gendarmerie had distinct German loyalties. Not only were the Swedish officers by tradition friendly towards their bigger Germanic cousin, but nationalist Persian forces who were still outraged at Russia's and Britain's high-handedness in splitting the country between them, were also in favour of Germany. They accepted subsidiaries from Germany and covertly aided German expiditions, such as the expedition headed by Niedermayer, as well as allowing Wasserman's proslyting among local potentates in southern Persia.

In 1916, the force split; some siding with the nationalists, actively fighting the Russians, while parts of the first and second regiments in Teheran remained neutral along with their Swedish officers. The troops who had remained neutral would later form the nucleus for the reconstructed Gendarmerie, which took part in the campaigns against the Bolsheviks in the Caspian provinces and the Kurdish rebellion in Azerbaijan, as well as keeping up its police duties of guarding the roads.

After the coup d'état in 1921, the Gendarmerie formed the core for the new national Iranian army together with the the Iranian Cossack Division and the remaining Swedish officers returned home. Harald O. Hjalmarson would later head the Swedish Brigade in the Finnish Civil War, and died in 1919, only 51 years old.

And that is how, bizarrely, a few Swedish officers actively aided Germany's overtures to the Muslim World during World War I.

Sources:

"The Unrest In Southern Persia." Times [London, England] 5 Apr. 1912: 3. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"British Officer Killed In Persia." Times [London, England] 12 Dec. 1912: 6. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"Policing Persia." Times [London, England] 27 Dec. 1913: 5. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 July 2012.

"Indian Soldiers Attacked in Dangerous Pass: The Consul Smart Incident." The Straits Times, 26 January 1912, Page 2

Cronin, Stephanie, Gendarmerie, Encyclopaedia Iranica www.iranica.com, online edition, 28 July 2012 (available at http://www.iranica.com/articles/gendarmerie)

Hopkirk, Peter, On Secret Service East of Constantinople: the plot to bring down the British empire, J. Murray, London, 1994

Wikipedia; entry on Swedish Gendarmerie in English, and on Harald Hjalmarson in Swedish.

(This post was originally posted on my old blog)

Baghdad: Worth a Mosque?

The Kaiser; aka "Hadji Wilhelm Mohammed" (Source: Wikipedia)

World War I is usually associated with the trenches on the Western Front. You know; shelling, gassing, the Somme, the Battle of Verdun... But as Germany knew right at the outset; the Allies' weakest spot was not the French border. No, the soft, unprotected underbelly of the Allies was Britain's Achilles heel – India (why, yes, I do like mixing my metaphors – why do you ask?).

Germany had long groomed Turkey for the (officially un)express(ed) purpose of getting a foothold in Asia. When the rest of the world refused to have any truck with the late Sultan Abdul Hamid after his brutal crushing of the rebellion by the (Christian) Armenian minority, Germany had taken Turkey's side against the outraged Russians. Germany had even helped Turkey arm itself by offering military advisors and arms. In return, Germany only wanted a small thing – a railroad, running straight from Berlin to Baghdad. That way, Germany would be well prepared to open up an Asian front in case of a conflict with Russia and Britain without risking that her troop movements were impeded by Russia and her Slavic allies in Eastern Europe.

In order to affirm the friendship Germany felt with the Islamic world, Kaiser Wilhelm even declared himself the protector of the Muslim world. During a state visit to Turkey in 1898, he made speech to that effect which was repeated on postcards that were spread from Kabul to the Bosporus. Islam's cause, Germany declared, was also Germany's.

Example of the postcards described above, with the German text on the left and the same in Arabic on the right

When war finally broke out, Germany urged the Sultan as the leader of the Islamic world to declare a jihad, a holy war, on Britain. The idea was that the vast Muslim population in India would then rise up against its British masters and throw them back into the sea from whence they came. Without India, Britain would be little but a puny island kingdom whose bark was considerably worse than its bite.

Germany was not content to rely entirely on the sultan, however, considering the rather bad relationship between the Ottomans and many Islamic peoples. No, Germany was going to take it one step further and try to persuade India's closest neighbours, Persia and Afghanistan, to join their cause. In order to do so, Germany sent several expiditions in order to treat with the Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan, as well as to proselyte among the local tribes.

