Page 314 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin 311

in the area. Indeed, the history of Persia’s relations with her neighbours and
with the two European powers most intimately connected with her, Russia and
Britain, revolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around
Persian claims to various slices of terra irredenta - in the Caucasus, beyond the
Caspian, along the marches of Afghanistan and Baluchistan, across the moun­
tains of Kurdistan, down the rivers, valleys and plains of Iraq and throughout
the length and breadth of the Gulf. While a few of these claims may have had
some solid foundation, the rest were merely fanciful, the fruit of illusion and of
memories of infinite durability. Like their Safavid predecessors, the Qajar
shahs held as an article of faith that wherever in the world a Persian foot had
trod became from that moment onwards irrevocably Persian, however long the
place in question may have lain under foreign domination. Such delusions,
combined with the frustration engendered by the reality of Persia’s impotence,
supplied the fuel which stoked a thousand protests, demarches and other

diplomatic pinpricks throughout the nineteenth century, and made Persia,
after the Saudi amirate of Najd, the greatest source of disruption and disorder
in the Gulf region.
Incapable of policing their own waters or controlling their own coastline,
successive shahs and their governments consoled themselves by doing their
utmost to hinder Britain in her efforts to suppress piracy and maritime warfare
in the Gulf. They refused, also, for many years to close Persian ports to the
slave trade, to grant rights of search and seizure to British naval vessels for the
apprehension of Persian slavers, or to discourage the slave trade within their
own dominions. When eventually they yielded to British representations on
the subject, they did so not out of any conviction of the evils of the traffic or of
the institution of slavery itself, but for the sake of political advantage. Their
co-operation later in the century in the restriction of the arms traffic, where it
was not withheld completely, was grudging and meaningless. Their territorial
demands and claims to sovereignty over Bahrain and other islands, over the
delta of the Shatt al-Arab and Kuwait, over parts of Makran, Baluchistan,
Seistan, Oman and the Trucial Sheikhdoms, were a source of irritation to all
concerned, and might have been more disturbing if they had been less absurd.
Whatever improvements were introduced to the Gulf, whether they were the
charting of its waters, the laying of telegraph cables, the provision of aids to

navigation or the establishment of quarantine stations and regulations, they
were invariably interpreted by the court of Tehran as affronts to its dignity,
and used as pretexts for renewed bombast about Persia’s sacred and immutable
rights.

These same shrill complaints about violations of Persia’s sovereign rights
were to be heard again in the 1970s. The shah and his ministers let slip no
opportunity to impress upon anyone who cared to listen that they regarded the
safeguarding of the peace of the Gulf as the exclusive responsibility of the states
around its shores. Although the shah denied that he was trying to declare a