Coll 28/67 ‘Persia. Annual Reports, 1932–’ [‎263r] (525/644)

[24073] D
11
imports reduced seriously the yield from customs duties—a tendency which
increased when the military operations of August brought about a temporary
break-down in the customs and frontier administrations; while the military and
political events of the period combined to create an atmosphere of uncertainty
and lawlessness particularly unfavourable to the regular collection of taxes of
^^ny kind. Ihe attitude of the Soviet authorities was also unhelpful. One of their
lirst acts, after the occupation, was to require the Persian Government to open
in their favour a credit of 80 million rials. Under the agreement concluded this
sum was to be wiped off by the importation of Soviet goods for the Persian
Government, but although some goods—including some wheats—were imported,
the Soviet authorities sold them to merchants in order to secure rials, thereby
not only leaving the credits outstanding, but also pocketing the taxes which
ought to have been collected by the Persian Government. The Persian Govern
ment effected some economies, e.g., by stopping work on some of the less important
industrial schemes in progress, but these were offset by large increases of pay
gTanted to the army and the civil service as an encouragement to honesty,
binding themselves in this financial morass, the Government tended to look to
the Allies (especially to His Majesty’s Government) to extricate them by means
of vaguely-conceived financial and economic assistance to be afforded under the
supplementary agreements provided for in the treaty.
28. There is one virtue that no one denies Reza Shah : in his reign law and
order were maintained as never before in Persia. The roads were safe, and the
severe treatment which had been meted out to the tribes and the removal of all
the more important leaders to other districts kept down the tribal troubles which
for many years before his accession had kept the Central Government in a chronic
state of paralysis. Within a month or so the situation changed. A foreign
invasion weakened the authority of the Tehran Government and of the local
administrations; the gendarmerie, hated for their depredations (the harassed
population made no allowance for the fact that the gendarme’s wage was not
enough to live on and that his officers stole a large part even of that wage), found
themselves faced with growing resentment, while the authority on which it had
rested was melting away; Reza Shah abdicated, and his army disintegrated; the
desertion of thousands 'of men from the army, with their arms, supplied with
modern rifles large stretches of country which had for years been almost com
pletely disarmed; and the release by the Government of most of the tribal leaders
who had been kept in Tehran in prison or under supervision, while it did credit
to the reforming zeal of the Firoughi Government, created here and there centres
of ambition and discontent which were full of danger to the State—a danger
accentuated by the fact that one or two leaders which not even M. Firoughi fad
intended to release, e.g., Nasir Khan of the Qashgai< managed to escape. It is not
surprising that in these circumstances the roads in the unoccupied areas became
unsafe. The least safe was probably the road from Isfahan to Bushire. His
Majesty’s Legation lent their assistance by encouraging the Government to
remove the most corrupt and brutal of the gendarmerie officers.and, when the
law raising the pay of all public servants was finally passed, to see that the
gendarmes received the increase. The rehabilitation of the army was a more
serious business, and it is fortunate for the Persian Government that only in
Kurdistan were its troops called upon during the first few months of the new
regime to undertake serious military operations.
29. The number of men in the army had been greatly reduced by
desertion during and immediately after the invasion, and the problem was how
to fill the gaps. Conscription was perhaps the most deeply hated of all Persian
institutions, mainly because of the corruption of the recruiting officers, and
His Majesty’s Legation, like very many Persians, would have liked to see it
replaced by a system of voluntary recruitment. Most of the Persian officers,
however, maintained that even if the army was to be reduced considerably
below its former figure, if could not be maintained by voluntary recruitment;
to pay rates which would attract recruits would be too costly, and even then
it would be the out-of-work in the towns who would enlist, and not the peasants,
who were the best material. An attempt—no one can say how serious—was
actually made to find voluntary recruits to fill some of the gaps, but only a
few score men were secured in this way. The country, therefore, returned
reluctantly to conscription, but owing partly to prevailing disorder, partly to
the Russian refusal to allow conscription to be applied in the provinces occupied