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Smugglers, Migrants, and Refugees: The Iran–Iraq Border, 1925–1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2020

Shaherzad Ahmadi Open the ORCID record for Shaherzad Ahmadi [Opens in a new window]
Shaherzad Ahmadi*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Saint Thomas, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: srahmadi@utexas.edu
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Abstract

Due to the illegal movement of goods and people, the Khuzistan-Basra frontier, like many other borderlands in the region, represented a liminal space for border dwellers and the Iranian state. Although scholars have written about the migration that was endemic to the early nation-building period, the consequences of this movement in the latter half of the 20th century require further exploration. Well into the 1970s, Iranian migrants and border dwellers complicated citizenship, evinced by the Pahlavi monarchy's failure or refusal to offer them their rights. The Iranian archives prove that, decades into the nation-building project, local dynamics continued to exert tremendous influence on Iranians and even superseded national policies.

Keywords

citizenshipIranmigrationrefugees

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Article
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 703 - 718
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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2 Marvin Howe, “Iraq's Deportees: Pawns in a Power Game,” New York Times, 31 January 1972, 6.

3 The war, of course, has its own robust historiography. Lawrence Potter's Gulf/2000 project is perhaps the most pioneering in its methodological scope. In the words of Lawrence Potter and Gary Sick, the “project has, over the past decade, brought together citizens of the Persian Gulf states to explore their mutual concerns and to seek ways to improve personal contact and understanding”; Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 1Google Scholar. The topic of the war gains tremendous attention in biographies of Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, of which there are many. There is still much to study on the topic of the war itself, however. Pierre Razoux has written one of the most ambitious books on the topic recently, called The Iran–Iraq War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. William Murray and Kevin Woods, who published their own monograph by the same title only a year prior, offer an impressive chronicle of the military history of the war; The Iran–Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. One of the most dynamic studies of the conflict, a social history centering on the Ba‘th Party's citizen-regime relationship, is Khoury's, Dina Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cultural histories like the volume edited by Milich, Stephan, Pannewick, Friederike, and Tramontini, Leslie, Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma, and Memory in Iraqi Culture (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2012)Google Scholar have supplemented our understanding of the conflict. From the Iranian perspective, historians emphasize the religious element of the war. Surdykowska's, Sylwia Martyrdom and Ecstasy: Emotion Training in Iranian Culture (Warsaw: Warsaw University, 2006)Google Scholar is one such example.

4 All Persian translations are by the author. Department of Finance, 1926, INA, 240/6069/47.

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26 This process is described in great detail by Sabri Ates in Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Ates perceives rather less autonomy in his subjects than I do. Following Pekka Hamalainen and Samuel Truett, Ates asserts that, with the rise of nation–states, “borderland people lost their ability to manipulate or negotiate with state power, play rival states against each other, and ‘live autonomously’ as a result of the territorialization of the state-space” (33). Of course, the present study does not deny the diminishing capacity of tribes to negotiate their best interests with the state. Nevertheless, the archives illustrate many means through which border dwellers and migrants remained aloof from the state and even supported each other, thereby destabilizing the strict categories of citizenship and borders proffered by Tehran.

27 Sahlins, Boundaries, 8.

28 Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil, “Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization,” in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, ed. Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 25Google Scholar.

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38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Letter from Ahmad Mehr to the Parliament, 1922, Iranian Library of Congress (hereafter ILC), 5234563765612555755705760.

42 Dokhtar-e Lur, directed by ‘Abd al-Husayn Sapanta (Bombay, India: Imperial Film Company, 1936), DVD.

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44 Ibid.

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51 Report from the Ministry of Economic and Financial Affairs, 13 February 1934, INA, 240/2883/1.

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53 Report from the Iranian consulate in Basra to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1931, INA, 240/78357/120.

54 Report from the Ministry of Economic and Financial Affairs, 13 February 1934, INA, 240/2883/1.

55 Letter from Seyyed Hussein to the Iranian ambassador in Iraq, 1945, INA, 293/5573/1; letter from Ali Reza son of Ebrahim to the Iranian ambassador in Iraq, 1945, INA, 293/5573/2.

56 Letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 3 February 1945, INA, 293/4473/3.

57 Report from the Department of Finance, 1948–49, INA, 240/11456/1.

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77 Howe, “Iraq's Deportees,” 6. Of course, this took place in tandem with Mohammad Reza Shah's support of Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq to secure a more favorable border arrangement in Khuzistan. His efforts culminated in the Algiers Agreement of 1975, signed by Mohammad Reza Shah and Saddam Hussein, conceding the thalweg of the Shatt al-Arab to Iran.

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83 Ibid., 23.

84 Ibid., 62.

85 Ibid., 24.

86 Ibid., 26.

87 Ibid., 82.

88 Ibid., 93, 101.

89 Ibid., 25.

90 Ibid., 33.

91 Ibid., 32, 34.

92 Ibid., 29.

93 Nevertheless, loans were offered to refugee entrepreneurs. Those who settled in Isfahan and Khuzistan gained the highest number of bank loans. Ibid., 47.

94 Purtaya, Iranian Bazgashteh az Iraq, 94.

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101 Hoover Institution, PUK 1262837.

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