Copyright

by

Bryan Campbell Sitzes

2018

The Thesis Committee for Bryan Campbell Sitzes

Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis:

Alienating Iranians from their Environment:

Irrigation, Flood Control, and Public Health in Late Pahlavi Khuzestan

APPROVED BY

SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Kamran Scot Aghaie

Faegheh Shirazi

Supervisor:

Alienating Iranians from their Environment:

Irrigation, Flood Control, and Public Health in Late Pahlavi Khuzestan

by

Bryan Campbell Sitzes

Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin

May 2018

“What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men

over other men with Nature as its instrument.” – C.S. Lewis

v

Acknowledgements

Many people helped me complete this project. I am extremely grateful to

Professors Kamran Aghaie and Faegheh Shirazi for all their encouragement and

suggestions. Dr. Samy Ayoub and Andrew Akhlaghi introduced me to environmental

history, setting me on an exciting historical path. Dr. Dale Correa, Middle Eastern

Studies Librarian and History Coordinator for the University of Texas Libraries, was

extremely gracious with her time and tracked down several documents that made this

paper possible. Many of my peers at UT - Austin helped me by challenging my

arguments and encouraging me to persist when the project seemed difficult, especially

Casey Boyles, Lucy Flamm, Robyn Morse, Garrett Shuffield, and Babak Tabarraee.

Many teachers and friends have helped me learn Persian over the years, but Babak, Roja,

and Anousha Shahsavari most of all. This paper absolutely would not have been possible

without the love and support of Mai, Prudence, and Pele.

vi

Abstract

Alienating Iranians from their Environment:

Irrigation, Flood Control, and Public Health in Late Pahlavi Khuzestan

Bryan Campbell Sitzes, MA

The University of Texas at Austin, 2018

Supervisor: Kamran Scot Aghaie

This thesis explores the changing relationship between rural Iranians, the state,

and the environment in the mid-20th century through a regional study of the province of

Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran. This research differs from predominant histories of

modernization in Iran by its use of an environmental historical framework and its focus

on rural communities on the national periphery. Environmental history, as opposed to

political, economic, intellectual, or feminist history, emphasizes the dynamic dialectical

relationship between society and its environment, acknowledging the historical agency of

the latter. Examining changes in the relationships between society, rivers, and disease

(types of “socio-environmental” relationships) demonstrates how modernization projects

affected social institutions and Iranian conceptions of nature. 20th century state initiatives

degraded the existing relationship between society and environment in Khuzestan

because of a modernist faith in humanity’s power over natural phenomena and a capitalist

drive to replace traditional modes of labor with new jobs integrated into a global cash

economy. Engineers designed plans for new canals and a massive modern dam that

vii

foremen and their professional crews built with over one million tons of concrete. Village

health agents coerced residents into mass chemotherapy treatments while school officials

experimented with the diets of schoolchildren to see what mixture of proteins might

produce the healthiest citizens. These projects reveal a state faith in the ability of experts

to control natural phenomena and successfully order society without input from local

communities.

Using corporate archival material, state reports, and anthropological studies, I tell

the story of how the Development and Resources Corporation’s arrival in Khuzestan

drastically altered socio-environmental dynamics, how the state enhanced its power and

presence in villages, and the ambiguous response of villagers to these changes. The

attractions of modern technologies and comfort commodities often came at the price of

personal and communal autonomy. I argue that the DRC and the state altered traditional

modes of incorporating nature into rural social structures. These organizations partially

alienated Iranians from their natural environment by conceptualizing it as a resource to be

completely controlled, for profit and national benefit, rather than accommodated for local

needs and demands.

viii

Table of Contents

List of Tables ........................................................................................................ ix

Introduction ..............................................................................................................1

Chapter 1: Irrigation and New Experts ...................................................................8

Chapter 2: Floods and a Great Dam ......................................................................40

Chapter 3: Public Health and Forced Treatments .................................................67

Conclusion ..........................................................................................................100

Bibliography .......................................................................................................108

ix

List of Tables

Table 1: Actions of villagers when catching a sickness ..................................95

Table 2: What villagers in the DIP believe cause sickness .............................97

1

Introduction

This thesis explores the changing relationship between rural Iranians, the state, and the

environment in the mid-20th century through a regional study of Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran.

Examining changes in the relationships between society, rivers, and diseases (types of “socio-

environmental” relationships) demonstrates how modernization projects affected social

institutions and Iranian conceptions of nature. Using corporate archival material, state reports,

and anthropological studies, I tell the story of how the Development and Resources

Corporation’s arrival in Khuzestan drastically altered socio-environmental dynamics in the

region, how the state enhanced its power and presence in villages, and how villagers responded

ambiguously to these changes. The attractions of modern technologies and comfort commodities

often came at the price of personal and communal autonomy. I argue that the DRC and the state

altered traditional modes of incorporating nature into rural social structures. These organizations

partially alienated Iranians from their natural environment by conceptualizing it as a resource to

be completely controlled for profit and national benefit, rather than accommodated for local

needs and demands.

This environmental study of a peripheral province departs from typical histories of

Iranian modernization in several ways. Geographically, historians of Iran have often examined

modernization on a national scale or within major cities, usually Tehran. This paper’s study of

the upper Khuzestan plains allows for a more granular examination of modernization processes

in local communities, outside an urban setting, and away from the national political centers.

Even within Khuzestan, the APOC/NIOC oil towns have received deserved attention for their

roles in the economic and labor histories of Iran, but the predominantly agricultural areas of

2

northern Khuzestan have remained largely outside the focus of modern scholarship.1

Methodologically, historians have engaged economic, religious, political, intellectual, and

feminist frameworks to illuminate a many of the aspects of Iran’s modernization period, but only

a handful have recently begun to use an environmental framework.

Environmental history incorporates actors often not regarded as especially significant

within other frameworks, such as landscapes (e.g. mountains), bodies of water, disease, or

animals. Traditional histories often view these kinds of actors within two extremes. The first

completely disregards their agency, viewing non-human elements as tools or backdrops to a

historical drama completely determined by humanity. The second, and far less common, extreme

sees human history as molded by nature. Here, the conditions societies find themselves in largely

predetermine the course of events.2 Environmental history as conceived by historians like J.R.

McNeill, William Cronon, and Alan Mikhail, understands both human society and the natural

environment as historical actors intertwined with, and inseparable from, each other. They act on

each other and each affects the other’s historical trajectory, as Cronon formulated,

Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given

moment, but then culture reshapes environment in responding to those choices. The

reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus

setting up a new cycle of mutual determination.3

Neither society nor environment are static. Instead both constantly evolve, both because of, and

independently, from each other. Thus, environmental history looks at particular historical periods

and places to see exactly how these socio-environmental dynamics occur.

1 One exception to this which was extremely helpful for writing this thesis was Cyrus Salmanzadeh’s Agricultural

Change and Rural Society in Southern Iran (Whitstable: Whitstable Litho Ltd., 1980). 2 The most famous example of nature-dominated history is Karl A. Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism: A Comparative

Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 3 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and

Wang, 2003), 13.

3

Some earlier works on Iranian history that partially integrate this framework of

environmental history are Richard Bulliet’s The Camel and the Wheel (1975) and Peter

Christensen’s The Decline of Iranshahr (1993).4 Bulliet conceived of his work as “technological

history,” but his narrative of the evolving relationship between man and animal certainly

qualifies it as environmental history. Christensen’s history of irrigation networks frames the

environment as relatively static, and attributes the decentralization of polities on the Iranian

plateau after the 6th and 7th centuries CE to the destruction of irrigation networks by war and

chaos. While Decline of Iranshahr is a useful read for historians of Persianate agriculture,

readers should keep in mind that landscapes change over time, both because of, and

independently from, humanity’s wars and changing land use patterns.

Outside of these works, almost no Iranian histories used an environmental historical

framework until the late 2000s.5 Histories written around the turn of the millennium about

Iranian civil society groups devoted to environmental issues were political histories with no

space for the environment’s agency.6 Arash Khazeni’s Tribes & Empire (2009) signaled a

growing awareness of the usefulness of environmental history, examining the intertwined

histories of the Zagros mountains and the tribes within them during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th

centuries CE.7 A 2016 special issue of Iranian Studies dedicated to the environment included

two historical articles. Alan Mikhail, in his contribution “Climate and the Chronology of Iranian

4 As noted by Abbas Amanat, “Environment and Culture: An Introduction,” Iranian Studies 49, no. 6 (2016), 936. 5 A great many modern works of Iranian natural history have been written since the 19th century, and Arabo-Persian

geographies like Ibn Khordadbeh’s Kitab al-masalik va al-mamalik were written for nearly a millennium. 6 See Kaveh Afrasiabi, “The Environmental Movement in Iran: Perspectives from Below and Above,” Middle East

Journal 57, no. 3 (2003): 432-448.; Simin Fadaee, Social Movements in Iran: Environmentalism and Civil Society

(London: Routledge, 2012). 7 Khazeni published his book around the same time renowned historian of global environmental history, J.R.

McNeill wrote in 2010, “To date, historians of the Middle East remain the least attracted by environmental history,”

in “The State of the Field of Environmental History,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35 (2010): 366.

4

History,” asserted the relevance of climate in Iranian political and economic history as a general

call for more attention to the environment by Iranian historians. This argument for the relevance

of climatic change echoed that of Richard Bulliet’s 2011 Cotton, Climate and Camels about the

effects of cooling temperatures in 10th and 11th century CE Iran. The other historical contribution

to the special issue was Saghar Sadeghian’s history of Caspian forestry in the Qajar and Pahlavi

periods, demonstrating the commodification of trees as lumber and, later, the growing awareness

of the importance of preserving forests purely for their ecological value. While environmental

histories of Iran remain few in number, the framework’s use is slowly growing.

This paper uses an environmental historical framework in an attempt to examine how

modernization projects affected the lives of common Iranians and their relationships with their

environment, while at the same time de-centering the role of the state. However, the state

remains prominent in this story, because of the nature of the subject and the sources used. The

program which affected the lives of thousands of residents of the upper Khuzestan plains was a

state-sponsored project imposed from above. Khuzestanis welcomed some of these

developments such as expanded health services and flood control, but had essentially no input

regarding the planning or execution of the projects. This narrative risks mistakenly portraying

Iranian villagers as lacking agency and passively receiving state initiatives. I have attempted to

show instances in which Iranians asserted their agency in the face of state dominance, but

sometimes this ground-level agency does not emerge in the fullness it deserves. Nearly all of the

primary sources are documents from the DRC or state institutions like the Khuzestan Water &

Power Authority or the Ministry of Education, and so they facilitate a predominantly top-down

view of events. Grace Goodell spent over eighteen months living first in a farmer-owned village

5

and then a state-operated shahrak in the project area during the early 1970s and her

anthropological study helped provide a community-level view of events.

This thesis outlines histories of irrigation, flooding, and disease in the upper Khuzestan

plains to demonstrate specific mediums of modernization in rural Iran and show how the process

affected these communities. In the first chapter, I outline how Khuzestan’s social history is in

part a history of irrigation and how irrigation practices strengthened village social bonds before

they were challenged by a new system developed outside the province. Landlords and senior

farmers once claimed the prerogative of decision-making in the irrigation process, but new canal

systems transferred much of this power to state engineers and bureaucrats. This power shift was

related to the disruption of indigenous modes of knowledge, as older irrigation experts gave way

to a younger generation trained in hard sciences. Communal projects to build new irrigation

works and maintain older systems became less necessary (but by no means disappeared), and

their reduced status weakened village social bonds. The commodification of water in the new

irrigation system helped shift rural Iranians into the capitalist monetary economy, increasing

their dependence on cash income at the expense of their former local autonomy.

The second chapter focuses on the role of flooding in Khuzestani history. Floods were a

constant and uncontrollable phenomenon throughout the province’s history, with settlement

patterns affected by flood patterns and social bonds created and strengthened by post-flood repair

projects. Iran’s first modern dam, in northern Khuzestan, altered how labor was organized and

conceptualized, while at the same time it mirrored the state’s increasing presence and power in

the villages by exercising unprecedented control over the Dez River and flooding. This increased

6

power over nature was intimately tied to the state’s increased capacity to enumerate the flow of

water into the dam’s reservoir and out of its release gates.

The last chapter continues to demonstrate the loss of local autonomy seen in earlier

chapters, but through changes in public health. Villagers of the upper Khuzestan plains in the

19th and early 20th centuries lacked access to most “professional” Iranian and foreign medical

services available in cities. While medical services continued to improve in much of the country,

no public health program existed in the plains until 1958. The program was initiated because the

state had determined the area’s residents could now contribute to the national economy and it

needed healthy laborers. Since the motivating logic of the public health program was to produce

and maintain an efficient labor pool, and elite disdain for the lower classes precluded

incorporating their needs and desires into planning, health projects often violated villagers’

personal autonomy or failed to actually foster healthier populations. Disease transformed from a

natural and expected part of villagers’ lives that was dealt with on a local level to yet another

medium for the state to increase its control over villagers. Mass compulsory chemotherapy

treatments and village health agents were the primary means of increasing state presence and

control. Despite this intrusion, villagers welcomed some health services and pushed back again

policies they found disagreeable.

Examining the processes of modernization through irrigation, flooding, and public health

allows for a more detailed view of the changes happening in mid-20th century Iranian rural

society. Many histories focus on land tenure and, while that is a critical story, more new Iranian

realities were emerging beyond such institutions. This period of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was

the beginning in a major shift in how Iranians engaged with their natural environment. An

7

expanding population and determination to economically develop the country have placed

greater and greater strains on Iran’s ecological dynamics since that period, pushing socio-

environmental relationships past the limits of sustainability. As Iran’s rain falls less often, rivers

dry up, and dust storms increasingly push residents to demonstrate in the streets, gaining a

historical understanding of these issues becomes ever more critical.

