Evolution of the Shatt al-’Arab Boundary Dispute

Evolution of the Shatt al-’Arab Boundary Dispute

Richard N. Schofield

Menas Press Ltd.

Only around fifty per cent of international boundaries in the Middle East and North Africa are demarcated or partially demarcated and three still remain to be allocated and delimited. This is as much connected with the environmental unsuitability of the region for the application of the linear concept of boundaries as the youthful nature of the system itself.
Drysdale and Blake (1985) calculated an average age of 70 years for the boundaries in the region, 40 of which have been delimited this century. The majority of Middle Eastern and North African states experienced independence and first exercised effective sovereignty over their territories at approximately the same stage of time, that being the post Second World War phase of decolonisation. Boundary alignments …

Richard Schofield took his first degree at the School of Oriental & African Studies, London, and recently completed a Master's course at the University of Durham, where he specialised on the Middle East. He has a continuing interest in the Middle East region and the problems of the Gulf area in particular.

Contents

List of maps / vi
List of tables / vii
Acknowledgements / viii

1 International Boundaries in The Middle East and North Africa / 1

Introduction - The youthfulness of the Middle East boundary system / 1

The alien nature of linear boundaries to the Middle East / 4

The acceptance of new territorial limits - A triumph for State Nationalism? / 8

The Iran-Iraq boundary, unique in the Middle East / 11

References / 15

2 Introduction to International River Boundaries / 17
- International rivers in the Middle East / 17
- Why choose a river boundary? / 21
- References / 26

3 The Shatt al-'Arab River and Boundary Suitability / 27

- The physical characteristics of the Shatt al-'Arab river / 27
Natural qualities / 27
(i)    Navigation / .32
(ii)    Irrigation / 33
(iii)    Fisheries / 33
Brief geological history of
the Shatt    al-'Arab region / 34
Boundary alignment within a river / 36
References / 40

4 The Evolution of the Shatt al-'Arab International Boundary in International Law / 42
Before 1847 / 42
1847 - 1911 / 44
1911 - 1937 / 48
1937 - 1975 / 55
1975 - 1980 / 62
References / 65

5 The Economic Importance and Levels of Utilisation of the
Shatt Al-'Arab in the Twentieth Century / 67
- Introduction / 67
- Pre 1945 / 67
- 1945 – 1980 / 70
- 1980 onwards the effect of the Gulf War / 76
References / 80

Conclusion / 82
References / 86

General Bibliography / 87

1 Books / 87
A. General / 87
B. Iran, Iraq and Iran-Iraq relations / 88
C. Political Geography / 89

2 Articles-Reports-Theses / 90
A. International law / 90
B. Political Geography / 90
C. Iran, Iraq and Iran-Iraq relations / 91
D. Shatt al-'Arab / 92
- (i) Boundary / 92
- (ii) Geomorphology & hydrology / 93
- (iii) Navigation and ports / 93

3, Bibliographies / 94

Index / 95

List of Maps

1.1 Boundary status in the Middle East and North Africa / 10
1.2 Iran - Iraq boundary    11

2.1 The Shatt ai-'Arab during the Ka'abide period / 22

3.1 The lower reaches of the Shatt al-'Arab river / 28
3.2 The Shatt al-'Arab water discharge / 29
3.3 Migration of the Shatt al-'Arab's principal navigational channel below Fao / 33

4.1 Frontier between the Ottoman Empire and Persia before 1847 / 43
4.2 Shatt al-'Arab boundary after Treaty of Erzerum 1847 / 44
4.3 Shatt al-'Arab boundary after Constantinople Protocol 1913 / 54
4.4 Shatt al-'Arab boundary after Iraq - Iran Treaty 1937 / 55
4.5 Shatt al-'Arab boundary after Algiers Accords 1975 / 66

5.1 Ports in the Shatt al-'Arab region / 67

List of Tables

3.1 The total water budget of the Euphrates, Tigris and Karun / 30
3.2 Ratios of low to high water (maximum) in selected rivers of the world / 30

