Iran-United Kingdom relations
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| United Kingdom | Iran |
The United Kingdom and Persia (pre-1935 Iran) have had relations since the late Ilkhanate period when King Edward I of England sent Geoffrey de Langley to the Ilkhanid court to seek an alliance.[1]
Since then, mutual relations have often been turbulent at times and better at others.
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[edit] History of Irano-British relations
[edit] Safavid era
It was Anthony Jenkinson of the Muscovy Company who first visited the Safavid court in the mid 16th century. In 1597, as Abbas I of Safavid sought to strengthen his dominance in eastern Khorasan against rebellious Uzbeks, he received Robert Shirley, Anthony Shirley, and a group of 26 British envoys in Qazvin. The British delegation sought to convert Persia into a British ally against the Ottoman threat. Shah Abbas warmly received the delegation and took them as his guests with him to Isfahan, his new capital.
Soon, the Shirley brothers were appointed by the Shah to organize the royal cavalry and train the army. Many events followed, including the debut of the British East India Company into Persia, and establishment of trade routes for silk though Jask in the Strait of Hormuz in 1616. It was from here where the likes of Sir John Malcolm later gained influence into the Qajarid throne.
[edit] Qajari era
Irano-British relations picked up momentum as a weakened Safavid empire eventually gave way to the Qajarid dynasty, which was quickly absorbed into domestic turmoil and rivalry, while competing colonial powers rapidly sought a stable foothold in the region. While the Portuguese, British, and Dutch, competed for the south and southeast of Persia in the Persian Gulf, Imperial Russia was largely left unchallenged in the north as it plunged southward to establish dominance in Persia's northern territories.
Plagued with internal politics and incompetency, the Qajarid government found itself incapable of rising to the numerous complex foreign political challenges at the doorsteps of Persia.
During the monarchy of Fath Ali Shah, Sir John Malcolm, Sir Harford Jones-Brydges, Allen Lindsay, Henry Eldred Curwen Pottinger, Charles Christie, Sir Henry Rawlinson, Harold Nicolson, Sir Anthony Eden, Sir John McNeill, Edmund Ironside, and James Morrier were some of the British elite closely involved with Persian politics. Allen Lindsay was even appointed as a general in Abbas Mirza's army.
A weakened and bankrupted royal court under Fath Ali Shah was forced to sign the notorious Treaty of Gulistan in 1813, followed by a second Turkmanchai treaty after efforts by Abbas Mirza failed to secure Persia's northern front against Imperial Russia. The treaties were prepared by the notorious Sir Gore Ouseley with the aid of the British Foreign Office in London. Sir Gore Ouseley was the younger brother of the British orientalist William Ouseley, who served as secretary to the British ambassador in Persia.
In fact, Iran's current southern and eastern boundaries were determined by none other than the British, after deafeating Nasereddin Shah in Herat in 1857. The British government assigned Frederic John Goldsmid of the Indo-European Telegraph Department to determine the borders between Persia and India during the 1860s.[2]
In 1872, the Shah signed an agreement with Baron Julius de Reuter, which George Nathaniel Curzon (who was one of the greatest statemen of his day) called:
- "The most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that have ever been dreamed of..."[3]
The Reuter Concession was immedialtey denounced by all ranks of businessmen, clergy, and nationalists of Persia. And the concession was quickly forced into cancellation.
Similarly, the "Tobacco fatwa", decreed by Grand Ayatollah Mirza Hassan Shirazi was an incident which raised popular resentment against the British presence in Pertsia in lieu of a diplomatically decapitated and apathetic Qajar throne. Concessions such as this and the 70 year contract of Persian railways to be operated by British businessmen such as Baron de Reuter became increasingly visible. The visibility became particularly pronounced after the discovery of oil in Masjed Soleiman in 1909 and the establishment of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the "D'Arcy Concession".
By the end of the 19th century, Britain's dominance became so pronounced that Khuzestan, Bushehr, and a host of other cities in southern Persia were occupied by Great Britain, and the central government in Tehran was left with no power to even select its own ministers without the approval of the Anglo-Russian consulates. Morgan Shuster, for example, had to resign under tremendous British and Russian pressure on the royal court. Shuster's book "The Strangling of Persia" is a recount of the details of these events, a harsh criticism of Britain and Imperial Russia.