8

Chapter 1: Irrigation and New Experts

For much of the past 150 years, Tehran and European-based narratives about Khuzestan

have emphasized ideas of wasted potential in a land of ancient prosperity and glory. Lord Curzon

described Shushtar as one of “the most decayed and melancholy among considerable centres of

human habitation that [he had] ever seen” and described the cultivated areas around it as having

“lapsed into shocking neglect” compared to the affluence of the Sasanian period.8 A report on

Khuzestan’s development relayed Mohammad Reza Shah’s proclamation a half-century later

that, “the re-discovery of water may prove a more meaningful factor in the future growth of

Iran’s mainland than the voyaging of outer space,”9 and David Lilienthal testified to the Senate

Foreign Relations Committee, “This is the land of Cyrus, Darius, and Shapur the Great. Here

many centuries ago, irrigated agriculture . . . flourished, but with wars, natural catastrophes,

neglect and time, much of the area reverted once more to desert.”10 When these men travelled to

Khuzestan, they saw a people and environment needing expert guidance to reach their full

potential. Mohammad Reza Shah envisioned himself both as the inheritor of Achaemenid glory

and a strong 20th century leader bringing the masses of Iran to modernity. Accordingly, the

perceived ruin of the Sasanian canals, dams, and levees of Khuzestan gave the shah an

opportunity to both attach his name to a glorified pre-Islamic monarchical tradition and

demonstrate the wisdom, benevolence, and power of the central state. These state-centered

8 George Curzon, “The Karun River and the Commercial Geography of South-West Persia,” Proceedings of the

Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 12, no. 9 (September 1890): 522. 9 Khuzestan Development Service, “Fourteenth Quarterly Report to Plan Organization, Imperial Government of

Iran, Covering the Period of December 22, 1960 to March 21, 1961,” 1961, DRC Records (560:1), 1. 10 David Lilienthal was the chairman of the board of directors of the Development and Resources Corporation. The

DRC signed a contract with the Plan Organization in 1956 for a comprehensive development project in Khuzestan.

Activities of the Development and Resources Corporation in Iran: Hearing before the Committee on Foreign

Relations, 87th Cong. (1962), 6.

9

historical narratives may have exaggerated the “ruin” of Khuzestan, especially after elites

embraced ideas of development and modernization theory in the mid-20th century.11

Experts brought in to study Khuzestan’s economic viability determined soil salinization

to be both a pre-modern and modern danger. The collapse of the Sasanian irrigation system in

the wake of the Arab (7th century CE) and Seljuq (11th century CE) invasions, according to the

dominant narrative, led to the salinization of the soil and ruin of the province’s agriculture.12

However, Khuzestan’s heavily saline soils predate irrigation systems by thousands of years.13

Rather than struggle against the saline soils in the southern part of the region, Khuzestani farmers

have concentrated in the upper Khuzestan plains where they could farm more easily,14 and the

Sasanians concentrated their own irrigation works in that region.15 The foothills are far enough

from the coast and elevated enough so that salinization from raised water tables is less of a

danger, and sloped enough to permit easier construction of drainage canals to mitigate

salinization from field inundation. 19th and 20th century narratives of ruin often based their

claims on periods of violence, loss of revenue to whichever state authority claimed Khuzestan,

11 In her excellent book, Diana K. Davis outlines similar notions French colonizers in the Maghreb had toward pre-

colonial land use patterns. They believed the region had been much more prosperous two millennia ago and blamed

modern “ruin” on lazy natives and poor Ottoman administration. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental

History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 12 Peter Christensen’s book is the most recent and well-known example of the irrigational collapse narrative. Peter

Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environment in the Middle East, 500 BC-AD 1500 (London:

I.B. Taurus, 2016), 114. 13 Vanessa M.A. Heyvaert and Cecile Baeteman, “Holocene sedimentary evolution and palaeocoastlines of the

Lower Khuzestan plain (southwest Iran),” Marine Geology 242 (2007): 104. 14 Khuzestan may be generally divided into two or three regions: the lower Khuzestan plains and upper Khuzestan

plains form its core and the Zagros mountains lie to the north and east of the upper plains. The boundary between

the lower and upper plains generally runs along a northwest-southeast diagonal line that passes near Ahvaz. Abbas

Alizadeh et al., “Human-Environment Interactions on the Upper Khuzestan Plains, Southwest Iran. Recent

Investigations,” Paléorient 30, no. 30 (2004): 70. 15 Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr, 108.

10

and the relative silence of sources about the region after the 11th century.16 These narratives were

largely concerned with “outbreaks of tribal violence and the government’s efforts to control

them” rather than acknowledging a historically rooted system of agriculture.17 These kinds of

events occupied central spaces in historical narratives because the gaze of the Iranian state on its

peripheries largely concerned itself with security and tax collection, while at the same time it

lacked a strong interest in or capability to support agricultural infrastructure in rural areas.

Neither nature nor society are static, and neither of them exist in isolation from the other.

Those are the fundamental tenets of environmental history but most of the modern histories of

Khuzestan present a static environment, a wasteland that could only be transformed and made

prosperous by a strong state. Socio-environmental dynamics occupy a blind spot in histories

centered on socio-political systems of land tenure.18 This chapter centers the shifting relationship

between Khuzestanis and their environment by examining changes to irrigation in the decades

just before the 1979 revolution. The state and rural socio-political structures have played a role in

this history but they are not the totality of it.19

16 For an extensive survey of early Islamic geographical writings about Khuzestan, see: Peter Verkinderen,

Waterways of Iraq and Iran in the Early Islamic Period: Changing Rivers and Landscapes of the Mesopotamian

Plain (London: I.B. Taurus, 2015).; According to Pyne, “there was almost a cessation of geographical works dealing

with the ‘Eastern Caliphate’” until the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. Nanette Marie Pyne, “The Impact of the

Seljuq Invasion on Khuzestan: An Inquiry into the Historical, Geographical, Numismatic, and Archaeological

Evidence,” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1982), 163. 17 Arash Khazeni, Tribes & Empire: On the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 2009), 17. 18 Iranian land tenure and 20th century land reform enjoy a deep literature. Three important examples are: Ann K.S.

Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia: A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration (London:

Oxford University Press, 1953).; Eric Hooglund, Land and Revolution in Iran, 1960-1980 (Austin: University of

Texas Press, 1982).; Afsaneh Najmabadi, Land Reform and Social Change in Iran (Salt Lake City: University of

Utah Press, 1987). 19 Cyrus Schayegh noted the strong trend of state-centered narratives in modern Iranian historiography and called

for de-centering the state without necessarily eliminating it altogether. Cyrus Schayegh, “‘Seeing Like A State’: An

Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42 (2010), 38.

11

In the mid-20th century, many Khuzestani farmers were engaging in communal irrigation

maintenance just as their ancestors had for several centuries, but they were not frozen in time.

Iranian farmers who could afford it began buying modern water pumps and tractors before the

Pahlavi state’s 1962 Land Reform Act. Khuzestani landlords and peasants were in the midst of

slowly modernizing agriculture in ways that made sense to them when the Pahlavi state imposed

its own vision of modernity on the province. Despite some historical distance, the changes in

Khuzestan resembled those experienced by Ottoman Egyptian peasants in Alan Mikhail’s Nature

and Empire, and some of the facets of change he outlines can help us understand the experiences

of Khuzestani peasants.20

One of Mikhail’s arguments centers on who had the authority to make decisions

regarding irrigation. Traditionally, the Ottoman state accepted and encouraged local authority.21

The Ottoman state devolved authority for such matters onto peasants in order to facilitate

efficient irrigation. Similarly, Iranian central governments did not historically dictate Khuzestani

irrigation practices at all because they were unable to project sustained power into the region.

While this enabled landlords and peasants a greater amount of autonomy, it also precluded

access to greater funding and materials for irrigation management and exposed Khuzestani

peasants to the whims of landlords who faced little pressure from any superiors to engage in

responsible management. This peripheral independence began to slowly erode after Reza Shah

took power in 1921 and unraveled more quickly as Mohammad Reza Shah asserted himself in

the 1950s. Just as Mohammad Ali’s state-building initiatives in early 19th century Egypt stripped

autonomy from peasants and radically transformed the nature of irrigation works with grand

20 Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 21 Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 39.

12

projects in the name of the nation, so too did the Pahlavi state attempt these things in mid-20th

century Khuzestan.

Autonomy has two aspects that are relevant to this discussion. The first lies in the

political and material autonomy discussed above. The second aspect of autonomy is knowledge.

Just as Mohammad Ali began to replace locals with intimate knowledge of their own irrigation

systems with students educated in Egypt’s emerging technical schools, the Pahlavi state

attempted to displace the knowledge authority of Khuzestani landlords and farmers with

corporate and state representatives from outside the province. Pahlavi bureaucrats saw peasants’

traditional irrigational knowledge as static, uncreative, inefficient, and ultimately incompatible

with a modern economy. The peasants who stayed in the villages to farm rather than migrating to

the cities needed to be educated in order to become fully contributing citizens, and so the DRC

and Khuzestan Water and Power Authority (KWPA) established training programs around the

province to teach peasants how to use the new irrigation technology. Historians have long noted

the use of education in nationalist projects,22 and the role of rural technical education in the

Pahlavi period also deserves attention.

Mikhail usefully outlines the structure of “water usage created communities” in Ottoman

Egypt, and the same communities can be clearly seen in Khuzestan.23 Khuzestani farmers met

every year to coordinate irrigation allotments and schedules, and irrigation maintenance projects

were communal affairs in which every cultivator was expected to contribute. As Mohammad Ali

initiated top-down measures for irrigation projects, Ottoman Egyptians became alienated from

22 For example: Mikiya Koyagi, “Modern Education in Iran during the Qajar and Pahlavi Periods,” History

Compass 7, no. 1 (2009): 107-118.; Afshin Marashi, Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, & the State (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 2008), 86-109. 23 Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 38.

13

their work and the communities of water were weakened. Likewise, the “vertically integrated”

Dez Irrigation Project was not sensitive to existing socio-riverine dynamics and the centrally

planned development scheme alienated Khuzestani farmers from their communities.

The changes in Khuzestan also reflect the capitalist evolution outlined in Donald

Worster’s Rivers of Empire.24 In this iteration of modernity, Khuzestan’s water became

commodified, carefully measured through new sluice gates, controlled year-round by the

Khuzestan Water and Power Authority through the Dez Dam rather than seasonal rain cycles,

and villagers received individualized bills to pay for it. In the past, peasants had contributed

communally to the landlord’s crop share and his responsibility for providing water was rooted in

that interaction. Peasants had to sell more of their crops for cash to pay utility bills rather than

living on a subsistence basis. After the Dez Dam began operation in 1963, peasants were left on

their own to procure water from a bureaucracy’s local agents, who had their own ideas about

how much water was “enough.”

To summarize, the Pahlavi court and bureaucrats of the Plan Organization believed the

potential bounties of Khuzestan were slipping through their fingers and into the Persian Gulf

because of outdated technology and ignorant peasants. The Pahlavi state would follow in the

steps of its Sasanian forefathers by irrigating the land of Khuzestan and making it prosperous.

The macro-view of the state ignored the reality on the ground in Khuzestan, where communities

bound together by water engaged in largely sustainable agriculture that fed their families. The

locations of Khuzestani communities were not happenstance but rather strongly influenced by

the evolution of Khuzestan’s hydrological and alluvial histories. The Dez Irrigation Project and

24 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1985), 48-60.

14

land reform together combined to weaken communal socio-environmental ties once strengthened

by irrigation.

“DESOLATION:” KHUZESTAN AND ITS RIVERS SINCE THE ABBASIDS

The catastrophes Khuzestan experienced during the Zanj rebellion (869-883),

exploitation by the dominant Baridi family (c. 927-941), exploitation by unpaid Buyid troops,

factional Buyid fighting, Buyid-Seljuq fighting (c. 1051-1054), and factional Seljuq fighting

after Malik Shah’s death in 1092 all led to various periods and degrees of social disruption and

starvation, but the picture is not actually of complete desolation. The continuous fighting among

elites over control of Ahvaz often resulted from the considerable Khuzestani tax revenues and

alludes to continued productivity. Widespread famine was uncommon in the reports of

contemporary authors.25 Various governors of Khuzestan repaired canals, bridges and dams, and

villagers were still cultivating rice, grains, sugar, dates, cotton, flax, and mulberry trees by the

11th century.26 Local elites financing, constructing, and repairing local dams and canals is a

pattern that emerges from this time forward.

The extent and legacy of damage from the Mongol and Timurid invasions on Khuzestan

are unclear, and at least one writer believes the damage was temporary.27 The truth of that matter

deserves further research. The clearest trend about Khuzestan from the 11th until the 20th century

is the local nature of rule, and thus any financing of irrigation or other agricultural works would

necessarily have had less capital to utilize than a shah or sultan might provide. By the early 16th

century, the Mosha’sha’iyan controlled western Khuzestan from their city of Hoveyze on the

25 Pyne, “The Impact of the Seljuq Invasion on Khuzestan,” 141. 26 Pyne, “The Impact of the Seljuq Invasion on Khuzestan,” 186-192. 27 Svat Soucek, “Arabistan or Khuzistan,” Iranian Studies 17, no. 2/3 (1984): 201.

15

Karkheh River. Dezful (on the Dez River) and Shushtar (on the Karun River) were each held by

local rulers, and the Kuh-e Giluya tribe controlled eastern Khuzestan. The Lur tribes and the

dramatic mountain terrain within their territory to the northeast of the region contributed to the

isolation of Khuzestan from the reach of Tehran or Esfahan.28 The Mosha’sha’ leaders were first

valis and then khans recognized by the shahs, and intermarried with the Safavid elite, but Tehran

never gained more than nominal control over the area.29 Punitive campaigns to collect taxes were

brief and the shahs largely left the sheikhs and khans to their own devices.

As we draw closer to the present, the sources become clearer regarding how the water of

Khuzestan directly played into local and regional history. During the early 19th century,

internecine Mosha’sha’ fighting and political instability on the Iranian plateau were already

weakening Hoveyze’s power when the Karkheh River burst a dam several miles upstream and

avulsed into a new channel in 1835 or 1837, leaving Hoveyze without a source of water. Almost

overnight, most of the population abandoned the town and “constructed temporary huts near the

new channel of the river.”30 Mohammareh, at the intersection of the Karun River and the Shatt

al-Arab, began to grow substantially soon after the Karkheh channel shifted and the avulsion

may have contributed to the increased trade it gained.31

The rulers of early modern Khuzestan (the Musha’sha’iyan, the Ka’b, local rulers of

Dezful and Shushtar) continued to finance irrigation projects just as the local elites in the 10th

28 Khazeni, Tribes & Empire, 39-41. The Bakhtiari tribe, specifically, would come to control much of eastern

Khuzestan by the 19th century. 29 Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s.v. “Mushaʿshaʿ,” by P. Luft, accessed November 2, 2017. 30 Vanessa M.A. Heyvaert and Jan Walstra, “The role of long-term human impact on avulsion and fan

development,” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 41 (2016): 2148.; Austen Henry Layard, “A Description of

the Province of Khuzistan,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 16 (1846): 35.; Verkinderen, Waterways of

Iraq and Iran, 242. 31 Mohammareh was renamed Khorramshahr in the Reza Shah period. Mohammad Reza Shah began referring to the

Shatt al-Arab as the Arvandrud later in his reign and the river is still known by the latter name in contemporary Iran.

Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “Arvand-Rūd,” by M. Kasheff, accessed November 29, 2017.

16

and 11th centuries had. Sheikh Salman (r. 1737-1768) of the Ka’b, for example, built a dam on

the Karun to force water into the Qubban canal to aid irrigation for his tribe.32 Unfortunately for

the local inhabitants, Karim Khan Zand’s army destroyed the dam in 1763 and the formerly

fertile region of dates, rice, wheat, and pasture turned to a “salt-encrusted desert.”33

Khuzestan’s irrigation networks also protected its inhabitants. Although Karim Khan

destroyed Sheikh Salman’s dam, the numerous rivers and canals immobilized his army. After

two or three months elapsed without successfully suppressing the Ka’b, plague broke out among

his forces and he was forced to leave his artillery behind for the Ka’b as he retreated.34 In March

1840, Mu’tamid al-Dawla marched with troops from Isfahan to break the power of the Ka’b and

Bakhtiari. Sheikh Thamer, leader of the Ka’b and ally of the Bakhtiari leader Mohammad Taqi

Khan, sent out a message to the other sheikhs to abandon their settlements and flee to Fellahiye

(modern-day Shadegan).

The men and women began to pull down the huts, and to bind together the reeds of which

they were constructed in order to make rafts on which to float down with the families . . .

to Fellahiyah. Domestic utensils, such as caldrons, cooking-pots, and iron plates for

baking bread, with quilts, carpets, socks of corn and rice, and the poultry . . . were piled

upon them . . . The country between Kareiba and Fellahiyah had been placed under water

by destroying the dykes and embankments of the river and canals, so that it was

impassable by horsemen.35

Frustrated by the newly impassable geography and a failed assault on Fellahiye, Mu’tamid al-

Dawla was forced by Sheikh Thamer and Mohammad Taqi Khan to return to Dezful.

While the rivers of lower Khuzestan and the Zagros Mountains to their northeast may

have protected the autonomy of the Khuzestanis, the Karun River also became a key ingredient

32 Willem Floor, “The Rise and Fall of the Banu Ka’b,” Iran 44 (2006): 288. 33 Verkinderen, Waterways of Iraq and Iran, 162. 34 Layard, “A Description of the Province of Khuzistan,” 43. 35 Austen Henry Layard, Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1894),

240.

17

in the consolidation of British and central Iranian control of the region. In March 1842

Lieutenant W.B. Selby became the first European to navigate a steam boat past Ahvaz. A band

across the river had previously prevented curious Englishmen from further exploration,36 but

afterwards they began steaming to Dezful and Shushtar. Naser al-Din Shah further eased British

penetration by opening the Karun to international trade in 1888.37 In fact, certain Qajar events

anticipated the 20th century Pahlavi agreement with Development and Resources Corporation.

Tehran briefly considered allowing the French to construct a modern dam and initiate irrigation

projects around Ahvaz in 1876 and 1878.38 The Iranian government also sent Dutch engineer

Diederik Lucas Graadt van Roggen to inspect Khuzestan’s ancient irrigation works in 1900 “in

order to restore the impoverished province to its former state of prosperity.”39 While those plans

never bore any fruit, the Tigris and Euphrates Steam Navigation Company signed a deal to

construct a road from Ahvaz to Isfahan with three Bakhtiari chiefs in May 1898. Iran’s first

modern steel bridges were built in Khuzestan as a result of this foreign investment.40 The latter

half of the 19th century was a preview for the transformation of socio-riverine relationship in the

next century. The first oil discovery of the Middle East in 1908 in Khuzestan ensured regional

autonomy would end as international economic interests deepened.

36 A band is a dam, and they exist in a variety of forms. The one at Ahvaz was long, low, and stone. W.B. Selby,

“Account of the Ascent of the Karun and Dizful Rivers and the Ab-i-Gargar Canal, the Shushter,” The Journal of the

Royal Geographical Society of London 14 (1844): 227. 37 Khazeni, Tribes & Empire, 76. 38 George Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), 333. 39 Verkinderen, Waterways of Iraq and Iran, 113. 40 Khazeni, Tribes & Empire, 104.

18

The Bakhtiari Agreement signed in 1905 gave the D’Arcy Oil Syndicate “permission to

survey, drill, build roads, and lay pipelines in the winter quarters” of the Bakhtiari.41 The Anglo-

Persian Oil Company (APOC) formed the year after oil was discovered and purchased the rights

of the D’Arcy concession,42 becoming “the largest industrial enterprise in Iran, exploiting a

major national resource, an employer on a massive scale” within decades.43 Nearly seventy years

later, the Pahlavi government would peasants in Khuzestan from their land and forcibly moved

them to newly constructed shahraks to placate international agribusiness interests, APOC and the

Bakhtiari khans signed the Land Purchase of 1911 that irrevocably alienated tribal pastoralists

from their traditional winter grazing grounds near Masjed Soleyman.44 According to Kaveh

Ehsani, the oil company towns that soon arose were not only set apart from the rest of Iran’s

cities by “their glaring modernity” and design rationale, but also distinct from the other cities of

Khuzestan which followed “the local physical topography, primarily as the means of water

allocation by gravity.”45 Despite the changes APOC introduced around its oil fields and company

towns, its regional goals were limited and it did not significantly alter Khuzestan’s general

agricultural structure.

Reza Khan transformed the government of Iran into a strong, centralized state but he was

less concerned with Khuzestan’s agriculture and more keen to pacify the Lur tribes on its

41 Khazeni, Tribes & Empire, 122-123. Tehran’s ineffectual protest of this deal signed directly between the khans

and a British company demonstrates the Iranian central government’s continued inability to project control over

Khuzestan. In particular, the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) weakened the central government in this period. 42 Khazeni, Tribes & Empire, 151. The APOC was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1935 and

then renamed British Petroleum Company (BP) in 1954. 43 Stephanie Cronin, “The Politics of Debt: The Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Bakhtiyari Khans,” Middle

Eastern Studies 40, no. 4 (2004): 1. 44 Khazeni, Tribes & Empire, 157. 45 Kaveh Ehsani, “Social Engineering and the Contradictions of Modernization in Khuzestan’s Company Towns: A

Look at Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman,” International Review of Social History 48, no. 3 (2003): 385-389.

19

northern and eastern edges.46 The Iranian government’s first three Development Plans after

World War II generally ignored agriculture in favor of industry and infrastructure.47 In the First

Development Plan, nearly half of the Plan Organization’s budget in its first year was earmarked

for irrigation and agricultural projects, but officials actually released very little of the money for

those purposes.48 Iran requested the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

(FAO) to investigate development possibilities in Khuzestan and a mission arrived in 1952. The

FAO team outlined a regional development strategy but the Iranian government did not

immediately act upon its recommendations.49

In fact, the first modern large-scale irrigation works and tentative farm mechanization

projects in Khuzestan were private Iranian endeavors. In 1947, Mahmood Naseri and Morteza

Khonsari leased 10,000 hectares of land near Shush, refurbished the irrigation system, brought

the first tractor and combine harvester to the Khuzestan, and were able to enjoy significant

returns on their investment. In 1948, nine Ahvazi bazaar merchants pooled 200,000,000 rials of

capital to form the Compagnie Agricole du Sud (Southern Agricultural Company). The company

purchased a large tract of land north of Ahvaz in Upper Khuzestan, built a dam for 70,000,000

rials on the Ojirub River, and connected it to an irrigation system with a 14 kilometer primary

canal. The SAC sub-let the irrigated land to local and Isfahani peasants for a fixed rent and some

tenants tilled their lands mechanically. Ten years later, both of these private projects were forced

46 Sekandar Amanolahi, “Reza Shah and the Lurs: The Impact of the Modern State on Luristan,” Iran & the

Caucasus 6, no. ½ (2002): 209. 47 Farhad Daftary, “Development Planning in Iran: A Historical Survey,” Iranian Studies 6, no. 4 (1973): 176-177.;

For a brief summary of land reform efforts between 1906 and 1960, see Cyrus Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change

and Rural Society in Southern Iran (Whitstable: Whitstable Litho Ltd., 1980), 62-63. 48 Gideon Hadary, “The Agrarian Reform Problem in Iran,” Middle East Journal 5, no. 2 (1951): 193-194. 49 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 21.

20

to sell parts of their properties to the state in preparation for the regional development project of

the Development and Resources Corporation.50

The Development and Resources Corporation

David Lilienthal and Gordon Clapp had held successive chairmanships of the Tennessee

Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1940s and afterward formed the Development and Resources

Corporation (DRC) consulting firm with the intention of guiding development projects around

the world. The TVA is a comprehensive regional development project intended to harness the

power of the Tennessee River, generate power, and provide jobs in a historically economically

depressed region. According to Nils Gilman, “the TVA became a prototype for how the state

could act as a rational, benevolent enforcer of the national interest.”51 Mohammad Reza Shah

allegedly learned of the TVA during a winter visit to the United States in 1954-55 and became

intrigued by the idea of a similar project in Khuzestan.52 In early 1955, Eugene Black of the

World Bank contacted David Lilienthal about coming to Iran and a contract was signed between

the DRC and Plan Organization (PO) of Iran on March 14th 1956.53

The DRC initially assumed responsibility for designing and executing the development

program but never intended to maintain long-term management. It founded the Khuzestan

Development Service soon after entering Iran and used that organization as institutional

preparation for a domestic Iranian equivalent, the Khuzestan Water and Power Authority

50 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 191-192. 51 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2003), 38. 52 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 23. 53 David Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. III: Venturesome Years 1950-1955 (New York: Harper

& Row, 1966), 4.; David Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. IV: The Road to Change 1955-1959

(New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 83.

21

(KWPA). The KWPA eventually assumed the executive responsibilities of the KDS. These

included the widespread promotion of fertilizer; managing the Haft Tapeh sugar cane project;

managing the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam (now known as the Dez Dam); the creation

and maintenance of a regional electrical grid; managing the Dez Irrigation Project (DIP);

sponsoring village education and health programs; extending credit to farmers; operating a field

trial farm, research station, and training center; extending on-site technical assistance to farmers

and landlords via the Village Production Service; and road construction.54

The DRC intended the Dez Irrigation Project to comprise around 125,000 hectares of

cropland under controlled irrigation from the Dez Dam. In 1957, Iran was not financially capable

of funding such a project on its own, so PO and DRC officials negotiated with the World Bank

for a loan. The World Bank preferred smaller scale projects and the PO presented a plan for a

20,000 hectare Dez Pilot Irrigation Project on the east bank of the Dez River to test the feasibility

of the larger project, which the World Bank agreed to finance in May 1960. The larger project

was approved in later stages. Stage I (agreed to in 1969) added 54,000 hectares to the project and

Stage II added another 29,000 hectares by 1975, bring the total to approximately 103,000 net

hectares of controlled irrigation.55

THE DRC & CHANGES IN KHUZESTANI IRRIGATION

By the late 1950s, no one had yet created a registry of agricultural holdings in

Khuzestan,56 and establishing a clear picture of agricultural activity on the eve of the Dez

Irrigation Project (DIP) and the land reform program is difficult. Most scholarship has focused

54 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 29-42. 55 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 38-39. 56 Grace Goodell, The Elementary Structure of Political Life: Rural Development in Pahlavi Iran (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1986), 21.; Hadary, “The Agrarian Reform Problem in Iran,” 184.

22

on the socio-political structures of rural Iran rather than how farmers engaged directly with their

land.57 In fact, most of the English-language geographic and agricultural studies on mid-20th

century Khuzestan were directly or indirectly tied to DRC’s activities in the region.58 Reports

from American agencies consistently generalized traditional irrigation as poor, but their

standards for ideal irrigation were rooted in the modernization theory zeitgeist of America at the

height of the Cold War and the capitalist ideals of production and profit.59 Their ideas of what

irrigation in arid landscapes should look like were strongly informed by the dramatic landscape

transformation of the American West.60 Even the Shah suggested that Khuzestan “could be made

into an even greater Imperial Valley.”61 The foreign experts also described “poor seeds and

livestock strains, improper timing of plantings, insufficient cover crop plantings, lack of

fertilizer, and, above all, water shortage,” 62 but what did Khuzestani irrigation look like in the

mid-20th century, how did it shape society, and how did that dynamic change?

57 For example: Nikki R. Keddie, Historical Obstacles to Agrarian Change in Iran (Claremont: W.Q. Judge Press,

1960). 58 For example: Jacobus S. Veenenbos, Unified Report of the Soil and Land Classification of Dizful Project,

Khuzistan, Iran (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1958).; Robert McC. Adams,

“Agriculture and Urban Life in Early Southwestern Iran,” Science 136, no. 3511 (1962): 109-122.; Theodore

Oberlander, The Zagros Streams: A New Interpretation of Transverse Drainage in an Orogenic Zone (Syracuse:

Syracuse University Press, 1965).; Adams’ connection noted in Abbas Moghaddam and Negin Miri,

“Archaeological Research in the Mianab Plain of Lowland Susiana, South-Western Iran,” Iran 41 (2003): 100.;

Even the DRC’s primary public health officer, F.G.L. Gremliza, carried out extensive archaeological surveys used

by later researchers. Abbas Alizadeh, Prehistoric Settlement Patterns and Cultures in Susiana, Southwestern Iran:

The Analysis of the F.G.L. Gremliza Survey Collection, Technical Report 24 (Ann Arbor: 1992). 59 David Lilienthal was a well-recognized member of the modernization theory “mandarins.” Gilman, Mandarins of

the Future, 226. 60 For a classic study on irrigation and the American West, see Worster, Rivers of Empire. 61 Lilienthal, Journals, Vol. IV, 179.; The Imperial Valley lies in southeastern California and was the site of a

massive, early 20th development project. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 194-206. 62 Economic Report on Agriculture and Natural Resources of Khuzestan, n.d., DRC Records (557:5), 3.; Veenenbos

explicitly stated that the irrigation systems he observed in 1958 were essentially the same farmers had been using for

the past 70-100 years. Veenenbos, Unified Report, 35.

23

Communities of Water

Communities of water develop both spatially and institutionally. Although the upper

Khuzestan plains held the best agricultural land of the region, dry farming was still risky.

Between 1964 and 1968, the area around Safiabad only received enough water to successfully

harvest a dry crop in two of the five years. In the other three years, rainfall timing would not

have allowed planting until February, significantly risking the success of the crop. The

agricultural communities of Upper Khuzestan therefore clustered around water, in the areas most

suitable for irrigation. These areas lay near the major rivers relatively close to the mountains.63

With this spatial logic prioritizing access to water, it follows that social institutions developed

around successful utilization of the river flows.

The DRC sought to overcome the spatial logic of Khuzestan’s communities of water.

