Page 283 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

28o Arabia, the Gulf and the West

where a river separated two stales, which held that the frontier should run
down either the thalweg or the median line. Eventually a compromise was
reached between the two positions, and was incorporated in a treaty signed by
the two sides on 4 July 1937. Persia was accorded as a frontier in the vicinity of
Abadan the thalweg of the Shatt al-Arab for a distance of eight kilometres.
Otherwise the previous frontier along the waterway was left unchanged.
Relations between Persia and Iraq remained distant in the years after the
Second World War, and they deteriorated further after the Iraqi revolution in
1958. Muhammad Reza Shah regarded the new regime in Baghdad with
distaste, and he was irritated by Iraqi attempts to stir up irredentist feeling in
Khuzistan, where many of the inhabitants were of Arab descent. Another
source of irritation was the treatment accorded the hundreds of thousands of

Persians who dwelt in Iraq, particularly in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
The Shatt al-Arab, however, was the principal bone of contention, and after an
acrimonious dispute over pilotage in 1959, and again in 1961, the Persian
government embarked upon the construction of a major oil terminal at Kharq
Island, off Bushire on the Gulf coast, so that the exportation of Persian oil
should not be subject to interference by Iraq in the Shatt al-Arab. The Kharq
terminal was completed in 1965, and in the same year trouble again flared up
over what the Persians considered to be the Iraqis’ excessive officiousness in
exercising their rights in the Shatt al-Arab.
Although Abadan was no longer as important as it had been for the export of
Persian oil, Khurramshahr further up the river was still a major port of entry
for goods destined for the interior of Persia, and the Persian government was
determined to control its approaches. It expressed its determination in 1965 by
threatening to renounce the frontier treaty of 1937 if Iraq continued its
provocation, and four years later it carried the threat into execution. On 19
April 1969 the Persian government pronounced the treaty of 1937 null an<^
void. As grounds for the renunciation the Persians contended that the treaty

had in the first place been forced upon Persia by Britain, and that for more than
thirty years subsequent to its conclusion Iraq had misappropriated the dues
collected from shipping, most of it bound for Persian ports, to purposes other
than the improvement of navigation in the Shatt al-Arab. The only fronuer
Persia would now accept along the river was the median line. Iraq refused to
accept the unilateral abrogation of the treaty, declaring that Iraqi sovereignty
over the Shatt al-Arab was incontestable and that she would continue to regar
the waterway as part of her territory.
A war of words followed between Baghdad and Tehran, accompanied y
some sabre-rattling along the frontier. Centuries-old religious and racial anti
pathies expressed themselves in the expulsion of thousands of Persians rom
Iraq, in the harassing of Persian pilgrims to Najaf and Karbala, and in noisy
threats by Baghdad to ‘unleash’ the ‘Front for the Liberation of Khuzistan .
Though the tumult and the shouting gradually subsided the incident e 11