Iran and the First World War

Battleground of the Great Powers

Touraj Atabaki

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781860649646
• eBook ISBN: 9781786724670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The First World War, leading to the overthrow of the Qajar regime and replacement by Reza Shah, was pivotal in the history of modern Iran. The Constitutional Revolution of 1906-09 aimed to abolish the arbitrary regime and bring in a modern constitution and parliament. But growing provincial unrest and rebellion by nomadic peoples brought chaos and instability, heightened by the strains of war and intervention by foreign powers. Iran was on the brink of disintegration, modernisation had failed, and growing frustration and pressure from the disillusioned middle classes, intelligentsia and urban population, set the stage for centralisation of power under the `Man of Order' - Reza Shah.

1

The First World War, Great Power Rivalries and the Emergence of a Political Community in Iran

Touraj Atabaki

The outbreak of the First World War and its aftermath may be the most important political episode in twentieth-century world history. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, the Ottoman and Russian empires, followed by the emergence of the Austrian republic, the Hungarian kingdom, the USSR and the Kemalist republic in Turkey were among the most significant outcomes of the conflict.

In Iran the eruption of the war increased foreign pressure, causing the long-standing rift in Iranian politics to widen. The central government was so divided and ridden by factions that the different cabinets that were formed never lasted more than a few months. And yet the central government itself was not the sole source of power in the country. As Blücher, a contemporary observer, put it, ‘there were two sources for exercising political power in the country, the official one which included the government and its connections, and the unofficial source’, which he explains consisted of ‘the national forces’.¹

Following the approval of the Iranian Constitutional Code by the Qajar king in 1906, Anglo-Russian rivalry in Iran faded away, if only temporarily, and an agreement was concluded between the two great powers. According to the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, Iran was divided into three zones – Russian, British and neutral. In accordance with this agreement, in October 1910, Britain delivered an ultimatum to Iran concerning the security of southern Iran. In so doing, Britain set an example for the Russians to follow. Russian troops had already occupied the northern provinces. In November 1911 the Tsarist government presented its own ultimatum to Iran, which amounted to nothing less than an attempt to reduce the north of the country to the status of a semi-dependent colony.² However, while the Iranian parliament, which enjoyed the support of the crowds in the street, resisted the Russian ultimatum, the fragile Iranian central government decided to accept the ultimatum and to dissolve parliament. The acceptance of the ultimatum and the dissolution of parliament seemed to be the only effective measure available to the deputies in face of the crisis that had arisen.³ Meanwhile the occupation of the north and south of Iran by Russian and British troops was to provoke the Ottoman forces to invade western and northwestern Iran early on in the war. If we add to this list of disasters the activities of the German agents, especially among the southern tribes, we begin to get an idea of how impotent the Iranian central government was during this period.

The Iranian central government’s early reaction to the outbreak of the war was to declare Iran’s strict neutrality in the farman of 1 November 1914. But what sense was there in the central government’s announcing its neutrality when the Entente’s forces occupied a sizeable part of Iranian territory? When Mostofi al-Mamalek, the prime minister of Iran, approached the Russian authorities and asked them to withdraw their troops from Azerbaijan because their presence gave the Turks a pretext for invading Iran, ‘the Russian minister appreciated the Iranian viewpoint but inquired what guarantees could be given that after the withdrawal of Russian forces, the Turks would not bring in theirs’.⁴

Consequently the north and northwest of Iran became one of the major battlefields of the First World War. As part of their military strategy, the Russians, British and Ottomans all pursued policies aimed at stirring up or aggravating the existing animosities between the different ethnic and religious groupings in the province. Promises were made with regard to setting up sovereign states for Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians and Azerbaijani Muslims. Such manipulations led to extremely bloody and barbaric confrontations among these ethnic and religious groups.

It seems clear that had Iran’s central government been strong and firmly established, it might have been well able to pursue a policy of neutrality. The fact is, however, that both the young king, Ahmad Shah Qajar, who was crowned in July 1914, and the cabinet of Mostofi al-Mamalek, were utterly impotent. As a result of their inability to remain neutral, some Iranians chose what they considered to be the safest path in seeking an alliance. Germany, because of its geographical distance, appeared to be a preferable ally. In contrast to the British, whose interests in India automatically made them pursue a policy of intervention in Iran, Germany at first sight seemed to present no direct threat. In its relations with Iran, Germany could even claim this advantage over the Russians and the Ottomans when they offered themselves as allies. It was true that the Germans ‘made persistent efforts to acquire a place in the sun, but they were always particularly cautious not to antagonize the Russians’.⁵

Anti-Russian and anti-British sentiments consequently made some Iranian Democrats see the Germans as suitable allies. When the Third Majles was convened in December 1914, 30 out of the 136 deputies were members of the Democrat Party.⁶ The pro-German activities of the Democrats were viewed with mistrust and dismay by the British and Russians who decided to increase the number of their occupying forces in Iran. The situation became so acute that the Russian troops stationed in Qazvin, 100 miles northwest of Tehran, marched on the capital, threatening to occupy it. The 30 Democrat deputies, accompanied by some journalists and influential E‘tedali (moderate) politicians, set out on their ‘long march’, first stopping in Qom where they formed the Komiteh-e Defa‘-e Melli (the National Defence Committee), then falling back to Kashan, and finally establishing themselves in Kermanshah, where they called themselves the ‘Iranian Provisional Government’. The Provisional Government, which had official recognition as the central power, and as such was the sole legitimate government of Iran, could not persist in face of the increased pressures brought to bear by the British. In 1916 Kermanshah fell to the Russian forces and the Provisional Government came to an end.

