War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

72 Stephanie CroninNew British missions and a bid for supremacyThe years of the First World War saw a further transformation in the domesticand the international contexts within which the foreign missions in Iranoperated. 62 The constitutional revolution had failed to provide Iran with themeans to escape from the coils of an exhausted Qajar political order and theWar brought increased imperialist intervention, both political and military,with Iran’s continued independent existence threatened by national disintegration,partition or the imposition of direct European control.The Gendarmerie had derived significant impetus in its early years fromthe political and financial support of Britain but, with the outbreak of warand the concomitant political polarization, the force rejected its imperial patronand identified itself unequivocally with Iranian nationalism. The Swedish commandwas effectively eclipsed, freeing the Iranian officer corps to assume aleading role in the military and political conflicts of the war and post-waryears. 63 Iranian gendarmes turned their guns on their British patrons, arrestingthe entire British colony in Shiraz and driving Allied nationals out ofmuch of southern and western Iran. Between 1915 and 1917 Gendarme officersoffered military leadership to nationalist forces battling against foreignintervention and control, and a docile and collaborating shah.In the first years of the war the Cossack Brigade became more thanever a Russian tool while Britain, shaken by its treatment at the hands ofGendarme officers whom it had armed and financed, itself began planningto raise and officer a force directly, over which its control would becertain. Iran’s strategic significance and the helplessness of its governmentproved an irresistible temptation to Russia and Britain. Allies in war,at first Britain and Russia acted together. In 1915 the two powers settledtheir differences over western Asia with the Constantinople Agreementwhich, although primarily concerned with Russian demands for controlover the Straits into the Black Sea, also gave Britain the “neutral zone” inIran, and recognized a free hand for both powers in their respective zones.In 1916, with Russian armies in occupation of northern Iran and within strikingdistance of Tehran, they used their control of elements within theIranian government to draw up the Sipahsalar Agreement which providedfor the expansion of the Cossack Brigade to a Division and the establishmentof a British-officered force, the South Persia Rifles (SPR). 64 Throughthe expanded Cossack Division and the SPR, Russia and Britain eachintended to consolidate its power in its respective zone of influence, Russiain the north and Britain in the south.The Agreement provoked profound opposition in Iran, where it waswidely perceived as accelerating the partition of the country, and the government,while too weak and dependent on Allied support to repudiate itoutright, refused any formal acceptance. Although the Agreement thus possessedno legal standing, the Russians proceeded immediately to expandCossack numbers while Britain raised the South Persia Rifles, a force whose