Unsatisfied with the approximately 90,000 hectares of traditionally irrigated land around Dezful,

the DRC initially planned to increase the total area of irrigated land to 125,000 hectares.64 The

DRC’s report on the needs of Khuzestan’s traditional agriculture noted that “the organizational

pattern of the agricultural industries of those countries which have made rapid technological

advancements are remarkably similar.”65 The modernization theory embraced by DRC officials

defined “a singular path of progressive change” determined by scientific understanding of the

universal good rather than local, hydrological spatial logics.66

63 Michael J. Kirkby, “Land and Water Resources of the Deh Luran and Khuzistan Plain,” In Studies in the

archaeological history of the Deh Luran plain: the excavation of Chagha Sefid, edited by Frank Hole, 251-288 (Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 269. 64 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 38, 73. 65 Maurice L. Peterson, Status and Needs for Agricultural Development in the Dez Irrigation Project in Iran, 1968,

DRC Records (811:8), 4. 66 Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 3.

24

Writers after World War II noted that the methods and technologies used by the majority

of Iranian farmers had not changed dramatically in recent history.67 Farmers used draft animals

to pull relatively light wooden plows and did their best to prevent water loss with the use of

terracing, qanats, and “the protection of certain trees,” just as their 19th century predecessors

had.68 Groups of peasants gathered throughout the year in communal bildar projects for

“maintaining the irrigation system, constructing bridges, improving animal access to fields,

facilitating tractor routes, or developing new canals and related structures” although the nature of

the project could be nearly anything.69 The communal form of agricultural labor, the boneh,

persisted up until the Pahlavi land reforms.70 Khuzestani landlords and farmers were not a static

group, however much the state might have painted them as such. Some Iranian farmers began to

use mechanized water pumps in the early 20th century and the private investors began limited

mechanization in Khuzestan in the late 1940s.71

Irrigation networks covered the Karkheh, Shush, and Dezful plains and the eastern part of

the Daiji plain. Qanats irrigated a few small areas near Dezful but most of the irrigation system

consisted of open canals diverting water from the Dez and Karkheh Rivers. Jacobus Veenenbos

wrote that “each diversion system has its own take-off higher or lower along the course of the

rivers.”72 His statement does not indicate whether tenure systems or geographical necessity

dictated individual canal departures from the rivers, but his subsequent discussion of irrigational

physics hints that the latter factor was more important.

67 Keddie, Historical Obstacles, 1. 68 Hadary, “The Agrarian Reform Problem in Iran,” 184. 69 Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political Life, 45. 70 Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political Life, 42.; Javad Safinezhad, Boneh: Nezam-ha-ye Zera’i-ye Sonati dar

Iran. (Tehran: Entesherat-e Amir Kabir, 1989), 12-13. 71 There were around 30,000 tractors in Iran by 1973. Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 189-191. 72 Veenenbos, Unified Report, 35.

25

Over approximately the past three and a half millennia, the Karkheh and Dez Rivers have

incised so deep into the plain that agriculturalists must either build weirs to raise the water level

and fill canals, connect their canals to the river further upstream than the intended area of

irrigation, or build qanats.73 Weirs and upstream canals were more common than qanats in the

mid-20th century, perhaps because qanats were more expensive to build and maintain.74 Cyrus

Salmanzadeh described how weirs were created,

The open canals were filled by directing water into them through temporary weirs – brush

and stone dams, called salehs locally, made from interlocking timber comb-shaped

baskets filled with brush and stone. Traditionally, each peasant juft-holder [sic] supplied

one donkey load of brush, leaf-o-lafe, as the dam was rebuilt annually. Water was

subsequently sub-channelled [sic] to appropriate farming areas and fields rather than

spilling freely over large surfaces as it had in ancient practice.75

This type of brush and stone dam contrasts sharply with the Dez Dam and other modern dams

constructed afterward. There could be no hope of controlling nature on the part of Khuzestani

villagers, only harnessing it. The dams were no match for the floods that washed them away each

year, but their value is apparent from the fact that they were rebuilt year after year. If the dams

were not built, the canals could not be filled and agriculture suffered.

Water rights accompanied land ownership in irrigated areas and the landlords were

responsible for financing the maintenance of the irrigation systems. Beyond financing the work,

the landlords’ participation usually lay in delegating project organization. In the Dezful area,

landlords often hired semi-professional foremen (sarbildar) to lead hundreds of laborers (bildar)

73 Veenenbos, Unified Report, 20-25.; Until at least 3,500 years ago, the Khuzestani rivers ran much closer to the

plain surface so canals, weirs, and pumps were not as necessary. Alizadeh, “Human-Environment Interactions on the

Upper Khuzestan Plains,” 72. 74 29 open canals and 7 qanats irrigated land later integrated in the Dez Irrigation Project. Salmanzadeh,

Agricultural Change, 74. 75 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 74.

26

for one to two weeks each year for canal cleaning. The landowners would delegate responsibility

for water management to a representative who received cost estimates for canal maintenance

from the sarbildar. Each represented landlord contributed his or her share of the cost into a bank

account and then the project began. In one project, a team of 300-400 bildar, working in teams of

three to four, dredged approximately 30 cm of sediment from a 12 km long canal just south of

Dezful in under 15 days, working from 6am to noon each day. The laborers earned 50-60 rials

per day while the foremen earned 120-200 rials per day.76

Near Ramhormoz in the village of Yusefabad, the kadkhoda would announce upcoming

canal dredging projects to the village from a rooftop. Every holder of khish or joft was expected

to send one worker and these workers were required to bring their own donkeys, cattle, shovels,

pickaxes, sacks, and food to the work site. The landlords generally only provided tea and sugar

for the workers. Once work began, the laborers worked through the day and night until water

flowed through the canal again. If a peasant failed to participate in the canal work or pay the

official in charge of water distribution (the mirab), they could lose their cultivation right

(nasaq).77

These communal projects of dam building and canal dredging helped create communities

of water. The laborers were recruited from the immediate area and so their villages benefitted

76 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 61, 72-75.; Bil can signify “a shovel, spade . . . a basket for carrying away

rubbish,” and bildar consequently signifies “a digger, delver.” A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, rev. F.

Steinglass (Springfield: Nataraj Books, 2010), s.v. "بیلدار" "بیل". 77 Mostafa Azkia and Kaveh Ehsani, “Janbe-ha-ye Ejtema’i-ye Taqsim-e Ab-e Rudkhane dar Khuzestan, Baksh-e

Dovom,” Ketab-e Tose’eh 3 (1992), 98.; Khish and joft are both measurements of land. Khish means “plough,”

“ploughshare,” or “plough-land.” Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, 431.; A joft (or joft-gav) was the amount of land

a team of cows or oxen could plow. Safinezhad, Boneh, 51.

27

from the projects even if they themselves were not always paid.78 The labor required for the

annual project was, in theory, evenly procured from those who benefitted from it. Only peasants

with cultivation rights (nasaq) were required to contribute labor and materials. Those without

nasaq were called khushneshin and they were not required to participate in an activity that would

not directly benefit them. The projects were also short term, unlike the years-long projects of the

DIP, and so the workers were not away from their homes and communities for extended periods.

The communal maintenance activities that had previously brought farmers together were

still practiced after the DRC’s arrival although the new irrigation systems may have decreased

their necessity. The old canals had not been eliminated when the new system was built, leading

F. Gremliza, DRC’s top field medical practitioner, to suggest that the Health & Sanitation

Department fill in the “former, maze-like, and useless irrigation channels together with all the

many unwanted collections of water along and close to the newly constructed canal system.”79

Gremliza’s characterization demonstrates the disconnect between how the DRC and the

Plan Organization viewed Khuzestan and how the villagers themselves lived it. In 1973, the

village of Rahmat Abad was still irrigating its fields with its traditional canal system when

visiting engineers connected it with a small government canal. This new canal actually decreased

the hectarage of land available to the farmers, blocking both human and water access to lands on

its eastern side that the villagers normally cultivated. After engaging with the state bureaucracy,

the villagers were allowed to alter their original canal system such that they recovered “almost

78 Grace Goodell mentions one landlord who transported labor from town for canal maintenance, but prevalence of

such a practice is unclear. Grace Goodell, “Some Aspects of Village Social Structure and Family Life in Northern

Khuzistan,” Presented at conference on Social Sciences and Problems of Development, Shiraz, Iran (1974): 3. 79 F.G.L. Gremliza, “Selected Ecological Facts on Health in the Dez Pilot Irrigation Area,” 1966, DRC Records

(886:5), 86.

28

90 percent of the community’s irrigation capacity and former lands.”80 Where DRC and state

officials saw an unintelligible maze of canals benevolently replaced by a single, efficient canal,

the villagers’ traditional canal system had grown with the land over time and its logic was local.

Importantly, despite the technological changes, land ownership largely remained in the hands of

peasants and former landlords. The most destructive force attacking communities of water was

not the physical transformation of Upper Khuzestan’s irrigation system itself but rather the

introduction of industrial agri-businesses.

When the agricultural growth rate during the Third Development Plan only reached 2.5%

instead of the 4% target, state officials determined the fault lay with traditional cultivation

organization rather than their own negligence or unrealistic expectations.81 Officials decided that

industrial, international agribusinesses were the solution for strong growth and the Ministry of

Water and Power allotted 68,000 hectares of the Dez Pilot Irrigation Project for their use.82 This

decision turned out to be a massive failure in both economic and human terms. The DIP land

they received was some of the best in Khuzestan, the Agricultural Development Bank of Iran

(ADBI) paid half their start-up costs, their imports were allowed in duty-free, and they were

given permission to operate for ten years without paying taxes. Four agribusinesses were

operating in the DIP by 1974, and by 1976 “they had accumulated losses greater than their initial

capital, without even taking into account their debts to the ADBI and other institutions.”83 The

ADBI was forced to take charge of the operations and the entire affair became a scandal. Similar

80 Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life, 38-39. 81 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 236. 82 Khuzestan Water and Power Authority, “Farm Corporations for the Dez Irrigation Project, Part I,” 1970, DRC

Records (804:3), 8.; Lilienthal had argued for the necessity of larger land plots for higher yields in a private meeting

with the Shah on November 2, 1961. David Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. V: The Harvest

Years 1959-1963 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 267. 83 Najmabadi, Land Reform and Social Change, 152.; Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 239.

29

plans around the country were scrapped and new plans had no chance for implementation as

Iranians overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979.

The Khuzestan Water and Power Authority “invited” landowners (former landlords and

peasant who received property under land reform) to re-sell their property to the government.

When the agribusinesses began operations, residents of the 100 villages located within their

boundaries were relocated to “labor centers,” or shahraks.84 One group of three shahraks

contained the inhabitants of 25 villages, of which 22 were demolished after the residents were

evacuated.85 The isolation engendered in shahrak communities began with the physical

destruction of their residents’ past.

The government-constructed housing of the shahraks were obviously not designed with a

community of water in mind. The logic of the town’s space precluded the possibility of such a

thought. These were glorified workers barracks, merely housing laborers for the agribusinesses

that surrounded most of the towns.86 Donald Worster describes a similar situation,

With these wage employees, the modern domination of water becomes most vividly and

unmistakably translated into hierarchy. Those who rule in that situation are not only those

who hire and pay but also all those who take part in designing and controlling the

hydraulic means of production. Workers serve as instruments of environmental

manipulation; rivers, in turn, become means of control over workers.87

Canals in the peasants’ areas of town were too low to water garden plots without considerable

money and effort, and the inhabitants hardly had the energy to garden after twelve hour shifts on

84 Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life, 161. 85 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural, 243. 86 Ten of the fourteen Khuzestan shahraks were located on agribusiness properties. Salmanzadeh, Agricultural

Change, 233. 87 Worster, Rivers of Empire, 51.; Nils Gilman describes the phenomenon within the modernization zeitgeist that

gave birth to the DRC, “Complementing modernization theory’s elitism of technical expertise was its resolute

antipopulism. Modernization theorists identified progress with the imposition of elite economic, social, and cultural

norms onto the masses,” Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 8.

30

the industrial farm. The shahraks suffered from high unemployment. Unemployed family

members might have helped in the household gardens, but the same summer months gardens

required the most care were the same months when the unemployed could most easily find

temporary work and so they remained under-attended. In the village, the women and children

had often socialized near the canals while washing laundry or kitchenware. Early on in the

shahrak, twenty or more families were forced to share one street water faucet. The scarce access

to such a water source and the multiple trips per day necessitated by it were not conducive to

cordiality and short tempers were common. In such a city, a community of water is impossible.88

Even new, urban communities were not strong. Village neighbors and families were spread

across different shahraks by the state and mothers were not allowed to move near their daughters

even if a property swap had been worked out privately between residents.89 If Khuzestanis had

evaded the gaze of the Iranian state for centuries, the institutional alienation of the shahrak

seemed to make up for lost time in its destruction of community.

Water Authority

The lack of centralized authority throughout most of the recent centuries in Khuzestan’s

history meant that landlords accumulated a significant, though not absolute, amount of power.

Many Khuzestani peasants had no higher authority figure than the landlord to turn to for redress.

Among the Bakhtiari and Arab villages, tribal ties did not necessarily provide alternative

authority structures because the khans and sheikhs were often landowners themselves. Despite

the potential for abuse, many villagers only interacted with landlords at harvest time and the

88 Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life, 175-177. 89 Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life, 188-190.

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majority of village and agricultural affairs were managed internally without interference.90

Additionally, although landlords had the power to strip peasant farmers of their nasaq at any

time, peasants were not bound to the land. One might leave for new opportunities in a nearby

village at any point, receive nasaq from a different landlord, and later return to their original

village several times in their life. Some landlords even recruited peasants from other villages to

come and sharecrop for them.91 Despite the hardship of transplanting families and property,

generations of Khuzestani peasants found moving to be a worthwhile solution to landlord

deprivation. The DIP and land reforms did not end Khuzestani migration either. F. Gremliza

found that 34% of the entire population of 55 villages in Upper Khuzestan had moved at least

once between 1961 and 1966.92

Landlords had the right to temporarily obstruct the river in order to fill their own canals,

which could deny downstream villages the necessary water for farming and lead to clashes.93

Village irrigation in eastern Khuzestan could also benefit or suffer from the rise or fall of

Bakhtiari khans, who constituted a large and powerful segment of Khuzestani landowners before

land reform. More powerful khans could guarantee more water for their villages, depriving other

villages of a fair share. The political and material status of Bakhtiari khans was generally fluid,

so villages could not expect their landlords to secure sufficient water in perpetuity. A group of

villages owned by a single khan could expect somewhat less fluctuation. The single landowner’s

90 Goodell, “Village Social Structure,” 2. 91 Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life,” 22-24. 92 Gremliza, “Selected Ecological Facts,” 27. 93 Salmanzadeh, Agricultural Change, 74-75.