[edit] Pahlavi era
One result of the public outcry against the inability of the Persian throne to maintain its political and economic independence against Great Britain and Imperial Russia in the face of events such as the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and "the 1919 treaty" was the Persian Constitutional Revolution which eventually resulted in the fall of the Qajar dynasty.
The great tremor of the Persian political landscape occurred when the involvement of General Edmund Ironside eventually led to the rise of Reza Pahlavi in the 1920s. The popular view that the British were involved in the 1921 coup was noted as early as March 1921 by the American embassy and relayed to the Iran desk at the Foreign Office [4] A British Embassy report from 1932 concedes that the British put Reza Shah "on the throne"[5].
After his establishing of power and strengthening of the central government, Reza Khan put an end to the autonomous activities of the British backed Sheikh Khazal in the south. London withdrew its support of Khaz'al in favor of Reza Pahlavi. He was however removed just as quickly from power during the invasion of Iran by Russia and Britain in WW2.
A novel chapter in anglo-Iranian relations had begun when Iran cancelled its capitulation agreements with foreign powers in 1928. Iran's success in revoking the capitulation treaties, and the failure of the Anglo-Iranian Agreement of 1919 earlier, led to intense diplomatic efforts by the British government to regularize relations between the two countries on a treaty basis. On the Iranian side negotiations on the widest range of issues were conducted by Abdolhossein Teymourtash, the Minister of Court from 1925-1932, and Iran's nominal Minister of Foreign Affairs during the period.
The ire of the British Government was raised, however, by Persian diplomatic claims to the oil rich regions of the Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands, Abu Musa and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf region. On the economic front, on the other hand, Iran's pressures to rescind the monopoly rights of the British-owned Imperial Bank of Persia to issue banknotes in Iran, the Iranian Trade Monopoly Law of 1928, and prohibitions whereby the British Government and APOC were no longer permitted to enter into direct agreements with their client tribes, as had been the case in the past, did little to satisfy British expectations. The cumulative impact of these demands on the British Government was well expressed by Sir Robert Clive, Britain's Minister to Tehran, who in 1931 noted in a report to the Foreign Office "There are indications, indeed that their present policy is to see how far they can push us in the way of concessions, and I feel we shall never re-establish our waning prestige or even be able to treat the Persian government on equal terms, until we are in a position to call a halt".
Despite the enormous volume of correspondence and protracted negotiations that took place between the two countries on the widest array of issues, on the Iranian side Teymourtash conducted these negotiations single-handedly “without so much as a secretary to keep his papers in order”, according to one scholar. Resolution of all outstanding differences eluded a speedy resolution, however, given the reality that on the British side progress proved tedious due to the need to consult many government departments with differing interests and jurisdictions.
The most intractable challenge, however, proved to be Iran's assidious efforts to revise the terms whereby the Anglo-Persian Oil Company ("APOC") retained near monopoly control over the oil industry in Iran as a result of the concession granted to William Knox D'Arcy in 1901 by the Qajar King of the period. "What Persians felt", Teymourtash would explain to his British counterparts in 1928, "was that an industry had been developed on their own soil in which they had no real share".
Complicating matters further, and ensuring that such demands would in due course set Iran on a collision course with the British Government was the reality that pursuant to a 1914 Act of the British Parliament, an initiative championed by Winston Churchill in his capacity as First Lord of the Admiralty, led the British Government to be granted a majority fifty-three percent ownership of the shares of APOC. The decision was adopted during World War I to ensure the British Government would gain a critical foothold in Iranian affairs so as to protect the flow of oil Iran from Iran due to its critical importance to the operation of the Royal Navy during the war effort. By the 1920s APOC's extensive installations and pipelines in Khuzestan and its refinery in Abadan meant that the company's operations in Iran had led to the creation of the greatest industrial complex in the Middle East.
