The Middle East

ON THE WORLD TODAY

WHEN the British and Russians marched into Iran in August, 1941, to forestall German invasion or a coup by the hundreds of Nazi technicians in government service, they found a nation in rags. Riza Shah Pahlavi, a great builder of roads and railways, had done much to modernize his country, but nothing to rescue his people from serfdom. Absentee landlords owned 99 per cent of the land and grew rich on their four-fifths share of each cropper’s produce. The intractable Shah was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammed Riza Pahlavi, and the presence of Allied troops was regularized by an Anglo-Soviet-Iranian Treaty in January, 1942.

Russia has since indicated that it considers another treaty, the forgotten Soviet-Iranian Treaty of 1921, also applicable to the current situation. In it, the U.S.S.R. renounced special privileges and existing oil concessions in Iran, on condition that these concessions would not be granted to any other power. Russia reserved the right to send troops into Iran should conditions arise there threatening her security; at the London meeting of the United Nations, Vishinsky charged that such conditions had arisen.

The Iranian crisis was the head-on clash between two power groups, each of which considers the other “hostile.” Probable aggression by the other group seems to be a guiding consideration of both sides.

In the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean area the Russians see a particularly dangerous gap in their global security system. The British control the Mediterranean, and the courtesy visit of the battleship Missouri to Turkey is an oblique but deliberate reminder that American naval interests also reach into Mediterranean waters. Strategic control of the adjacent Arab subcontinent is ensured by British troops and airfields in Iraq, Palestine, and the Suez Canal Zone.

In this strategic picture, the Iranian plateau —situated within 90 minutes’ bombing range of the great industrial region north of Baku, and governed by a clique of anti-Soviet politico-racketeers — emerges, in the eyes of the suspicious Russians, as the logical jumping-off ground for an attack on them.

What the Russians really want in Iran, after taking a long, hard look at the unsavory Teheran mob, is a “friendly” government on their border. Hence their encouragement of Azerbaijanian autonomy, which has a genuine basis in popular revolt against the Teheran regime, and their decision to keep troops in northern Iran until the newly established pro-Soviet government of Azerbaijan has been recognized or is well enough armed to defend itself.

After security, oil

Oil concessions are a second consideration. Soviet oil production, tremendously depleted by the ravages of war, is insufficient for the requirements of the Five-Year Plan. Oil from northern Iran is easily transportable to Russia by trans-Caspian tanker and is accessible to Turkistan and, via the trans-Siberian Railway, to Siberia. But in Iran the sole existing concession (which dates back to 1901) is held by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British government is a majority shareholder.

Concessions were granted, between the two world wars, to American and British interests. They were never exploited and have expired. But the Russians charge that the granting of these concessions constituted a violation of the oil clause in the 1921 treaty. In 1943 and 1944, British and American firms dickered for new concessions. At this point the Russians stepped in and were about to clinch a 150,000-squaremile concession when the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) passed a law that no concessions would be granted until all foreign troops had departed.

The Soviet’s highhanded behavior on the diplomatic level has obscured its telling case both for oil concessions and for support of the Azerbaijanian autonomists. Anglo-American endorsement of the Teheran government’s plea for freedom to “restore order” puts us in the odious position of seeking to restore the predatory powers of rapacious taxgatherers and absentee landlords. It also makes the Russians stand out as the champions of reform throughout the great Moslem world.

The Anglo-American bloc, holding the geopolitical trumps and the atom-bomb joker, has been playing the game according to the Hoyle of international law. American and British troops in Iceland, Greece, China, and Indonesia are there by legal agreement. To the Soviet this is pure hypocrisy. But distrust of Anglo-Saxon legalism was hardly sufficient justification for Gromyko’s walkout on the Security Council.

The knee-in-the-groin bargaining methods with which the Russians are conducting their “search for security” are simply creating a world-wide sense of insecurity. To the British and American public, to whom a war of aggression against the U.S.S.R. is unthinkable, Russia’s reluctance to negotiate the desired changes in the Middle East; power relationship makes her policy look more like aggressive expansionism than life insurance.