32

concern lay with the sum total of his kharaj from his villages, and so they were left to themselves

to manage and negotiate irrigation systems.94

The mirab was a full-time specialist hired by the landlord, like the sarbildar. The primary

responsibilities of the mirab were equitable distribution of water between the plots of the village,

surveying the village irrigation works to direct repair of minor damage before the problem

magnified, traveling upstream to make sure the village was receiving its fair share of water, and

resolving disputes about improper water usage or theft.95 DRC and KWPA engineers soon came

to replace the authority of the landlord and his representatives. Lilienthal related a story told by

one DRC village agent after land reform was initiated in 1963,

Yesterday in one of the villages in the pilot area the peasants just threw the landlord out .

. . They grabbed hold of him and his khadokah [sic] . . . and carried him out of his own

village and threatened to kill him if he came back. But that is the rare violent case. A

good many of the landlords are leaving before they get thrown out. Just leaving. This

means that there is no one left in such villages to do what the landlord and his people

have done, the managing of things. Then the villagers come to us and ask us for help,

about planting, harvesting, getting things to market, arranging about water. There’s a

vacuum developing and we are asked to fill it – we of [DRC], we Americans. We don’t

see any other way out but to help the peasants, for the time being, until there are Iranians,

now being trained, to do the helping.96

By March 1961, Dez Pilot Irrigation Project technicians had recorded 1608 hydrological

measurements of canal discharges, field outflows, and inflows. The DPIP contained 58 villages

and the Khuzestan Development Service had quickly installed hydrological stations in 6 of them.

KDS also extended its hydrological knowledge of the area through monthly readings of 250

94 Azkia and Ehsani, “Taqsim-e Ab-e Rudkhane dar Khuzestan,” , 97.; Kharaj can mean “tax; tribute; [or] land tax.”

Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, 431. 95 Robert Charles Alberts, “Social Structure and Culture Change in an Iranian Village,” (PhD diss. Madison:

University of Wisconsin, 1963), 302-303. 96 David Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. V: The Harvest Years 1959-1963 (New York: Harper

& Row, 1971), 452.

33

piezometers and ground-water samples sent to the KDS laboratory.97 Whereas village mirabs had

gained their knowledge from a lifetime of walking village irrigation channels, the DRC had no

time to spare in its endeavor. David Lilienthal considered himself a man of action and DRC

officials had strong faith in their expertise. At the same time DRC technicians were carrying out

hydrological research to gain an understanding of Upper Khuzestan’s fluid environment,

bulldozers were levelling over one thousand hectares of land, construction began on at least five

canals, and 27 field gates and 34 field culverts were installed.98

The Pahlavi state extended its control not only by supplanting local landlords and

kadkhodas with its own representatives, but also by supplanting the local sarbildar and abyar

with state planners, state and private engineers, and non-Khuzestani Iranian private contractors.

Under the traditional system, landlords used irrigation maintenance managers from the local area

and projects occurred on a small scale. Before each growing season, either the landlord or village

elders determined the manner of dividing the irrigated water between farm plots. In the new

irrigation scheme of northern Khuzestan, technocrats carefully planned 183 kilometers of canals,

laterals, and sub-laterals with more efficient water control systems.99 Instead of bildar crews

assembling for work, new canal construction contracts were often awarded to the lowest bidder.

The contractors were often based in Tehran, encountered serious delays, and had their contracts

97 Khuzestan Development Service, “Fourteenth Quarterly Report,” 27-29.; A piezometer measures groundwater

pressure. 98 Khuzestan Development Service, “Fourteenth Quarterly Report,” 40.; Statistics regarding land levelling are

scattered. This reports claims nearly 3,000 hectares of land had been levelled, but a 1971 report states that the land

levelling program had stalled and only 1,500 hectares were levelled. Public Administration Service, “Credit

Requirements for Improved Traditional Agriculture, Dez Irrigation Project,” 1971, DRC Records (811:1), 6. 99 A.A. Ahmadi, “Measures to Accelerate Planned Results or Full Benefits Contemplated from Water Resources

Development,” 1966, DRC Records (914:4).

34

re-assigned or taken over directly by the KWPA.100 Instead of the mirab controlling water flow,

state irrigation engineers wielded the power with the force of bureaucracy behind them. Instead

of a rationalization of water distribution, the human figure locally in charge of this new system

“played the villages off against each other for personal favors.”101 The traditional agreements

with landlords were often negotiated from a point of weakness by the village farmers, but once

agreement was reached they could use the irrigation system as agreed upon without worry until

the next year. The new state engineers had the power to cut off water to fields within the hour.102

The DRC moved quickly to implement its vision in Upper Khuzestan, caring only to

learn how many cubic meters of water per second flowed through the Dez River, or the chemical

composition of the soil. DRC technicians and sub-contractors who carried out surveys knew the

irrigation practices of Khuzestani farmers were inefficient and needed replacement and so they

did not attempt more than cursory examination of the traditional system. There was little to learn

from it. Khuzestani peasants, on the other hand, had much to learn if they expected to exist in the

new agricultural system of Khuzestan.

From the very beginning of the DRC’s planning, its officials stressed the importance of

training Iranians in operating all aspects of the new agricultural system. The Khuzestan

Development Service hired its first Iranian in 1956 to work on the KDS’s Soil Fertility Project,

and it hired seventy-seven young Khuzestanis as village workers in October 1957. Their job

would be to work directly with farmers and landlords and demonstrate new agricultural

100 For examples of awards to contractors, Contract No. 4, lateral E-5 and sub-laterals, Melli Sakhteman Company

(Tehran), KWPA, Quarterly Report 11 on Dez Multipurpose Project for Loan 247 IRN, April 30, 1963, DRC

Records (527:4).; Contract No. 5, covering the balance of canals, laterals and structures for Unit II, Rah Canal

Company, KWPA, Quarterly Report 12 on Dez Multipurpose Project for Loan 247 IRN, July 31, 1963, DRC

Records (527:5).; KWPA take-over from a contractor is noted in KWPA, Quarterly Report 19 on Dez Multipurpose

Project for Loan 247 IRN, April 30, 1965, DRC Records (527:6). 101 Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life, 132. 102 Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life, 147.

35

techniques and technology, and so they were given classroom and field training in elementary

soil chemistry, soil mechanics and agronomy. By 1961, around 150 Iranians had been hired and

trained to manage modern techniques of planting, fertilizing, irrigating, and harvesting of crops

within the 20,000 hectares of the Dez Pilot Irrigation Project, and the KDS planned to extend its

training program into all fifty-seven villages of the DPIP as quickly as possible.103

The KDS training program extended far beyond agricultural practices. It also recruited

Iranians for training as office workers, carpenters, masons, plumbers, riggers and steel workers,

drivers, machinists, electricians, painters, mechanics, watchmen, fire fighters, blacksmiths, and

forklift operators. As of March 20, 1961, the full number of Iranians employed by KDS and its

sub-contractors was 4,368.104 When Lilienthal envisioned an integrated development scheme for

Khuzestan, he was not merely conceptualizing an intricate irrigation network but also a

transformation of Khuzestani society and its individuals. As one DRC report noted, “It will take

time . . . to bring the management capability of the villagers up to the level required to make full

use of the modern facilities being provided.”105 Of course, it was not enough to hire engineers

and send them out to teach villagers about irrigation. That would have been a surface measure

with little deep impact. Training Iranians for a range of new careers helped create the

infrastructure for a modern Khuzestan and absorb the Khuzestani villagers no longer needed for

village irrigation work. DRC officials held an idealized vision of American work ethic and

sought to imbue these values into their Iranian employees. Progress reports were cautious but

noted hopefully that,

103 Khuzestan Development Service, “Training and Development, A Special Report: 1957-1961,” 1961, DRC

Records (563:4), 12-13. 104 Khuzestan Development Service, “Training and Development,” 3. 105 Peterson, Status and Needs for Agricultural Development, 4.

36

. . . individuals may be seen today striving for self-improvement and reaching out for

know-how and occasionally for responsibility . . . The technical knowledge required for .

. . controlling the flow of power or water can be learned in good universities and by field

experience. The ability to make decisions, to take the consequences when the decisions

prove inferior, to drive for improvements . . . this total ability can be gained only thru

[sic] experience at progressively higher levels of management.106

DRC officials were proud of their Iranian peers in a patronizing, Orientalist manner, and this

undergirded the entire Dez Irrigation Project. Just as Pahlavi planners believed that villagers

could not live and farm successfully without some form of hierarchized authority replacing the

landlord, development experts did not believe that peasants could operate modern irrigation

systems without transforming their character and modes of knowledge.

CONCLUSION

After the disappearance of Seljuq authority in Khuzestan at the end of the 11th century,

Khuzestani peasants, landlords, and tribal chiefs were largely left to their own devices. Regional

historians turned their gazes to the Byzantine wars in the west and Khuzestan slipped out of most

history books. The Safavids, Nader Shah Afshar, the Zands, and the Qajars lay nominal claim on

the province but political fates of local Arab sheikhs and Luri khans only mattered to Khuzestani

peasants if it fields and canals were destroyed or landlords demanded exorbitant shares of the

crop. Europeans and plateau Iranians increasingly travelled to the province in the 19th century

and most remarked on the seemingly pitiful state of Khuzestan compared to its glorious past.

Nearly 100 years after the first modern damming and irrigation scheme for Khuzestan was

proposed to Naser al-Din Shah, the Development and Resources Corporation arrived with

visions of concrete canals, scientifically measured irrigation flows, and fleets of tractors.

106 Khuzestan Development Service, “Training and Development,” 50.

37

Rural life in Upper Khuzestan, and especially that of nasaq-holding peasants, revolved

around crop irrigation and communities of water helped bond society together. The incision of

Khuzestan’s rivers deep into the plain required rural communities to devise creative methods to

bring water up to their canals. Communal bildar projects to build dams for raising the water and

afterward cleaning the canals to maintain steady irrigation brought neighbors together. Few

people knew how large their agricultural plots were but they knew how much water was required

for it to produce crops. One of the primary responsibilities of landlords was to provide water for

the community and peasants were free to find better circumstances in other villages if the

landlords failed in their duties.

The Dez Irrigation Project disrupted several of these fluid communal connections without

severing them completely. Although the DRC planners built a vast system of new canals,

peasants still lived in their own villages next to them and depended on them for their crops. Not

all of the canals were concrete and so they still required communal maintenance. Many

communities continued to rely on the older canals that were still in use. The Khuzestani

communities of water survived and adapted to the rapid mechanization pushed onto their farms.

Indeed, some landlords were modernizing before the state brought in the DRC. Technological

innovation was not anathema to villagers.

The traditional water authority and knowledge of the landlord and mirab was greatly

reduced, however, and the bureaucracy of the KWPA replaced them. Instead of negotiating water

usage once a year, villagers might have to negotiate weekly with engineers from Tehran or

Isfahan because of the increased technical power over water flow. Landlords often lived and

stayed in town, but the engineers were a regular presence in the villages. The DRC tried to

38

replace traditional irrigation knowledge with hydrological engineering courses, sacrificing the

organic knowledge of local land for abstract theory. Historians sometimes wonder how

“corporate knowledge” is lost among generations and this is a clear example. The DRC did not

just want to teach technical knowledge; they wanted to build a new type of Iranian with what

they conceived of as the ideal American characteristics of honesty and integrity instead of

Eastern slyness and evasion.

These developments shaped and changed Khuzestani communities of water but they did

not devastate them. That “accomplishment” lay with the shahraks of the industrial agribusiness

farms. The peasants of the 100 villages near Dezful who had gained a brief taste of owning their

own land were forced to re-sell it to the government, work that same land as wage labor, and live

in disorienting new towns with no communal logic. Even the ADBI acknowledged the negative

mental effects of the shahraks on their residents in its autopsy of the agribusiness ventures.107

The only bright spot about the shahraks was their temporary existence. After the revolution,

much of the land taken for agribusiness was re-occupied by Khuzestan’s peasants.108

Like communities of water around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, the story of

Khuzestani irrigation involves a developing nation-state grasping at the natural resources within

its macroscopic point-of-view, ignoring the concerns of the people whose lives it affects. Unlike

Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire in the American West, the Pahlavi state did not completely

achieve mastery of the Khuzestani landscape but the logic of its project shared the American

viewpoint of nature as a thing, a commodity, to be harnessed. Perhaps if Plan Organization

107 Najmabadi, Land Reform and Social Change, 154. 108 Kaveh Ehsani, “Rural Society and Agricultural Development in Post-Revolution Iran: The First Two Decades,”

Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 15, no. 1 (2006), 88.

39

officials had deigned to consult the people it wanted to use, a collaborative development project

could have been undertaken together.

40

Chapter 2: Floods and a Great Dam

The Zagros Mountains rise up over 4,500 meters above sea level on Khuzestan’s northern

and eastern edges, blocking rain from entering the Iranian plateau proper. The mountains instead

collect the precipitation in nearly 100, 000 km2 of drainage basins, from which water pours into

Khuzestan and covers the province with more fresh surface water that any other region in Iran.109

The Karkheh, Dez, Karun, Jarrahi, and Zohreh are the major rivers that flow out of the Zagros

and their paths have regularly shifted throughout history, affecting their dependent communities.

The Karkheh, for example, once turned west further downstream but an early 19th century flood

shifted it into a new channel, contributed to the ruin of old Hoveze, and possibly the rise of

Mohammareh (now Khorramshahr).110 Several forces, both human and non-human, have shaped

the paths of these rivers and the societies dependent on them throughout Khuzestan’s history, but

one of the most important has been powerful winter and spring flooding.

Modern societies have classified floods under the category of natural disasters, along

with earthquakes, drought, mud slides, and other events. Christof Mauch noted that, “until the

1980s catastrophes were seen mainly as deviations from the norm, as extreme and destructive

forces that descended without warning on unlucky communities.”111 In the following decades,

academics began to realize that “natural disasters” are both physical events occurring in the

world and socially-constructed concepts. A natural event’s perceived negative impact on

109 Michael J. Kirkby, “Land and Water Resources of the Deh Luran and Khuzistan Plain,” in Studies in the

archaeological history of the Deh Luran plain: the excavation of Chagha Sefid, ed. Frank Hole, (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1977), 251. 110 Willem Floor, “The Rise and Fall of the Banu Ka’b. A Borderer State in Southern Khuzestan,” Iran 44 (2006):

289.; Vanessa M.A. Heyvaert and Jan Walstra, “The role of long-term human impact on avulsion and fan

development,” Earth Processes and Landforms 41 (2016): 2147. 111 Christof Mauch, “Introduction,” in Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies toward a Global

Environmental History, ed. Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister (Lanham: Lexington Books, Inc., 2009), 4.