The attempt to revise the terms of the oil concession on a more favourable basis for Iran led to protracted negotiations that took place in Tehran, Lausanne, London and Paris between Teymourtash and the Chairman of APOC, Sir John Cadman, spanning the years from 1928 to 1932. The overarching argument for revisiting the terms of the D'Arcy Agreement on the Iranian side was that its national wealth was being squandered by a concession that was granted in 1901 by a previous non-constitutional government forced to agree to inequitable terms under duress.
However, despite much progress, Reza Shah Pahlavi was soon to assert his authority by dramatically inserting himself in to the negotiations. The Monarch attended a meeting of the Council of Ministers in November 1932, and after publicly rebuking Teymourtash for his failure to secure an agreement, dictated a letter to cabinet cancelling the D'Arcy Agreement. The Iranian Government notified APOC that it would cease further negotiations and demanded cancellation of the D'Arcy concession. Rejecting the cancellation, the British government espoused the claim on behalf of APOC and brought the dispute before the Permanent Court of International Justice at the Hague, asserting that it regarded itself "as entitled to take all such measures as the situation may demand for the Company's protection." At this point, Hassan Taqizadeh, the new Iranian minsiter to have been entrusted the task of assuming reponsibility for the oil dossier, was to intimate to the British that the cancellation was simply meant to expedite negotiations and that it would constitute political suicide for Iran to withdraw from negotiations.
The end of World War II brought the start of American dominance in Iran's political arena, and with an anti-Soviet Cold War brewing, the United States quickly moved to convert Iran into an anti-communist block, thus considerably diminishing Britain's influence on Iran for years to come. Operation Ajax and the fall of Prime Minister Mosaddegh was perhaps the last of the large British involvements in Iranian politics in the Pahlavi era.
[edit] The Islamic Republic
After the Revolution of Iran in 1979, Britain suspended all diplomatic relations with Iran. Britain did not have an embassy until it was reopened in 1988.
During the Iran-Iraq war, the British supplied Saddam Hussein with military technology and hardware. The infamous supergun of Project Babylon is a prime example that comes to mind in this regard. All of the required metal tubes for the barrels were purchased from firms in the United Kingdom. The Arms-to-Iraq scandal is thought to have been an element in John Major's defeat by Tony Blair.
A year after the re-establishment of the British embassy in Tehran, Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous Rushdie fatwa, ordering Muslims across the world to kill British author Salman Rushdie. Diplomatic ties with London were broken off only to be resumed at a charge d'affaires level in 1990.
Relations normalised in 1998 during President Mohammad Khatami's reformist administration, and Jack Straw became the first high ranking British politician to visit Tehran in 2001 since the revolution.
Relations suffered a setback in 2002 when David Reddaway was rejected by Tehran as London's ambassador, on charges of being a spy, and further deteriorated when Iran arrested eight British sailors after their vessel apparently strayed into Iranian waters near the border with Iraq. They were released later.
[edit] Current relations
The Herald Tribune on January 22, 2006 reported a rise in British exports to Iran from £296 million in 2000 to £443.8 million in 2004. A spokesperson for UK Trade and Investment was quoted saying that "Iran has become more attractive because it now pursues a more liberal economic policy".[6]
However, the rigidity of Tehran-London ties remains to be seen as Iran's new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has put forth a hardline government in power, in line with the revolutionary ideals of Ayatollah Khomeini .
The confrontation between the United States-European Union pact on one side and Iran on the other over Iran's nuclear program also continues to develop, remaining a serious obstacle in the improvement of Tehran-London ties.
A confidential letter by UK diplomat John Sawers to French, German and US diplomats, dated March 16, 2006, twice referred to the intention to have the United Nations Security Council refer to Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter in order to put pressure on Iran. Chapter VII describes the Security Council's power to authorize economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions, as well as the use of military force, to resolve disputes.
The Sunday Telegraph reported that a secret, high-level meeting would take place on April 3, 2006 between the UK government and military chiefs regarding plans to attack Iran.[7] The Telegraph cited "a senior Foreign Office source" saying that "The belief in some areas of Whitehall is that an attack is now all but inevitable. There will be no invasion of Iran but the nuclear sites will be destroyed." The BBC reported a denial that the meeting would take place, but no denial of the alleged themes of the meeting, by the UK Ministry of Defence, and that "there is well sourced and persistent speculation that American covert activities aimed at Iran are already underway"[8].