5.1 Total import and export figures for the
Iranian and Iraqi ports on the Shatt al-'Arab / 71
5.2 Quantity of goods imported and exported through Iraqi ports / 72
5.3 Iraqi and Iranian commercial ports - dry cargo imports and exports / 75
5.4 Deep water berthage in Iraqi and

Iranian commercial ports / 77

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

May I express my gratitude to the following people and institutions who have been of great help at various stages in the preparation of this volume:
to Drs Gerald Blake, Dick Lawless and Mr Mike Drury at Durham University for their friendly encouragement and constructive criticism, especially in the work's embryonic stage.

to Dr Keith McLachlan of the School of Oriental and
African Studies, London University, for initially introducing me to the political geography of the Middle East and latterly, for suggesting much appreciated editorial changes to the text.

to Sue Harrap, cartographer to the Geography Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies for much needed help with maps.
to the staff of Durham University's Centre for Middle

East and Islamic Studies and Oriental Library.
to Croom Helm Ltd. and Oxford Univeristy Press (New
York) for their amenability to my inclusion of a couple of informative diagrams.
Richard N. Schofield November 1985

Chapter 1

International Boundaries in the Middle East and North Africa

Introduction the Youthfulness of the Middle East Boundary System

Only around fifty per cent of international boundaries in the Middle East and North Africa are demarcated or partially demarcated and three still remain to be allocated and delimited. This is as much connected with the environmental unsuitability of the region for the application of the linear concept of boundaries as the youthful nature of the system itself.

Drysdale and Blake (1985) calculated an average age of 70 years for the boundaries in the region, 40 of which have been delimited this century. The majority of Middle Eastern and North African states experienced independence and first exercised effective sovereignty over their territories at approximately the same stage of time, that being the post Second World War phase of decolonisation. Boundary alignments were however generally made earlier in the Maghreb and North Africa than in the Mashreq and Arabian Peninsula.

Proximity to Europe and all the inherent economic consequences that this lent itself to made North Africa particularly attractive to the competing and aggressive colonial powers of the time. North Africa had long-established trade links with Mediterranean Europe even though many of her ports served nothing more than entrepot functions, possessing only minor links with even their immediate hinterlands. A particularly harsh form of direct rule was experienced in parts of the Maghreb under French authority and Libya, under the control of an increasingly expansionist and Fascist Italy, was effectively to constitute that country's "Fourth Shore" from 1921 onwards. That Algeria, occupied by France in 1837, only forced independence in 1962 after an unprecedentedly violent struggle, in which an estimated one million of its nationals lost their lives, illustrates that until recently the economic value of the region to Europe was such that it was not easily to be relinquished.

Conversely, the Middle East proper, save for the important and nominally independent territories of Egypt and Iran, experienced extensive and rapid boundary realignments in order to enact the peace agreements which followed the First World War. Three classes of Mandated territory emerged from these agreements (Boateng, 1978), in which the administrative units' ability to manage their domestic affairs without reference to any other powers would never be complete and could rapidly diminish. At the top of this scale, in what has been termed the 'A' Class, the former Turkish territories of Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine were to be provisionally recognised as independent states but had to accept, temporarily, advice and assistance from an advanced power, these being the United Kingdom or France. This was in contrast with the position of South West Africa and a number of sparsely settled Pacific islands, constituting a 'C' Class, which were, and regrettably still are, administered by the mandatory power as an integral part of its territory.

Drysdale and Blake's consideration of the applicability of earlier boundary type classifications (Boggs (1940) and Hartshorne (1936)) to the territorial framework of the Middle East and North Africa, yields interesting results. Indeed it perhaps reinforces the assertion (Prescott, 1978) that each boundary is unique and that it is most profitable in the first place for specific case studies to be made to prepare the way for a later concentration on common bodies of techniques and concepts for analytical purposes.

