Last Saturday Rifaat Pasha, Minister for Foreign Affairs, made a
statement in the Turkish Chamber. According to a Reuter telegram, he said that the Potsdam interview, as he understood it,
"exclusively concerned the recognition of Russia's special interest in Northern Persia by Germany, while safeguarding the open door and the junction of the Khanikin-Baghdad line with the prospec- tive railway in Northern Persia and the maintenance of the status quo. M. Sazonoff had made a similar declaration to the Ottoman Ambassador in St. Petersburg. Subsequently, however, the publication of the alleged Russo-German Agreement had aroused doubts, but the assurances of Baron von Marschall, who had pro- mhied to supplement them in a couple of days, had calmed fears. Rifest Pasha added that the integrity of Persia was a matter of capital importance to Turkey."
As for the relations of Turkey and Great Britain, they were most cordial, and any differences between them in the Persian Gulf, where Turkey's sovereign rights were "unquestionable,"
would be settled by mutual confidence and not by newspaper articles. Since this statement was made the Cologne Gazette, in an inspired article, has announced that in the matter of the Baghdad Railway Germany would recognise, that the railway was "an internal Turkish concern." Certainly Great Britain could have nothing to do with the Baghdad Railway on any other presumption.
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