On March 23, 2007 fifteen Royal Navy personnel were seized by the naval forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for allegedly having strayed into Iranian waters. Eight sailors and seven Royal Marines on two boats from HMS Cornwall were detained at 10:30 local time by six Guard boats of the IRGC Navy. They were subsequently taken to Tehran. Iran reported that the sailors are well. About 200 students targeted the British Embassy on April 1, 2007 calling for the expulsion of the country's ambassador because of the standoff over Iran's capture of 15 British sailors and marines. The protesters chanted "Death to Britain" and "Death to America".[9] Speculation on the Iranians' motivations for this action ran rampant; with the Iranians under tremendous pressure on a number of fronts from the United States, the Revolutionary Guard Corps could have been responding to any one of a number of perceived threats.
On April 3, 2007, Prime Minister Tony Blair advised that "the next 48 hours will be critical" in defusing the crisis. At approximately 1:20 PM GMT, Iran's president announced that the 8 sailors would be 'pardoned'. The following day, he announced all 15 British personnel would be released immediately "in celebration of the Prophet's birthday and Easter." After the soldiers return channel 5 news released an interview they had filmed just prior to the soldiers capture. In it, Captain Chris Air, the most senior of the captured men, admitted that one of the patrol's responsibilities was to obtain intelligence on Iran. The videos release was blocked by the MOD until the soldiers release for fear that it could compromise the soldiers position.[1]
[edit] Further reading
- Kazemzadeh Firuz, Russia and Britain in Persia 1864-1914, A study in Imperialism, 1968, Yale University Press.
- Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia: Story of the European Diplomacy and Oriental Intrigue That Resulted in the Denationalization of Twelve Million Mohammedans. ISBN 0-934211-06-X
- Ingram, Edward. Britain’s Persian Connection 1798-1828: Prelude to the Great Game in Asia. 1993. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-820243-1
- Bonakdarian, Mansour. BRITAIN AND THE IRANIAN CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION 1906-1911. Syracuse University Press in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation. 2006. ISBN 0-8156-3042-5
[edit] References
- ^ Patrick Clawson. Eternal Iran. Palgrave 2005 ISBN 1-4039-6276-6, p.25
- ^ Frederic John Goldsmid's Eastern Persia: An account of the journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission. 1870-1871-1872. London. Macmillan and Co. 1876.
- ^ George Nathaniel Curzon. Persia and the Persian question. Vol.I London. Frank Cass and Co. Ltd. 1966. p.480
- ^ Zirinsky M.P. Imperial Power and dictatorship: Britain and the rise of Reza Shah 1921-1926. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. 24, 1992. p.646
- ^ Sources:
- FO 371 16077 E2844 dated 8 June 1932.
- The Memoirs of Anthony Eden are also explicit about Britain's role in putting Reza Khan in power.
- Ansari, Ali M. Modern Iran since 1921. Longman. 2003 ISBN 0-582-35685-7 p.26-31
- ^ Hint of Iran sanctions tugs at trade ties, Judy Dempsey, January 22, 2006, International Herald Tribune
- ^ Government in secret talks about strike against Iran, Sean Rayment, Sunday Telegraph, April 2, 2006
- ^ MoD denies Iran military meeting, BBC, April 2, 2006
- ^ Protest in Iran targets British Embassy, China Daily, April 1, 2007
[edit] See also
- Foreign relations of Iran
- Foreign relations of the United Kingdom
- Iran-China relations
- Iran-US relations
- Iran-Russia relations
- Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran
- Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907
- Imperial Bank of Persia, a British owned bank established in 1889.
- Gholhak Garden conflict
- 2007 Iranian seizure of Royal Navy personnel
[edit] External links
- Iran-UK relation timeline: BBC
- The British-Iranian Chamber of Commerce
- The Iran Society of London
- The Irano-British Chamber of Commerce
- Iran's Embassy in London
- The British Embassy in Tehran
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