In order for any classification (Boggs, 1940) to hold credibility with regard to the Middle East, recent studies (Drysdale and Blake, 1985) suggest the desirability and necessity of making certain adaptions. Were each boundary interface considered individually, classified and then a total enumeration made, a vast majority of the region's boundaries would probably be found to be 'Complex'. By considering the total length of boundaries, which is 21,300 miles, a more meaningful classification may be attained. This eliminates the 'Complex' category but facilitates application of the 'Physiographic', 'Anthropogeographic' and 'Geometric' classes (Boggs, 1940).

By such a scheme, fifty-eight per cent of the region's boundaries were classified as 'Geometric', thirty-five per cent 'Physiographic' (wadis and rivers 17 per cent; watersheds 15 per cent/limit of plain or plateau 3 per cent) and only four per cent 'Anthropogeographic'. This paucity of anthropogeographic demarcation can be interpreted as underlining the underdevelopment of the westernised concept of 'cultural landscape', upon which Hartshorne based his classification scheme. Yet Drysdale and Blake (1985) mention the Turkey- Syria boundary, agreed upon by a Franco-Turkish Agreement of 1926 (coincident for 240 miles with the Baghdad Railway) and the disputed Algeria-Libyan boundary (parallel with an ancient transaharan caravan route) as major examples of boundaries of this type.

The great majority and indeed the greater length of Middle Eastern boundaries, mostly formed in 'frontiers of separation', are classified as 'physiographic' or 'geometric'. They traverse and impinge upon areas of extremely low population density. Perhaps one drawback of a morphometric classification scheme based on a total length of boundary within the region is that it will either fail to indicate or greatly underplay the importance of those few interfaces traversing areas of significant population density. These began as or have attained the characteristics of 'frontiers of contact' and often constitute political flashpoints in this unstable region. These flashpoint boundaries - and one thinks of certain frontiers in the Levant and the Shatt al'Arab in this regard - only constitute a tiny proportion of total boundary length in the region and none are geometric. Yet the numbers of people and their activities that this small length affects are disproportionately large. A consideration of total length therefore and indeed the whole morphological approach to classification, which has been criticised as unwarrantedly dominant in decades past, can give little guide to the functional importance of a boundary. The apparent need to regard each boundary or even section thereof as unique is, therefore exacerbated,

A newcomer to the Middle East on inspecting a population distribution map of the region might be tempted to argue that a classification stressing the characteristics of its 'cultural landscape' (Hartshorne, 1936) might reap some reward. There would seemingly be a case for asserting that in the youthful history of sovereign state territories, there has not yet been time or opportunity for full authority and development to extend to the periphery of states, that this extension of authority is one day inevitable and that boundaries traversing such units can therefore be regarded as 'antecedent'. Similarly, the predominant geometric boundaries traversing areas of very sparse population might be regarded as 'pioneer'.

Such assertions, however, seemingly applicable to the majority of boundaries in the region, deny that anything other than the European and North American experience can be regarded as acceptable and stipulate that their 'cultural landscape' must be universal. However, the arid zone of the Middle East and North Africa possesses a long history of environmentally-suited cultural elements. Large areas were capable of sustaining only very small and sparse populations within a mobile and adapted economy dominated …

Richard N. Schofiela

Evolution of the Shatt al-’Arab Boundary Dispute

Menas Press Ltd.

Menas Press Ltd.
Evolution of the Shatt Al-’Arab Boundary Dispute
Richard N. Schofiela

Menas Studies in Continuity & Change
in the Middle East and North Africa

Evolution of the Shatt al-’Arab Boundary Dispute
By Richard N. Schofield

Middle East & North African Studies Press Limited
Gallipoli House, The Cottons, Outwell, Wisbech,
Cambridgeshire, PE14 8TN, England

c Menas Press Ltd.
1986

ISBN 0 906559 25 - 1
Printed by Whitstable Litho Ltd.,
Whitstable, Kent