Coll 28/67 ‘Persia. Annual Reports, 1932–’ [‎52r] (103/644)

I.—Introduction.
THE achievement of the year has been the settlement of the Anglo-Persian
Oil Company dispute, and the outstanding fact has been that, with the
disappearance of Teymourtache, there is no transmuter of the electric force
emanating from the Imperial dynamo. The Shah now issues orders which no
one dares question or bowdlerise, and the result is that, as these orders are
sometimes issued when he is—to quote his Minister for Foreign Affairs—too
angry to think, a great fear haunts the capital. To make matters worse, there
is every reason to think that the Shah himself is haunted by the fear that he is
in the grip of cancer, and that if he came to die, neither the work which he has
undertaken for the modernisation of Persia nor even his upstart dynasty would
survive. And so we have witnessed feverish activity on the railway, a continued
expansion of the armed forces, the death or arrest of Teymourtache and other
“ tall poppies,” a neurotic regard for prestige in foreign relations, all symptoms
of a mind tortured by doubts and fears for the future, and of an iron, if ill-
directed, determination to secure the future even against the hand of death.
It is just possible he has a friend or someone he trusts among the General Staff,
but of army matters we know nothing. The universal impression is that he
confides in nobody, and that the suspiciousness on which Teymourtache once
dilated to Sir It. Clive has become a disease. None the less, all foreigners wdio
have at rare intervals access to him are invariably impressed by his quickness
of apprehension and by his readiness to listen to reasonable arguments.
Unfortunately, his mood seems to change almost as soon as the foreigner has
withdrawn.
2. A curious fact is that, in spite of the suspension of the Anglo-Persian
treaty negotiations throughout the year, and although relations have twice been
acutely strained, there has been no renewal of the Persian demand for our
evacuation of Henjam, nor have the Persian Government made any attempt to
drag Bahrein into the limelight; they have, in fact, neglected the two most
obvious points of attack.
3. Another outstanding feature of the year was the stubborn attitude
maintained towards the Soviet Government both in commercial matters and in
the severity of the measures taken against Soviet propaganda. These measures
were partly responsible for the steadily increasing timidity displayed by Persians,
who normally frequent foreign society, in visiting foreign Legations. Officially,
no orders have been issued, but the general impression is that it is safer to keep
away, and this has reached such a point that the English wife of a senior officer
is afraid to come to the British Legation.
4. Generally speaking, the year has been marked by a sense of uneasy
expectation both in foreign and internal affairs. People are wondering what
will happen here when, in the spring, the Shah pays his official visits to Iraq,
a country with which he desires to settle a number of important questions, and
Turkey, and then goes on to Switzerland to see his son and to consult specialists,
and they are asking what will happen next if the verdict of the specialists is
unfavourable; will the few people of prominence left in the country be sent to
join the Minister of War and others in prison, and will there be an upheaval?
Many Persians hold that upheavals do not occur in this apathetic land without
a push from abroad, and they would therefore presumably argue that nothing
dramatic would occur unless the Soviet Government had decided on a forward
policy.
II.— Foreign Relations.
(A) British Empire.
United Kingdom.
5. Twice in the course of 1933 Anglo-Persian relations appeared to the
optimistic observer to have reached a point of cordiality which justified a hope
that the protracted treaty negotiations might be finally concluded early in 1934,
and twice they were strained almost to breaking-point. At the end of the year
they were more or less normal, if uneasily so.
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