41

communities’ welfare determines it to be a “disaster.” In Khuzestan, floods are clearly not

“deviations from the norm” but rather a regular part of an annual cycle. The province’s flood

season usually begins around October and ends around May, and the time of year in which

floods occur could help Khuzestanis predict their general behavior. Earlier in the season, rainfall

alone leads to flash floods with relatively low volume and short duration. Later in the season,

rainfall combined with snowmelt leads to floods with more gradual fluctuations but much higher

volume and duration.112

In fact, Khuzestan’s residents have necessarily factored floods into their lives at least

since regional agriculture began roughly 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists believe that the earliest

farmers near modern-day Shush and Shushtar settled on hills in flood plains, casting their seeds

on the lower ground and taking advantage of the uncontrolled floods to water their crops.113

Floods shaped Khuzestani society geographically and culturally, while Khuzestani society in turn

helped shape the province’s rivers. When the Development and Resources Corporation arrived in

1958, it represented both a change in how Khuzestanis conceived of and responded to floods and

also a continuation of direct human impact on river behavior dating back to at least the Parthian

period.114

The flood control regime initiated after 1958 demonstrates the increasing gaze of the state

on Khuzestan through the enumeration of river water, dam construction laborers, and flood

112 Khuzestan Water and Power Authority, “A Summary Report on the Flood of March 1972 in Khuzestan,” 1973,

DRC Records (558:5), 4. 113 Abbas Alizadeh, Chogha Mish II: The Development of a Prehistoric Regional Center in Lowland Susiana,

Southwestern Iran, Final Report on the Last Six Seasons of Excavations, 1972-1978 (Chicago: Oriental Institute

Publications, 2008), 4.; Abbas Alizadeh et al., “Human-Environment Interactions on the Upper Khuzestan Plains,

Southwest Iran. Recent Investigations.” Paléorient 30, no. 30 (2004): 77. 114 Flow regulation, flow diversion, and channel engineering are direct impacts, “as opposed to indirect impacts of

human-induced climate change and land-use changes that may affect water and sediment fluxes.” Heyvaert and

Walstra, “Human impact on avulsion,” 2138.

42

property damage. It also demonstrates the shift in how the state conceived of the proper

organization of labor as workers were recruited to build Iran’s first modern dam, Dez Dam

(originally Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam). These processes were expressions of the

modern Iranian state’s predilection to control that surpassed historical Khuzestani methods of

flood management in ability, scale, and intent.

KHUZESTANI SOCIETY AND FLOODS BEFORE THE DEZ IRRIGATION PROJECT

Residents of the upper Khuzestan plains accommodated annual floods into their rhythm

of life at least as early as flood water farming began c. 8,000 years ago. Near annual flooding

gave structures at lower elevations a relatively short lifespan that diminished the worth of their

construction. The decision to found settlements on hills to take advantage of floods while

avoiding their destructive potential demonstrates an acknowledgement that the massive water

surges could not be controlled. In this early period, with no extensive canal systems or major

dams, Khuzestani communities had essentially no direct impact on the behavior of the rivers that

sustained them.

Flooding continued to shape settlement patterns after Khuzestan’s farmers largely

abandoned floodwater farming for canal irrigation. Communities congregated along rivers and

their canal systems to ensure regular water supplies for crop growth but flooding consistently

shifted river courses (a process called “avulsion”) and so shifted community settlements. The

long history of Khuzestani irrigation itself came to affect avulsions because of the growing

number of former channels for flooded rivers to shift into. These former irrigation channels

expedited post-flood avulsions into new river courses, as opposed to natural processes of alluvial

build-up changing plain gradients over decades or centuries. For example, archaeologists believe

43

a dam once existed at Band-e Qir (whose name means “Bitumen Dam”) to separate the flows of

the Karun River and Masroqan Canal between Shushtar and Ahvaz, thus increasing the area of

irrigated land. By the 14th century CE, the dam had collapsed, possibly because of flooding, and

the Karun left its old channel to join the Masroqan Canal at Band-e Qir.115 The main channel of

the Karun still follows this unnaturally straight path for several kilometers today.116 Even more

dramatic were the successive avulsions of the lower Karkheh. In the early Islamic period, the

Karkheh flowed into the Dez River, which then joined the Karun (as the Dez still does).117 A

channel was dug by the 14th century to supply the newly ascendant town of Hoveyze with water.

The channel was so large that it eventually gathered all of the Karkheh’s water into itself,

severing the Karkheh from the Dez. This predominantly human-facilitated avulsion that supplied

the Safavids’ Mosha’sha’ governors in Hoveyze contrasts with a catastrophic 19th century flood-

dominated avulsion. Someone constructed a canal on the Karkheh upstream from Hoveyze and a

large flood in 1835 or 1837 shifted the Karkheh into this new canal. Hoveyze’s residents

abandoned the city and quickly moved to the banks of the new river channel. According to

Layard, its pre-flood population was said to have been around 24,000 but barely 400 people

remained when he visited sometime between 1840 and 1842.118 The Ka’b tribe to the south had

115 Peter Verkinderen, Waterways of Iraq and Iran in the Early Islamic Period: Changing Rivers and Landscapes of

the Mesopotamian Plain (London: I.B. Taurus, 2015), 125. 116 Heyvaert and Walstra, “The role of long-term human impact on avulsion and fan development,” Earth Processes

and Landforms 41 (2016): 2145. 117 Verkinderen, Waterways of Iraq and Iran, 236-237. 118 Austen Henry Layard, Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia, vol. 2 (London: J. Murray, 1887),

168-9. A plague epidemic shortly after the river shifted contributed to the devastation of the population.;

Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “LAYARD, Austen Henry,” by John Curtis, accessed February 11, 2018.

44

been challenging the preeminence of the city of the Mosha’sha’iyan for decades and this flood

avulsion sealed the end of Hoveyze’s provincial influence, which it never regained.119

Khuzestan’s rivers have been slowly eroding parts of their channels and sinking below

the plains for at least 3,000 years. This phenomenon largely occurs in the alluvial plains and

steppe areas of upper Khuzestan that also contain the best farmland. The deep incisions of the

rivers in this part of Khuzestan have greatly decreased the instances of avulsion over the past

1000 years. Instead, damage to home, farmland, and livestock constituted the primary dangers of

floods for residents of the upper Khuzestan plains. In the late spring of 1852, a furious rainstorm

with lightning and hail struck Dezful and was soon followed by a flood of the river Dez. City

residents trying to safely return home from the fields with cows and donkeys instead had most of

their livestock swept away.120 That same year, a rain storm (possibly the same one) visited the

upper Khuzestan plains with hail the size of cannon balls, according to accounts. These massive

ice chunks destroyed the wooden drums used to dredge and repair the local qanats and a

subsequent flood damaged most of the homes in Dezful. The regional damage was so great that

local elites considered extending takhfif (a mitigation of required contributions, whether financial

or of another nature) to the district peasants that year.121 A three-day rain storm observed in

Shushtar in the winter of 1852-53 was followed by flooding that swept away sections of several

of the city’s dams.122 Hosein Ali Khan Afshar traveled to Dezful in the winter of 1847-48 and

wrote in his travelogue that in Dezful “when rain comes for one or two continuous days, the river

119 Heyvaert and Walstra, “Human impact on avulsion,” 2146-2148.; Verkinderen, Waterways of Iraq and Iran,

239-242. 120 Ahmad Latifpur, Khuzestan dar asr-e Qajar vol. 1 (Tehran: Entesherat-e Farhang-e Maktub, 2013), 252. 121 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 260-261.; In April 1962, a DRC official reported a “hail storm that punched holes in most

of our asbestos cement roofs. (One hail stone weighed 80 g. – that’s 1/6 lb.).” G.L. Williams, “Dez Project –

Narrative Report for April 1962,” 1962, DRC Records (757:1). 122 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 256.

45

also becomes like a sea of water and intensely covers everything.”123 Ahmad Latifpur described

massive flooding as a ceaseless phenomenon in his overview of Qajar era Khuzestani floods.124

One example of the myths that sprang up among Khuzestanis as a result of constant flooding was

an assertion related by Qazi Nurullah Shushtari, a 16th century CE Khuzestani scholar who

moved to Mughal India to join Emperor Akbar’s court: the first city that Noah founded after the

flood was Shush and Shushtar.125

By 1000 BCE, farmers of the upper plains had to devise methods for maintaining a

controlled flow of water from the incised rivers to their irrigation canals.126 It is unclear how

Khuzestan’s earliest irrigators raised water, but at some point farmers began constructing brush

and stone dams, or weirs, to raise the river levels (as described in Chapter 1). These weirs lacked

the strength of major river control structures like the stone systems constructed at Shushtar and

Dezful, and floods washed them away almost every year. Farmers continuously rebuilt them,

however, because of their necessity in maintaining irrigation water supplies. The annual

construction of weirs in Khuzestan continued into the 20th century and demonstrated another

mode of accommodating floods in Khuzestani social rhythms. The weir-builders knew that their

project could not last long because of constant flooding but, on a village level, they had no other

recourse. They needed to raise water levels to grow crops, but stronger structures required more

resources than individual village communities could draw upon. Floods formed an integral part

123 Hosein Ali Khan Afshar, Safarname-ye Lorestan va Khuzestan, edited and introduced by Hamid Reza Dalvand

(Tehran: Pazhuheshga-ye Alum-e Ensani va Motale’at-e Farhangi, 2003), 152. 124 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 260.; Latifpur notes in this passage three more major floods of 1885, 1913, and 1923, with

the last flood being particularly nightmarish and destructive of people’s homes. 125 Prashant Keshamurthy, Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (London:

Routledge, 2016), 157. Keshamurthy also relates a myth in which a copy of a biographical dictionary written by an

18th century Mughal poet was discovered “floating on a pile of furniture from [a] flood” by a Bakhtiari nomad in

Shushtar and later fortuitously given as a gift to a visiting scholar who recognized its value. 126 Vanessa M.A. Heyvaert and Cecile Baeteman, “Holocene Sedimentary Evolution and Palaeocoastlines of the

Lower Khuzestan Plain (Southwest Iran),” Marine Geology 242 (2007): 100.

46

of Khuzestani life and even contributed to the formation of village social structures through their

necessitation of communal weir-building projects.

Floods did not irreversibly destroy all of Khuzestan’s river structures, however. Khans

and sheikhs shouldered the responsibility once held by caliphs or shahs for maintaining

Khuzestan’s infrastructure after the region slipped from Abbasid control in the 11th century

CE.127 By the Qajar period, leaders usually lacked financial support from Tehran but could still

organize larger projects than villagers. Sheikh Salman (r.1737-1768) of the Ka’b, for example,

built a dam on the lower Karun to force water into the Qubban canal to aid irrigation for his

tribe.128 These elites not only constructed new dams and bridges but repaired old ones. In 1858, a

flood carried away five arches of a bridge at Dezful and Khanlar Mirza, the Qajar governor of

Khuzestan and Lorestan, instructed his lieutenant Ebrahim Mirza to repair the bridge once the

rivers had subsided.129 Two years later, a flood destroyed five levees of the Shapuri Dam on the

route from Shushtar to Dezful and prevented travel between the two cities. Hajj Sheikh Jafar

Shushtari collected help from the people to repair the levees and restore traffic.130 Layard relayed

the efforts of Sheikh Thamer of the Ka’b in his mid-19th century travels,

The country over which he ruled owed much of the prosperity which it then enjoyed to

the encouragement which he gave to agriculture and commerce . . . canals and

watercourses for irrigation, upon which the fertility of the soil mainly depends, were kept

in good repair, and new works of the kind were frequently undertaken.131

The construction and repair projects sponsored by these elites were institutions of vertical

connection, connecting the village classes to ruling classes through projects which benefitted all.

127 Nanette Marie Pyne, “The Impact of the Seljuq Invasion on Khuzestan: An Inquiry into the Historical,

Geographical, Numismatic, and Archaeological Evidence,” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1982), 58-118. 128 Floor, “Banu Ka’b,” 288. 129 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 256. 130 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 256. 131 Layard, Early Adventures, 64.

47

These vertical connections were also intensely local. The irrigation works were commissioned by

local or provincial leaders and supplied water to the communities in their vicinity. The repaired

bridge facilitated traffic between Dezful and Shushtar, the major cities of northern Khuzestan

located only about 55 km distant from each other.132 Like weirs, floods often damaged these

bridges and dams, necessitating repair, and so the connection was regularly reiterated.

However, many ruins of bridges and dams that were not maintained reflect either an

inability or inconsistent intent to maintain infrastructure on the part of Khuzestan’s elites. Near

Behbahan, for example, De Bode observed a bridge originally built on a “grand scale,” but by his

visit in 1841 its arches only remained near the banks “while nearly all the rest have been carried

away by the force of the current.”133 A Dezfuli resident wrote that,

Some of the causes of degradation and destruction of the pleasant city, Jondi Shapur, that

day include the filling of the city’s streams from the strength of the flood that until now

the people of Dezful face annually and the lack of a powerful leader that forces people to

repair the channels.134

Apparently, another cause of the degradation of Khuzestan’s infrastructure was not the lack of

elite desire, but sometimes the lack of elites themselves. Despite the strength of the stone

foundation of works in Shushtar and Dezful and the repair projects, floods still collapsed sections

of dams and bridges that degraded their overall structural integrity over time. Smaller dams,

bridges, and levees could be rebuilt but the scale of resources needed to maintain older, grander

structures in the face of near-annual floods was largely absent in this province that was only

loosely tied to authority in Tehran.

132 Dezful and Shushtar were so intimately connected that modern and early modern histories of Khuzestan rarely

mention one without also considering the other. 133 Clement De Bode, Travels in Luristan and Arabistan (London: J. Madden and co., 1845), 297. 134 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 261.

