'Kurdistan and the Kurds' [‎9v] (18/122)

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the chete, which was little more than an organised band of brigands, for
use in the Balkans and elsewhere. But the darkest stain on the pages of
Kurdish history is the facility with which they permitted themselves to be
employed as the instruments of Turkish tyranny against the Armenians.
In 1908 the Young Turks attempted to carry through a policy of levelling
and centralisation, employing for this purpose the most unscrupulous
methods. Ibrahim Pasha An Ottoman title used after the names of certain provincial governors, high-ranking officials and military commanders. , the chief of the Milli confederacy, was murdered;
and at the same time the Hamawand Kurds of Kirkuk were sternly sup-
pressed. Yet lawlessness increased throughout Kurdistan, while many
Kurdish chieftains entered into relations with Russia.
The nomad habits of the Kurds are bad for the development of the
land. Not only do they not allow them to practise agriculture themselves,
but they also inculcate in them a contempt for settled order; their
continual depredations on their more civilised neighbours make farming so
hazardous and unprofitable an undertaking that many a fertile tract of
country now lies barren. And the inefficiency of the Turkish adminis
tration offers no hope of security to those who would settle permanently
on the land. Though in some parts Kinds have become sedentary and
work on the land, they are thoughtless for the morrow, while ignorant
distrust of modern appliances is crowned by oriental indifference to
progress. One of the main causes of this inveterate nomadism in the
Kurds is the breeding of horses on a large scale in the highlands of Armenia;
for, hardy though the horses are, they are unable to endure the rigours of
winter in the mountains. So deeply ingrained is this habit that the Miran
Kurds, though they have been compelled to forego their annual migration
for three years during the war and to remain in the plains of Jezirat-ibn-
‘Omar, yet intend to resume this year the migration to their summer-
quarters near Lake Van.
Besides the rearing of horses, the Kurds keep sheep and goats in
great numbers, but, unlike the Arabs, no camels; the reason for this is
clearly I hat the camel is more suited to the plains than to the mountains
of Kurdistan. The sedentary Kurds grow every kind of farm-produce,
while those who dwell in the cities are weavers and smiths; but these
Kurds also, especially those who inhabit the villages in the hills, are
lawless and given to robbery ; they pay taxes very irregularly or elude
t hem entirely. Many of them are ready to revert to nomadism if oppor
tunity offers. Since the year 1860, however, the Turkish grasp has grown
firmer, when the Government undertook the subjugation of ‘Iraq after the
Crimean War; here the Kurds now constitute the finest class in the country,
where they are found both as cultivators and as city-dwellers. They are
sturdy, capable men, and many of them enlist in the army or in the police.
In the plains they are generally peaceable and law-abiding. Those, on the
contrary, who live in the mountains between ‘Iraq and the Persian frontier,
are still a menace to the inhabitants of the lowland. They spend the
winter, from October to February, in villages or camps in the plains on