'Military report on Tehran and adjacent Provinces of North-West Persia (including the Caspian Littoral)' [‎19v] (43/610)

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1010 .
prices As a natural result the administration of the provinces
was in absolute chaos. Not one of the Young Persians having
executive experience, character or authority necessary to
govern a province, they had to fall back on officials of the
old regime as Governors and Governors-General. The powers
of these were nevertheless curbed by the appointment _ of
voung inexperienced men of the new order in the remaining
offices, who checked and thwarted them at every turn, khus
the old order and the new were intermingled m bewildering
confusion. The young men suddenly elevated from absolute
nobodies, became inflated with preposterous ideas of their own
importance; and the old officials, regarding them contemptuously,
would end the new order on the spot if they could. The popular
assemblies elected at each provincial centre displayed neither
initiative nor energy, and, beyond worrying the executive
a nf.hnrities in absurd trivialities, did absolutely nothing.
Public opiniofi as directed towards the administration of a
country, even with popularly elected deputies, cannot be
evoked in an instant in a nation like the Persians, accustomed
for centuries to autocratic rule. The deputies, many of them
Mullas, meet, chat and smoke, but have not the vaguest idea
of how to conduct public business. The conclusion is that
the period of preparation here was too short, and the national
spirit too supine, for evolving men of the right stamp, and
except for reactionary and greedy Shi’ah Mullas on the one
hand, and violent 1 Turkish and Caucasian revolutionaries on
the other, no men of character and natural gifts appear to
exist in Persia of to-day."
The principal event of 1910 was an expedition by Yepnm
and Sardar Leader of a tribe or a polity; also refers to a military rank or title given to a commander of an army or division. Bahadur Bakhtiari to Azarbaijan against Shahsavan
rebels in the vicinty of Ardabll, which resulted m the flight ol
* Rahim Khan, a brigand of Karadagh, who was the chief in
stigator of the rebellion, to Russian territory, and the arrest
and deportation of rebel chiefs 2 to Tehran. On their way
from Tehran to Azarbaijan they had also put down the Roy
alists 3 in Zinjan.
The political history consists of an empty treasury, a series
of Cabinet crises, the division of the Assembly into numerous
1 The only individual who displayed higher qualities and a real gift, of leader
ship was Yeprim. The writer’s surmise about the non-existence of men oi
character and natural gifts in Persia of to-day ’ has been only too f y
corroborated by subsequent history. (See Chapter V, pp. 101-4)
* Including Amir ’Ashayir of the Shatranlu tribe of Khalkhal (see Chap e
VIII).
* Their leader Mulla Qurban All was exiled to Mesopotamia, page 338.