48

It was the degraded form of these older, grand structures that contributed to the

perception of overall Khuzestani degradation and ruin in the eyes of modern travelers from

Tehran and abroad. George Curzon was perhaps the bluntest of all British visitors regarding what

they collectively saw as the failure of Khuzestanis to engage in any meaningful infrastructural

enterprises, with one particularly dismissive quote describing them as “a people who have lost all

taste for public works, and are only careful of those that exist in being careful that they should

fall into decay.”135 Ahmad Kasravi repeatedly commented on past glories of the dilapidated

structures he saw in Shushtar in the 1920s.136 Gordon Clapp, co-founder of the Development and

Resources Corporation, remarked in 1957 that “a few of these ancient structures are still

performing a useful service while the ruins of others portray the purpose they once served.”137

Khuzestan’s uncontrolled floods continued to destroy homes and infrastructure on an

almost yearly basis as the Development and Resources Corporation (DRC) arrived in the

province. In 1961, a DRC party took an 800 km trip into the Bakhtiari Mountains (a major part

of the Zagros roughly between Shushtar and Isfahan) to scout for future dam locations. They

took a picture at Pol-e Susan on the Karun where Bakhtiari khans had built a suspension bridge

in 1910 to ease the crossing of their sheep across the river, noting that “the suspension bridge has

washed away many times, the last time in 1958.” They also described a bridge built by the Lynch

Bros. company around 1909 at Pol-e Shalu, destroyed by a flood in 1929 and rebuilt

135 George Curzon, “The Karun River and the Commercial Geography of South-West Persia,” Proceedings of the

Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 12, no. 9 (1890): 519. 136 Ahmad Kasravi, Tarikh-e ponsad sale-ye Khuzestan (Tehran: Donya-e Ketab, 2006), 80-89. 137 Gordon R. Clapp, “Iran: A TVA for the Khuzestan Region,” Middle East Journal 11, no. 1 (1957): 3.

49

afterward.138 If DRC and Iranian government officials considered Khuzestan’s irrigation

networks completely outdated, its flood management system was nonexistent.

Although Khuzestanis had lived with floods destroying their homes and shifting entire

river course for thousands of years, the dominant mode of flood response was to rebuild to the

extent possible. Villagers and elites each rebuilt dams, bridges, canals, and homes according to

the resources at their disposal because these were necessary for food, shelter, and travel. We can

see in modern day Houston (floods, hurricanes), Tehran (pollution, earthquakes), or California

(wildfires) that people are generally reluctant to move from their home region. If the people of

Khuzestan would not move and could not control nearly annual flooding, the only answer left

was to rebuild. Rebuilding was a pattern of life, but a pattern that drained resources and

decreased potentially higher agricultural yields which the 20th century Iranian state increasingly

came to view as unacceptable. When the Shah and Plan Organization officials turned their

attention to Khuzestan, it was only natural that a modern dam capable of regulating water flows

would become the center piece of the provincial development project. Such a dam would collect

and reserve excess runoff from winter and spring flooding to prevent property damage, and then

engineers could disperse the collected water in the drier summer and fall seasons to facilitate

year-round irrigation. The dam would create more than enough electricity to supply Khuzestan’s

needs, and so the utility authority could then sell excess energy outside of the province. Plans for

the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi Dam (now known as the Dez Dam) began almost as soon as

DRC officials arrived in Iran in 1956.

138 “The Bakhtiaris: Notes from an 800-Kilometer Trip into the Bakhtiari Mountains at No Ruz, 1961,” 1961, DRC

Archives (564:4), v-vi, xi. The travelers noted and photographed destroyed stone bridges dating possibly to the

Sasanian period. They also revealed the journey was inspired by reading a copy of Layard’s Early Adventures in

Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia, 1.

50

THE DRC AND FLOOD CONTROL IN KHUZESTAN

Since the founders of the DRC, David Lilienthal and Gordon Clapp, were both former

chairmen of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), they had experience prior to their arrival in

Iran with a major regional development project in which modern storage dams occupied a central

role. The United States Congress passed legislation to create the TVA in May 1933 and twelve

dams were under construction by 1942.139 DRC planners brought a similar urgency for dam-

building to Khuzestan. Less than three months after the DRC signed its contract with the Plan

Organization in March 1956, DRC engineer William Voorduin submitted reports from fly-over

inspections of suitable dam locations along the Dez River.140 Clapp wrote in the winter of 1957

that,

The heart of the program, as tentatively conceived, will be a system of storage dams on

the five rivers, to permit the irrigation of vast lands in the Khuzestan plain. Special

treatment of drainage and salinity problems will have to be devised. The dams also will

control floods and make possible the generation of electricity on a large scale for

industrial, commercial and residential use.141

Irrigation management may have been the primary function of the new dam but flood control

remained an integral aspect of its role in the wider development project. Officials could not risk

floods destroying the investments made in modernizing agriculture projects. A progress report

from 1960 showed a picture of an underwater home and proclaimed, “the destruction of homes

like these in Ahvaz is part of the flood damage amounting to $1,000,000 per year which will be

139 Patrick Kline and Enrico Moretti, “Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies, and the Big

Push,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 1 (2014): 281-281. 140 David Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. IV: The Road to Change 1955-1959 (New York:

Harper & Row, 1969), 90-91. 141 Clapp, “Iran,” 3.

51

brought under control by Dez Dam.”142 Just as the Iran state’s public health program was an

instrument of extending control over Iranians and their environment (manifested as disease), the

Dez Dam was an even grander, more conspicuous object of environmental domination. As

Lilienthal wrote in his journal the day before the dam’s dedication ceremony on March 13, 1963,

“Back from a great experience: ‘our’ dam now controls the Dez River.”143 The state would now

attempt to control the seasonal floodwaters coming down the Dez.

Floods in the springs of 1969 and 1972 put the brand new Dez Dam to the test, but first I

want to look at the construction of the dam itself. We saw how, for at least the last few centuries

in Khuzestan, traditional dam-building involved local, communal construction projects after each

flood or slightly more durable projects financed by provincial elites. The weaker weir projects

strengthened horizontal community ties while elite-back projects strengthened vertical ties to

patronage networks still largely confined within the province. The construction of the Dez Dam

thus represents a dramatic rupture in the mode of labor in Khuzestan and its role in society. As

Alan Mikhail observed in 19th century Egypt,

Shifts in labor on irrigation works and other construction projects over the course of the

long eighteenth century ushered in new conceptions of the [state], the [social body], and

of the relationship between the two. The single most important factor affecting this

transition in the forms and practices of labor over the period was an increase in the

relative size of repair projects . . . and other structures.144

142 Khuzestan Development Service, “Fourteenth Quarterly Report to Plan Organization, Imperial Government of

Iran, Covering the Period of December 22, 1960 to March 21, 1961,” 1961, DRC Records (560:1), 1. 143 David Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. V: The Harvest Years 1959-1963 (New York: Harper

& Row, 1971), 447.; An earlier and telling quote from Lilienthal in October 1961, “I have been awed, hushed, by

the power of puny man who has used his knowledge and courage to change the face of the earth: the foundations of

the arc that in a year will rise to a majestic 630 feet of concrete to control the waters of the Dez River . . . To see the

very earth move because of ideas that came out of our heads was something that still gives me a sense of

incredulity.” Vol VI, 259-260. 144 Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2011), 170. Several of the concepts in this chapter derive from chapters 4 and 6 of his book. The

major project in he examines is the Mahmudiyya Canal, intended to connect Alexandria securely to the Nile.

52

The construction of the Dez dam did not foster bonds based on village or agricultural

community, although it provided avenues for new socials bonds. Laborers could bond over

working conditions, as we will briefly see later. The dam’s construction also continued the

replacement of the landlord’s authority with state authority. The state claimed Khuzestanis as it

organized them into a dam workforce and later demonstrated its power as it controlled the Dez

River to a degree never before seen.

One way in which the construction project changed the mode of labor was how the

workforce benefitted from the project. Laborers came from around the region to work on the

project for wages, instead of working on local projects with less immediate and more communal

benefits. Unlike traditional projects, the laborers had no coercive socio-institutional reasons to

work on the dam. In the past, nasaq-holders could lose their cultivation rights if they did not

show up for communal projects. There was no threat of losing pre-existing assets like nasaq if

they abstained from the project. Wages acted as an attractive force to draw and keep workers,

while the benefits of participation (wages) were also personal rather than communal. Najmabadi

described a process of land reform whereby peasants, or “producer-proprietors,” were separated

from their traditional means of production, labor became specialized and stratified, and the

money economy expanded across Iran to pave the way for commodity production and

consumption.145 The creation of wage labor through projects like the Dez dam was possible after

Khuzestanis were alienated from their traditional means of production. The construction project

is the second step of labor stratification and specialization. A position on the construction crew

provided a replacement for livelihood with wages as the new compensation. Demonstrating

145 Afsaneh Najmabadi, Land Reform and Social Change in Iran (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987),

26-27.

53

Najmabadi’s third step of commodity consumption, workers then had to spend these wages at

businesses in order to procure the food and supplies previously available from their own labor or

through a barter network.

The Iranian laborers of Dez Dam also went on strike, demonstrating the formation of a

communal identity based on their labor. In November 1960, Italian laborers went on strike for

several hours to demand more pay. At the same time, Iranian laborers went on strike for two or

three days to demand “free unlimited rides on the man-haul trucks” as the workers commuting

from Andimeshk and Dezful received. Chief Engineer Williams intimated that they should have

been happy just to have free housing.146 The Iranian strike may have had some relation with the

Italians’, but details on the conditions of each strike are unclear. Another strike had occurred two

months earlier, in September,

Impresit’s paymaster was held up late in the month on the road when it first starts to

climb onto the Plateau. He seems to have been treated a bit roughly, and relieved of some

$20,000. When word got out, there was a bit of a strike by workmen who were afraid

they would receive no pay.147

The report contains no details about which workers went on strike, how long it lasted, nor how it

was resolved. A strong tradition of organized labor activism already existed in Iran generally and

Khuzestan specifically, because of the oil industry, but the role of that tradition in the story of the

Dez dam’s construction is also unclear.148 No other strikes appear throughout the collected DRC

source material. Perhaps there were no others, or perhaps their absence is a result of the kinds of

sources I use for this project. That two strikes, appearing within two months of each, would be

146 Williams, “October 1960.” 147 Williams, “September 1960.” 148 For an overview of Iran’s early labor movements, see Ervand Abrahamian, “The Strengths and Weaknesses of

the Labor Movement in Iran, 1941-53,” in Continuity and Change in Modern Iran, ed. Michael E. Bonine and

Nikki R. Keddie, 181-202 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).

54

isolated incidents seems strange considering the history of organized labor in Iran and

Khuzestan. However, this was also the period in which the Pahlavi state began to strongly

suppress such movements,149 and the importance of the project may have concentrated their

efforts there. Future research may hold the answers.

A shift in the size of river projects required an intensification of the organization and

enumeration of laborers, and this was a part of the process of transforming rural Iranian subjects

into citizens of the nation-state. By counting laborers, institutions “saw” them, but the manner of

enumeration can lend clues toward how institutions viewed individuals or groups. The lack of

any conspicuous enumeration of laborers in the DRC’s detailed 1963 financial report suggests

the number of laborers in and of itself was not a major company concern.150 The report lists costs

for cement and property purchases, highlights the dam’s kilowatt generation, and even marks the

date of the dam site’s discovery, but fails to mention anything about the number of Iranian

laborers or the amount they were paid. For an approximation of the number of laborers (Iranian

and foreign together), monthly accident reports instead provide a clue.151

According to the accident reports, the size of the dam’s workforce reached its zenith in

late 1962 with about 2,900 workers employed per month.152 By May 30, 1963, twenty-seven

individuals (Iranian and foreign) had died and 1,215 “major accidents” had occurred.153 Asgar

149 Abrahamian, “Labor Movement,” 200-201. 150 Development and Resources Corporation, “A Financial Report on Funds Received and Accounted for from

March 29, 1956 to June 21, 1963,” 1964, DRC Records (558:3). 151 Some regular reports list monthly employment figures. For example, 1,674 Iranians were employed at the Dez

dam site in December 1960 and 1,736 Iranians were employed in March 1961. Khuzestan Development Service,

“Fourteenth Quarterly Report,” 26. 152 Khuzestan Development Service, “Monthly Accident Report, Sept. 1, 1962 through Sept. 30, 1962,” DRC

Records (759:1).; DRC had awarded the primary dam contract to Impresit-Girola-Lodigiani (Imgregilo) of Italy, and

these accident reports only concerned this particular contractor so the Iranian workforce was probably larger. 153 KDS, “Monthly Accident Report, May 1, 1963 through May 30, 1963.”; Off-duty deaths were not included in

the official number of 27 project deaths. For example, five presumably off-duty Iranian laborers were riding in a

55

Akbari died when he slipped and fell from a pendulum shaft ladder.154 Mandali Alyasi tried to

leave the roof of a moving elevator and was crushed by a door frame.155 A Euclid dump truck

backed over Eshagh Joodaki while he slept in a work tunnel.156 These kinds of deaths could not

have happened in the smaller scale weir-building projects. A tally from the last available report

(Sep. 1963) lists the causes of the most common major accidents since the beginning of the

project: 228 injuries from falling objects, 211 injuries from handling objects or materials, and

107 injuries from falls to lower levels.157 Crucially, the reports measure the impact of accidents

via man hours lost and disability charged. Nine workmen died in the first a year and a half of

construction and project officials established formal safety precautions through weekly safety

drills and monthly safety bulletins.158 Injured workers (and often damaged equipment) reduced

work efficiency, increased project cost, and slowed down the pace of progress, so officials were

motivated to increase safety primarily for the sake of the project rather than the sake of the

workers. The information in these accident reports demonstrates an enumeration of workers

according to the value of labor to the company. They reflect yet another aspect of how Iranian

labor was alienated from traditional means of production and integrated into the emerging cash

economy.

truck in December 1961 when it left the road and turned over. Three died immediately and the other two later died

in the hospital. The reports do not include totals for “non-job fatalities.” KDS, “Monthly Accident Report, Mar. 1,

1962 through Mar. 30, 1962.” 154 KDS, “Monthly Accident Report, May 1, 1963 through May 30, 1963.” 155 KDS, “Monthly Accident Report, April 1, 1963 through April 30, 1963.” 156 KDS, “Monthly Accident Report, July 1, 1962 through July 30, 1962.” 157 KDS, “Monthly Accident Report, September 1, 1963 through September 30, 1963.” 158 Williams, “April 1961.”; Regarding a concrete-pouring ceremony of the dam in October 1961, Lilienthal wrote,

“As the Shah and I talked, I spoke of what one usually avoids in showing off a big construction undertaking, that is,

the cost in lives, the amount of coverage it takes to work on a job where there are bound to be a good many

fatalities. Indeed there was a note of sadness, particularly among the Italians, for only yesterday a rockfall killed two

Italian skilled men and badly injured four others.” Vol VI, 260.