Meanwhile, inspired by pan-Turkish and pan-Turanian sentiments (envisaging a greater united homeland for all Turkic people), the Ottomans opened a new front against the Entente forces in Azerbaijan. The immediate result was that Azerbaijan became one of the major battlefields of the First World War. As part of their military strategy, the Russians, British and Ottomans pursued policies aimed at stirring up or aggravating the existing animosities between the different ethnic and religious groups in the province. Promises were made with regard to setting up sovereign states for Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians and Azerbaijani Muslims. During the struggles of the Constitutional Revolution (1905–9), although Azerbaijan was split between reformist constitutionalists and conservative royalists, it had nonetheless been possible for Muslim Azerbaijanis to make common cause with the Christian Georgians and Armenian volunteers. Now, thanks to foreign manipulation, Azerbaijan became ‘a divided land’, where the heads of various tribes and communities were engaged in unifying the ummet-e Islam under the banner of Ettehad-e Islam (Unity of Islam).⁷

The Russian Revolution of February 1917 appeared to have a more immediate impact in northern Iran than in the south. Along with the general consternation among the Russian troops, what could be observed in Azerbaijan was a shift in attitude on the part of some units of the Russian army towards the local people. In Tabriz Russian soldaty began to address Tabrizis as ‘friend’ or ‘comrade’, but in the early days there was no real initiative from the Russians to spread the idea of radical change.⁸ Furthermore, seven years of war and continuous military occupation made the Azerbaijanis reluctant to react favourably to the Iranian social democrats’ call to join in the revolutionary surge descending from the north.

By 1917 the Iranian social democrats in Baku, who had been engaged in clandestine political activities since the beginning of the war, announced the formation of their own independent political party, Ferqeh-e ‘Adalat (the Justice Party). In 1918 the Justice Party sent a group of 18 party members to Gilan, under the leadership of Asadollah Ghafarzadeh, first secretary of the party. Although the first attempt by the party to establish contact with Kuchik Khan, the leader of the Jangali rebel movement in Gilan, was a failure, the party soon sent a second group of 20 members to Gilan. In June 1920 the Justice Party held its first congress in Anzali, Gilan’s major port on the Caspian Sea.⁹ At this congress, consisting of 51 voting members, the Justice Party was renamed the Communist Party of Iran.

While the spirit of communism was spreading its wings over the Caucasus, in neighbouring Anatolia pan-Turkism, having replaced the rival schools pan-Ottomanism and pan-Islamism, was flourishing. The outbreak of the First World War, with the Ottomans fighting Russia, paved the way for the spread of pan-Turkism. For the pan-Turkists the Russians were not only kafirs (infidels), but also invaders who had occupied areas south of the Caucasus, which were considered part of the Islamic Turkic homeland. Therefore the war against Russia could be promoted with all the sanctions of jihad.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Russian Empire made many pan-Turkists believe that the time for liberating the fatherland and unifying the Turkish nation had come. Although this optimism did not last for very long and the Bolsheviks soon showed that they would not tolerate any territorial changes to their empire, nonetheless for some years the veteran partisans of pan-Turkism were still busy employing any possible means for realizing their old dream. However, contrary to their expectations, the achievements of pan-Turkists in Azerbaijan during and immediately after the First World War were not very impressive. Although the province remained for years under quasi-occupation by the Ottoman troops, their attempts to create a solid base of support among Azerbaijanis ended in failure.

Following the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, the Ottoman army finally began to withdraw from Iranian territory. In Istanbul the Committee of Union and Progress cabinet resigned and a new government was formed under Ahmed Izzet Pasha. This was the final nail in the coffin of pan-Turkism, pan-Turanism and pan-Islamism that the Young Turks so anxiously exploited during the last four years. The departure of all foreign troops, except the British, from Iranian soil, however, did not strengthen the power of the central government. In the north of the country – in Azerbaijan, Gilan and Khorasan – there were reform-minded individuals who believed that if they succeeded in launching regional campaigns to initiate reform in their own region, the same reforms would gradually spread throughout the whole country. The agenda of these regional campaigns did not include the call for secession, but rather these efforts represented an attempt to establish stable political power in Iran, while considering the question of a fair division of powers between the central government and local authorities throughout Iran. Besides Azerbaijan, Gilan and Khorasan, one could find other regional movements in the south and the west of the country, which although never seeking reform, nevertheless aimed at weakening the authority of the central government throughout the country. Simko’s revolt was one such regional movement. It is interesting to note that it was during this rather chaotic period of Iranian history that the political community of the country was gradually crafted.