The full story of Germany's jihad is too long and complicated to relate here, but one of the more absurd aspects of it was the claim that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam and gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca. His name, therefore, was given as "Hadji Wilhelm Mohammed", a rather shameless, not to say blasphemous, attempt to exploit the genuine religious feeling of the Muslims. Meanwhile, Germany coldly planned to lay claim to most of the land under Ottoman control as soon as Britain and Russia had been defeated.

It didn't work though,  and perhaps it never could have. Perhaps Germany underestimated her Muslim allies' ability to see through her rather feeble ruse, or maybe they simply overestimated the religious ties and underestimated the political and ethnic tensions within the Islamic world.

Nevertheless, forgotten as it is today, the affair of the German Jihad without a doubt managed to further increase the gap between Christian Europe and Muslim Asia and helped contribute to the dichotomy so strongly and painfully experienced in the century that followed World War I.

(This post was originally posted on my old blog)

Review: Greenmantle by John Buchan

Full title: Greenmantle (novel) 
Writer: John Buchan 
First published: 1916 
Available: digitally on Project Gutenberg; in print on Amazon 

Quote: "There could never be a Superman. But there might be a Superwoman..."

I have never read The Thirty-Nine Steps, I'm ashamed to say, so Greenmantle was my first acquaintance with Buchan's hero Richard Hannay. I called him a prat on Twitter after about 1/4 of the book and he is, sometimes. First of all, you do sometimes want to kick him in his seating area for being a South African of his time (I'm sure you get what that means without me spelling it out). Second, he's obviously intended to be a forthright, brave and sympathetic chap and like all such heroes, he suffers a bit from what I like to call the "Harry Potter Syndrome", meaning that you have a main character who, while clearly beloved by the author, is irrefutably the most boring character in the book.

What more is, he tends to describe everything in detail. "Tell don't show", seems to be Mr Buchan's motto. In fact, it's a little like an old-fashioned school paper at times. Like an "What I Did For My Holiday: Went to Erzerum"-essay by Richard Hannay, age 12. "First we went to Lisbon and the weather was narsty. I had clams for dinner. They were good."

You get the picture, right?

That aside, it's still a page turner. I admit Mr Buchan makes a little too much use of coincidence – whenever someone walks out onto the street or crawl down a hole, they meet someone they know, be it London, Lisbon or Constantinople. Still, I'm willing to overlook that as he also does a good job of entertaining you (if you only learn to skim Hannay's step-by-step account of everything but his toilet visits).

The story is written right after the events described – the main historical event in it is the siege and capture of Erzerum and since it was published already in 1916, Buchan must have written it right after it happened. The main plot is based on Germany's attempt to start a jihad in the Middle East and Central Asia, and isn't all that far-fetched, if you're familiar with the factual background. In fact, Buchan is remarkably well-informed (but then he was very well-connected).

The villain is a villainess in the fine old tradition of megalomaniac bad guys and gals. The sad truth is that she comes across as much less of a female stereotype than most modern female villains, most likely due to the sex-lessness of the Good Old Boys-style of writing (the characters probably exist between the waist and their knees, but I think they're smooth and plastic, kinda like Barbie and Ken).

Hannay is the main character, but I would argue that the hero is Sandy Arbuthnot, who knows everyone in every bar from here to Kabul and goes undercover in a skin cap and stained eyebrows, and commands a whole band of awesome dancing Turkish gypsies (yes, I know. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to; it's a swashbuckling adventure!). However, maybe I'm paranoid, but I was so strongly reminded of Francis Crawford (Lymond of Dorothy Dunnett's books) by sensitive, genius, polyglot, madcap, ballad-quoting and most assuredly Scottish Sandy that I think it simply cannot be a coincidence. DD, I'm onto you!

Right, to sum up this rambling attempt at a review: fun, swashbuckling adventure with extraordinary period flavour that should be avoided if you can't overlook period-typical imperialistic-swine attitudes.

I gave it 4/5 on Goodreads.