Which is it? That is the real issue dramatized by the Iranian crisis. If it is aggressive expansionism, then strategic concessions that would place the Soviet astride Britain’s lifelines and the Middle East oil fields would be suicidal. If it is life insurance based on a sense of insecurity, then sympathetic over-all consideration of these claims — as distinct from piecemeal adjudication — is the only way left to halt the dangerous feuding that has set in.

What Russia fears in Iran

British and Russian political activity in the Middle East during the past three years has been such as to strengthen each power’s suspicion of the other. British sponsorship of the Arab League, an essentially artificial grouping of states (Arab unity, except on the Zionist question, is still largely a myth) was not dissimilar in intent to the more recent Russian sponsorship of autonomy movements among the Azerbaijanis and the Kurds.

The Russians have good reason to fear that an antiSoviet Iranian government might grant the British and the Americans oil concessions in the northern provinces and hence a foothold in Russia’s back yard. Anthony Eden’s pointed encouragement of Arab unity in a statement to Commons in February, 1943, when the Germans were already on the run in North Africa, can only have had in view a long-range objective: to draw together the Arab States so that they would act as a bloc against Russian infiltration.

Who woos the Arabs?

Britain’s efforts to foster cohesion among the Arab States are in part a defensive rejoinder to the Soviet’s exploratory attempts to exploit the smoldering discontents and minority problems of the still feudal Arab world. Soviet Information Bureaus are now active in Syria and Lebanon, and Tass distributes a weekly news review free of charge to the local papers. The newly formed Arab Workers Society in Jaffa, Palestine, has obvious Soviet affiliations; unlike the other Arab parties, it is notably more anti-British than anti-Zionist.

The Iranian crisis is a flare-up of all this jockeying for position between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Geography, oil, and the rottenness of Iran’s internal setup made this crucial in-between country the logical scene of the first showdown. Anglo-American willingness to play along with Teheran’s reactionary ruling clique invited the Soviet to assume its favorite role of champion of the oppressed masses, and provided the basis for Moscow’s exaggerated charges of collusion between unidentified “warmongers” and the anti-Soviet leaders of Iran.

The United States, meanwhile, has been forcefully pursuing trade, oil, and aviation policies which add up to a large-scale economic penetration of the Middle East. A number of Americans have a direct hand in Iranian affairs. One group, headed by Major General Clarence S. Ridley, has been reorganizing the German-trained, Russophobe Iranian Army. Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf, former head of the New Jersey State Police, has been organizing the Iranian constabulary. Others, employed as private citizens, have been advising the hopelessly incompetent government on finance, agriculture, irrigation, public health — and oil.

These are able men, not warmongers. But their presence has aroused Russian suspicion despite the fact that when A. C. Millspaugh’s financial mission, by its attempts at honest administration, incurred the hostility of Iran’s political racketeers, Ambassador Wallace Murray withheld official support, even in regard to contract rights.

The factions in Iran

The Allied occupation has proved disastrous for Iran. Food distribution broke down when the railway was taken over to carry supplies to Russia, and famine followed. While Iranian factories closed for lack of materials, Britain and the United States were pouring money into the country for construction work. Prices rose 1000 per cent. Profiteering and corruption in Teheran reached a new high.

Disillusioned with Western democracy, the liberal intelligentsia of Iran turned toward the pro-Soviet Tudeh or People’s Party, whose leaders claim that it would receive three quarters of the popular vote in an honest election. (Its paper, Rahbar, has the second-largest circulation of Iran’s 157 insolvent journals, which survive on subsidies and bribes.) In the summer of 1944, when word leaked out that the powers were negotiating for oil, the Tudeh staged a mass demonstration in favor of oil concessions to the Soviet.