The emergence of the political community in modern Iran dates back to the turn of the twentieth century with the constitutional movement. During the Constitutional Revolution (1905–9), there was a widespread conviction that the path to social and political improvement lay in a firmly established, centralized government based on law and order. For at least a decade after the revolution, such political aspirations distinguished the constitutionalists from their conservative opponents, ‘the champions of despotism’. In the Constitutional Revolution, Iranians, regardless of their ethnic background, fought alongside one another against those forces that supported ‘lawlessness’ as well as against the absolute arbitrary power of the monarchy. They were united in their opposition to the state retaining its monopoly on decision-making. Their objective was not to divide this power among the different ethnic groups in the country in order to establish separate independent states based on ethnic identity. Although, in their view, the revolution was supposed to change the old power structure, which was centralized, arbitrary and despotic, the new government would still be centralized. Now, however, it would be rational and functional on the basis of a written constitution.

The Iranian Constitutional Code was ratified in 1906. However, the period of the Lesser Despotism from June 1908 to July 1909 which followed Mohammad Ali Shah’s coup d’état was a decisive stage in the constitutional movement in Iran. Despite the fact that, for the time being at least, Mohammad Ali Shah’s coup successfully hindered the functioning of a constitutional government, the overall long-term effect of his violent intervention was to galvanize the movement. The propertied classes, who rather easily abandoned the barricades in the early days of the movement and, in some cases, even pretended that social harmony prevailed among the people, were now shocked into a new consciousness. It was glaringly clear that the constitutional movement had the capacity to bring about serious changes to the old, established socio-political structures. On the other hand, ordinary people were coming to realize that a constitutional government did not result in everyone ‘eating a kebab as long as the span of a hand’. The latter quotation refers to a statement made by one of the proponents of the revolution, Sheikh Salim. During the early days of the movement in Tabriz, he had assured the people that when the constitution came such would be the benefits that they would enjoy.¹⁰

By the outbreak of the First World War one could see in the country’s prevailing political discourse the gradual crafting of a sense of Iranian state patriotism and territorial nationalism. The fashioning of such territorial nationalism was mainly due to the survival of irredentist policies adopted by the great powers, threatening the country’s territorial integrity. For many Iranians, assuring territorial integrity was a necessary first step on the road to establishing the rule of law in society and a competent modern state, which would safeguard the collective as well as individual rights.

On the eve of the outbreak of the war, many popular politicians were taking a stance in relation to the question of the country’s modernization. In the programme of his second cabinet, which was rejected by the Majles in 1914, Mostofi al-Mamalek proposed the following: the abolition of the old pensions system, the speedy completion of the new Constitutional Code, the founding of a secular law school to train personnel for the ministry of justice, the establishment of several schools for girls, and new laws concerning telegraphic communications.¹¹

That same year, Moshir al-Dowleh presented his cabinet before the Third Majles with a programme that proposed ‘formulating commercial codes, enacting bankruptcy laws, the establishment of a teachers’ college for women, the adoption by all schools of a uniform curriculum and uniform textbooks, the gradual transformation of maktab-khanehs (religious schools) into secular elementary schools and the formation of a Chamber of Commerce’.¹²

The process of centralization in the 1930s, which included such harsh and disruptive measures as moving tens of thousands of nomads and forcing them to settle on the land, generally enjoyed the support of many members of the Iranian intelligentsia, who during the war and the immediate years after, promoted the idea that only a centralized, powerful (though not necessarily despotic) government would be capable of solving the country’s growing problems of underdevelopment, while at the same time safeguarding the nation’s unity and sovereignty.¹³ Thus, years before Reza Shah attained power, the blueprint for his future execution of reforms and changes throughout the country was there. During his 20-year rule (1921–41) Reza Shah achieved with stupendous consistency the realization of most of the demands voiced by the intelligentsia during the First World War.

The failure of modernization in the nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, the setback that the Iranian constitutional movement suffered in the years before the outbreak of the First World War and indeed the outbreak of the First World War itself, left no choice for the vast majority of the urban population, in particular the middle classes and the intelligentsia, but to opt for a ‘man of order’, who, as an agent of the nation, would install a centralized, powerful (though not necessarily despotic) government capable of solving the country’s growing problems of underdevelopment, while at the same time safeguarding the nation’s unity and sovereignty. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• 1. The First World War, Great Power Rivalries and the Emergence of a Political Community in Iran
• 2. The Iranian Provisional Government
• 3. Going East: The Ottomans’ Secret Service Activities in Iran
• 4. Iranian Nationalism and the Government Gendarmerie
• 5. A Kurdish Warlord on the Turkish–Persian Frontier in the Early Twentieth Century: Isma‘il Aqa Simko
• 6. Ahmad Kasravi on the Revolt of Sheikh Mohammad Khiyabani
• 7. Pan-Turkism and Iranian Nationalism
• 8. The Populists of Rasht: Pan-Islamism and the Role of the Central Powers
• 9. The Council for International Propaganda and the Establishment of the Iranian Communist Party
• Notes