B. Destani – författare

This collection of documents has been brought together in an attempt to add a depth of understanding to consideration of the ethnic conflicts within the Balkan region over the last 150 years. It is wide-ranging in its coverage of the position and treatment of ethnic minorities within the Balkan states and beyond. It will be discovered that within each state is a minority of some kind with a degree of persecution formed against them, whether they be Jews, Magyars, Circassians, Muslims, Christians or former residents of a different country such as Greeks in Turkey or Albanians in Greece. The rationale for commencing this work at 1860 is to illustrate the position of various populations and ethnic groups prior to the Congress of Berlin (1878), after which their situation worsened considerably as a result of territorial adjustments based on political and nationalistic considerations rather than ethnicity.

These four volumes, concerning Muslim minority communities from 1843 to 1973, consist of contemporary political despatches, correspondence and reports composed by British diplomats, some of whom were resident in the country under debate. The papers are written very clearly from a British perspective, but this authoritative voice of government allows us an insight into high politics at a time when the British were inextricably involved in the government of the Middle East. The documents provide information and insight, but what is also evident, from even a quick reading, is the extent to which the position and treatment of minority cultures is a central consideration in achieving peace and good governance. Perhaps inevitably the material concerning minorities is partial and unsatisfactory in some ways; but taken together these volumes provide a continuity of evidence for how little has changed from historical to modern times.

These original dispatches, correspondence and reports record aspects of the Kurdish situation, starting from the period following the First World War. Although the Kurdish peoples are numerous, their aspirations for unity and independence have been repressed by the dominant regimes in the region, effectively minoritising the Kurds within a group of established states. Since the end of the First World War, the former Ottoman Kurdistan has been administered by five sovereign states: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the former Soviet Union. In 1918, Kurdish hopes for an independent Kurdistan provided for by the Treaty of Sevres (1920) were quashed by the constitution of modern Turkey, founded by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), and by the division of Kurdistan between Turkey, Syria and Iraq by the French and British, formalised in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

These documents explore the arrangements and conditions for Jewish communities living under Islam. The situation of Jewish communities has varied according to the country of habitation and the particular time period although it is thought generally to have deteriorated from 1800 with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Up to 1948 more than a million Jews lived in the Muslim countries of the Middle East. By 1992, excluding the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, the number was only c.20,000. Although they cover more than 100 years the papers do not form a continuous record of events but rather provide a series of snapshots of history from which it is possible to ascertain something of the contemporary position of Jewish communities at particular points. Geographically the collection covers the Arab Middle East and the Maghreb countries, but excludes the (non-Arab) states of Turkey and Iran.

This is the second of the new document collections available as part of the multi-part set Minorities in the Middle East. In these four volumes the selection of documents combines to give an overview of the interplay within and between the different faiths existing in Jerusalem. These pages contain documents exploring the treatment and position of the diverse religious minorities within Jerusalem and more generally in Israel after 1948. Historically, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims have varied according to political events. Within the confines of Jerusalem and its environs the many different claims of the main faiths of Islam, Judaism and Christianity to parts of the city have exacerbated the effects of the political climate. Furthermore, struggles for rights to minority worship within the state have been diverted as rivalries between churches, particularly within the Christian church, have divided congregations.

These four volumes consist of original political despatches, correspondence and reports, which describe events affecting the Druzes of Syria and Lebanon from the time of Ottoman rule under Bashir II, through the Turkish rule of Lebanon under the double Kaimakamship, the 1860 massacre of the Christians and the tensions in the aftermath that persisted through to the occupation of Lebanon by the French and British during WWI. The documents record the period of the French Mandate, and events leading up to the Druze Rebellion of 1925. The final volume tracks the history of the Druzes in the mid-twentieth century from the perspective of Anglo-French relations up to and during the Second World War, noting the power struggles of the leading Druze families, and describing the situation in the Jebel Druze, the Druze position with regard to Palestine and Israel, and finally the position of the Druze communities within Israel.

This two-volume set of documents and maps provides the historical background appropriate to understanding the present Balkan crisis. It makes available the essential historical texts and maps determining the formation of boundaries in the Kosovo region. Treaties, political reports and diplomatic correspondence have been selected from British government files to show the main historical developments in territorial relations between Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Greece. The collection begins with the rise of Balkan nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century. This important period establishes the basis for much of the modern conflict between the Balkan States. The collection ends with the provisional Government of Albania set up in 1944, turning away from its original close links with Yugoslavia, fearing Yugoslav expansionism, and seeking alliances with China and other Communist powers.