Shortly after the Russians had been rebuffed on the oil deal, the first disorders broke out in the Russianoccupied provinces. By September, 1945, the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, which incorporated the Tudeh Party of that province, had been organized in Tabriz. Its manifesto demanded administrative and cultural autonomy for the region, redistribution of land, and tax reform.

Azerbaijan (“Land of Fire”) is a province the size of Virginia, situated between the Turkish border and the Caspian Sea. Its population of two million, which includes Turkomans, Kurds, and 40,000 Armenians (persecuted by the late Shah for their Christianity), speaks a Turkish dialect, Turki, banned in schools by the central government.

Red Army troops in Azerbaijan were put on their best behavior, and the Russians made a point of sending Soviet Armenians to the Armenian districts, and Kurdish-officered units to Kurdish territory. These missionaries impressed upon the Azerbaijanis the liberality of Soviet policy toward its Asiatic minorities, who enjoy autonomy in Soviet Azerbaijan and Soviet Armenia just across the border from Iran.

Revolt in Azerbaijan

In November, 1945, arms were distributed to the members of the Azerbaijanian Democratic Party, who attacked and quickly overpowered the local gendarmerie. Troops sent north by the central government to suppress the separatist movement were stopped by Soviet guards. To Iranian and American representations that Teheran be allowed full freedom to “preserve its authority,” the Soviet replied that the dispatch of Iranian troops into the northern provinces would only “increase the disturbances and bloodshed.” By mid-December the coup was a fait accompli.

Meanwhile a Democratic Party of Kurdistan, organized after the visit of five Kurdish chieftains to Baku, proclaimed an autonomous republic under the leadership of Giza Mohammed in the territory bordering Iraq. The Kurdish separatists have expressed solidarity with the Azerbaijanian autonomous government and their capital, Mehabad, is actually in Azerbaijan.

An old Arab proverb says: “There are only three plagues in the world — the rat, the locust, and the Kurd.” Three million Kurds are concentrated in a corridor 600 miles long and 200 miles wide which straddles sections of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and the Iraq oil country. Intellectual leadership of the movement comes from the 20,000 Kurds living in Soviet Armenia, where the Russians have allowed them to teach their language in schools, open a Kurdish college, and publish a weekly Kurdish journal. There have been repeated clashes between Kurdish separatists and units of the Iranian Army.

Keeping the score

This was the general situation referred by the London meeting of the Security Council to direct negotiation between the Soviet and Iran. A new Premier, Achmed Ghavam Es-Sultaneh, somewhat more acceptable than his predecessor to the Russians, was confronted in Moscow with the expected demand for (1) oil concessions, (2) recognition of Azerbaijanian autonomy, and then with the announcement that Red Army troops would remain in Iran.

On Tuesday, March 12, the State Department, whose note protesting violation of the March 2 evacuation deadline had gone unanswered, announced it had received reports that “additional Soviet armed forces” including “heavy artillery combat equipment" were moving toward Karaj, twenty miles northwest, of Teheran, and toward the Turkish frontier. American correspondents who flew over Karaj counted fourteen tanks and a score of other vehicles, but saw nothing to indicate that the garrison had been increased. After a week, the allegedly advancing forces had got nowhere except into increasingly large headlines.

This sorry episode showed that the “war of nerves” technique was back in fashion. The State Department was in effect saying to the Russians, “No rough stuff,” and at the same time building up the case against them in headline type. The Russians, for their part, probably did do some southward marching to encourage their friends in Teheran, and possibly moved a column or two westward to needle Turkey, standing pat against Soviet claims.

At this point the United States and Britain, both of whom had been somewhat reluctant in January to have the Iranian dispute, with all its anti-Soviet implications, dumped into the lap of the infant Security Council, made it clear to Iran that a second protest to the UN would receive their full support.

The merits of the Soviet case are one thing; its methods of procedure are another. The Soviet search for security is itself intimately bound up with the success of the UN. Anything Russia does to imperil the UN creates insecurity, increases suspicion of her intentions, and hardens resistance to her claims.