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The construction project provided a wide variety of jobs for the specialization of Iranian

labor. Previous traditional dams required relatively few specialized roles compared to the

massive Dez Dam, which was the seventh tallest dam in the world when it was completed. The

dam’s construction lasted roughly five years and cost $63 million by June 21, 1963.159 Projects

of this magnitude also sought to transform agriculturalists into tradesmen and integrate these new

kinds of labor into Iran’s modernizing economy. According to a 1960 training report, at the dam

site,

Personnel . . . including a sizeable number who have never before held jobs, have been

taught a variety of construction trade skills pertinent to such activities as road

construction, large scale excavation work, surveying and drilling, transport, building

construction, etc.160

Nomads without communal pasture land and villagers without fields or traditional trades could

find a new mode of sustenance on the dam project. The author seems to consider whatever the

Iranian laborers did for sustenance before arriving to the dam site to not have been real work. He

might have been correct if having a “job” means working for a wage in order to purchase

commodities, but most, if not all, of the laborers had no doubt performed a great deal of work in

their lives. However, the sort of work valued in the increasingly globalized economy of Iran was

work that could be quantified and contribute to modern industries.

The dam also contributed to the re-education of Iranians at professional and

administrative levels. All levels of a project like constructing a major dam would ideally be

159 The general contractor for the dam completed all major operations by August 1963. KWPA, Quarterly Report 13

on Dez Multipurpose Project for Loan 247 IRN, October 31, 1963, DRC Records (527:5).; DRC, “Financial

Report,” 78.; The dam’s cost by that date was 4,729,732,413 rials, with a rate of 75 rials to 1 dollar. “Financial

Report,” 6. 160 D.A. Morrissey, “Education and Training Report,” 1960, DRC Records (557:6).

57

completed by Iranian personnel. Another report detailed the training of inspection positions at

the dam site,

On-the-job training of construction inspection personnel takes places in the Concrete,

Construction and Geology Departments, where 60 to 70 Iranians are employed. In

conjunction with or under the supervision of overseas engineers and technicians, Iranian

engineers and technicians take an active part in supervision or inspection of the

subcontractors’ work performance; they also participate in such work as concrete testing,

grouting, grouting inspection. Although the majority of these employees have had

previous experience in construction work, they all receive a short period of intensive

training in their specific assignments, during which they become familiar with the

established practices of their positions. Foreign engineers and supervisors believe that

this training prepares a number of Iranians for engineering and inspection work on any

construction project of comparable nature.161

Iranians also received on-site training as draftsmen, survey party chiefs, safety officers, account

clerks, supply clerks, office administrators, and many other jobs. Future research could attempt

to trace the future job assignments of individuals trained at the Dez dam, and the development

project as a whole, to provide a complete picture for how it contributed to Iran’s modern

workforce. How many of these men who helped construct Iran’s first modern dam went on to

build the dams on the Karkheh, Karun, and other rivers of Iran?

The Dez Dam became a tourist destination soon after construction began, resembling a

sort of national monument to Iran’s modernization. Official visitors, like DRC co-founder

Gordon Clapp, began arriving in November and December 1960.162 By January 1961, project

officials felt the need to construct entrance buildings and station lookouts to keep visitors from

wandering into work areas. In mid-1962, around 350 visitors arrived per month. As the project

neared completion in the spring of 1963, approximately 5,000-7,000 monthly visitors arrived

view the massive structure and its man-made lake. Roughly 10% of those in October and

161 Khuzestan Development Service, “Training and Development: A Special Report, 1957-1961,” 1961, DRC

Records (563:4), 21. 162 Williams, “December 1960.”

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November 1962 took an escorted tour through the dam’s tunnels.163 Just as holidays around the

world facilitate travel, the emerging dam received its highest number of visitors during Nowruz,

with some 16,500 visitors arriving to the site during the 1963 new year period.164 Since the

dam’s official commemoration ceremony took place during that same Nowruz, with the presence

of the Shah, a full entourage, and much fanfare, the extensive publicity probably contributed to

such high visitation numbers.165 Needless to say, traditional village weir-building ceremonies did

not garner such interest.

A final point on the dam’s construction is that the new reservoir necessarily displaced

residents of the land it covered. The DRC’s head engineer Voorduin identified the dam site in

May 1956 and the DRC began “First Phase activities (camp facilities, water supply, diversion

tunnel, etc.” in February 1958.166 Property concerns show up in a passage in the first project

report issued in December, 1957:

The right-of-way for the access road is presently being negotiated and land acquisition in

the Dez reservoir area will be studied by Mr. George Baker during his thirty-day visit in

January. This remains a pressing and critical item.167

Despite Williams’ framing of the issue as “pressing and critical,” apparently DRC and Iranian

officials made little to no progress towards resolving it. The issue did not resurface in technical

or narrative reports until August 1961, when Williams wrote,

We may also get in the bind on reservoir property. I have always been under the

impression that this has been cared for, but I see no activity in moving several villages

163 Williams, “January 1961,” “September 1962,” “October and November 1962,” “January 1963.” 164 Williams, “April 1963.” 165 Williams wrote, “The Shah’s visit on March 14 seems to have been a huge success. Since then we have had

visits by one of his brothers, one sister, and the family of another sister. I was also very pleased to show [former

head of the Plan Organization, Abolhassan] Ebtehaj and family over the job on March 17. I think he was the most

interested and best informed [sic] visitor we have ever had.” “March 1963.” 166 DRC, “Financial Report,” 80. 167 “Summary Progress Report.” 1957, DRC Records, 558:6.

59

from the reservoir area; and we hope to start flooding that in just over a year now. This is

just one more of many, many services that should be done by others, but on which we

much push and push.168

He wrote in Oct. 1961, “Reservoir land acquisitions are exactly where they were when I wrote

last month – also where they were last year, for that matter.”169 May 1962 finally brought some

activity:

After many months of prodding, to be sure our reservoir site has been acquired, a 3-man

team from Tehran visited the site, requested detailed maps of all land, fields, houses,

trees, and other improvements in this inaccessible area of some 65 sq.km.; and returned

to Tehran. While most of the land may belong to the government, the committee feels

that some compensation is due the peasant and/or nomad farmers. KWPA says the

mapping is not necessary, the farmers have been compensated by other means, and other

land acquisition procedures will be undertaken.170

The narrative reports suggest officials had a vague idea that the fate of villagers living in the area

of the future reservoir must be addressed but it was by no means a priority. The planners

prioritized speed, quality, and economic efficiency of the construction project over all else, and

so the villages were not addressed until absolutely necessary. Williams’ primary concern was the

presence of the villages in the reservoir area. The manner of the villagers’ compensation and

their fate once they left the area lay outside the interests of the project. The smaller-scale of

traditional river works makes it less likely that villagers were displaced from their homes as a

direct result of dams or other constructions. These smaller dams referred to as weirs created

smaller reserves of water, and village settlement shapes would have likely adjusted accordingly

over time if they were built in similar locations after each reconstruction. In this way, the modern

Dez dam controlled not only the river but also the communities near it. Rather than existing to

168 Williams, “September 1961.” 169 Williams, “September 1961.” 170 Williams, “April 1962.”

60

benefit the communities immediately near it, the dam existed for the nation at the expense of

local communities.

THE COMPLETED DEZ DAM AND RIVER CONTROL

“On June 22, 1963, when KWPA Finance assumed direct responsibility for the receipt

and disbursement of program funds, Pahlavi Dam and Transmission System were approximately

94 per cent complete.”171 After five years of construction, the DRC turned over primary dam

operations to Iranian control via the KWPA. The dam would facilitate year-round irrigation,

generate electricity for Khuzestan and other provinces, and of course control seasonal flooding.

By controlling the floods, the dam both protected property and demonstrated the increasing

power of the state. Tehran not only increasingly controlled the population through security

forces, but began to exert control over nature itself.

Just the construction period enumerated workers, the completed Dez dam contributed to

an enumeration of Khuzestan’s natural resource of water (also occurring at the new irrigation

headgates of farmers’ fields) that transformed it into a commodity. With the dam and the flood

control system of which it was a part, engineers could measure Zagros runoff into the new

reservoir, calculate what downstream flood levels would have been according to their models,

and measure actual river levels with observation crews and gauging stations. An event on May

29, 1963 demonstrated the newfound river control and enumerative abilities of the dam.

For several months – and in spite of some apathetic attitudes – I have insisted on opening

release slowly and observing the arrival of water at Dezful to be sure we did not endanger

life or property. On May 29 it paid off! A DPIP contractor built and lost a cofferdam that

day. He blamed the loss on a tidal wave from here, and threatened to bring suit for much

work and equipment. Fortunately, Jack France had two observers at Dezful taking

171 DRC, “Financial Report,” 68.

61

readings of that rise. It was spread over about two hours with gauge readings taken every

5 minutes. The fastest rate of rise was about 12 cm per minute. That was close!

A system of at least seventeen river gauges began upstream from the reservoir and continued

downstream from the dam.172 Initially radio, and later telephone, communications from the

gauge stations allowed technicians to relay information quickly to engineers back at the dam.

Another demonstration of the structure’s control over the river came in the spring of 1964,

Two DPIP employees were drowned at Dezful the night of April 30. By closing our

spillway for 12 hours they were able to find the bodies. Full control of the river sure

makes for good public relations.173

Just as Lilienthal dreamed, DRC engineers exercised an unprecedented amount of control of the

Dez River. In the past, the closest mechanism to “flood prevention” was really “flood avoidance”

and involved building villages in areas less likely to experience flooding. There was no real hope

of controlling rivers, even through dams and levees, and the effects of flooding were barely

enumerated. Instead of recording “cubic meters of water per second,” 19th century observers like

Hosein Ali Khan Afshar wrote “when rain comes for one or two continuous days, the river also

becomes like a sea of water.”174

Two major Khuzestani floods, in 1969 and 1972, appear in the DRC records after the

dam’s completion. The manner in which the KWPA prepared for them, responded to in-the-

moment challenges, and managed damages afterward demonstrates a profound change in the

way the affected societies coped with such a natural disaster. Although natural events like major

floods are rarely completely controllable, any ability to reduce the force of the water itself was a

revolution in the history between Iranian society and its water sources.

172 B. Malekani et al., “A Summary Report on the Flood of March 1972 in Khuzestan,” 1973, DRC Records

(558:5), 3. 173 Williams, “April 1964.” 174 Afshar, Safarname, 152.

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The winter of 1968-1969 experienced a higher than normal amount of rainfall, with

frequent storms culminating in a torrential concentration during January 18-25. The

meteorological station at Haft Tapeh recorded 150 mm of rainfall over seven hours, and

Manouchehr Alavi, hydraulic engineer, noted that the subsequent floods “produced the greatest

peak discharges in the history of recorded streamflow in some areas or rivaled past flood

stages.”175 According to his report,

At Godar Landar station (about 275 kilometers river distance above Ahvaz) the river rose

as much as 17.40 meters during 6 days (from 19 to 24 January), only about 4.30 meters

less than the high stage of February 1929 flood or 3.15 meters less than the severe flood

of March 1938.176

This January flood was largely the result of rainfall alone, but another flood in March and April

was a combination of rainfall with melting mountain snow. The two floods “surged through

hundreds of villages and evacuated houses,” produced around 1,440 million rials in damage to

“public facilities, roads, bridges, residential, commercial, and agricultural properties,” and the

January flooding killed 28 people.177 Rescuers used helicopters and boats to reach families

trapped on top of houses. The river overran sand banks in Ahvaz and flooded downtown. It

covered date palm plantations around Khorramshahr.178 Another flood occurred in March 1972

after ten days of storms.179 As with most late-rainy season floods, including the March-April

1969 flood, the rainfall combined with melting snow to flood downstream areas. The scale of

175 Manouchehr Alavi, “A Summary Report on Floods of January and March-April 1969 in Khuzestan,” 1969, DRC

Records (558:4), 1, 3. He notes on page 5 that “record collecting began at Ahvaz in 1893,” and on page 4 that “the

modern stream-gaging [sic] program began in 1955.” 176 Alavi, “Floods,” 4-5. 177 About $19 million USD at the time. Alavi, “Floods,” 1, 4. 178 Alavi, “Floods,” 4. 179 Malekani et al., “Flood,” 4.

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this flood was generally smaller, causing roughly 485 million rials of damage and no reported

deaths, but caused greater damage than the 1969 floods in the lower Karkheh region.180

The Dez Dam played a role in flood mitigation by controlling the flow of the Dez River,

although the Karkheh, Karun, and Jarrahi all contributed to flooding.181 At the height of the

Dez’s January flood flow, 4,070 cubic meters of water entered the dam reservoir every second

(m3/s). The dam only released 1,800 m3/s of water, however, and the reservoir absorbed the

excess. Such retention behind the dam probably reduced the amount of flooding in Ahvaz by

over 1 meter, since during the March 1969 flood, reservoir inflow was slightly less, the dam

released slightly more water, and Alavi estimated that its flow regulation decreased the flood

peak in Ahvaz by about 1 meter. The dam on the Dez was able to seriously mitigate flooding on

the downstream Karun, while very little damage occurred along the Dez River itself. Most of the

damage along the Dez came instead from the heavy rains, which did not permit field work and so

prevented wheat planting and kenaf threshing.182

Gauging and warning systems along the Dez and Karun Rivers increased data about

flooding to quickly inform official responses.183 The system could was able to give about two

days advance notice of flooding so people could prepare and evacuate,184 and field teams used

the system to connect with KWPA engineers at Dez dam “to ensure the maximum utilization of

these facilities for flood control purposes.”185 They also communicated twice per day with

180 Malekani et al., “Flood,” 13. 181 Alavi, “Floods,” 6. 182 Development and Resources Corporation, “Monthly Progress Report of Field and Project Advisory Services,

December 22, 1968 to January 20, 1969” 1969, DRC Records (557:8). 183 Alavi, “Floods,” 10. 184 Alavi, “Floods,” 10. 185 Malekani et al., “Flood,” 3.

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officials of the Province Auxiliary Emergency Committee and other relevant organizations in

Ahvaz.186

In the undammed and relatively undeveloped Karkheh and Jarrahi river basins,

descriptions of flood damages were less detailed. Permanent or semi-permanent structures like

crops, villages, and bridges sustained flood damage while waters covered roads and prevented

travel. Since large amounts of capital had not been invested in modernizing those agricultural

lands or building factories and the major population centers also lay outside those basins, there

was less incentive to quantify damages. Interestingly, Alavi describes the towns of Bostan and

Susangerd as “surrounded by flood water,” suggesting that they lie on higher elevations than

their surrounding areas just like the oldest Khuzestani settlements.187

19th century observers in Khuzestan only described the scale and effects of flooding in

qualitative terms, with few suggestions for mitigating the damage. In contrast, the KWPA’s

report on the spring floods of 1969 explicitly aims to “provide hydrologic data for use in flood-

control planning [and] in design of hydraulic structures to be built on the rivers.”188 The report

aims not only to describe the damage, like 19th century narratives, but to quantify it. One of the

primary methods of quantifying the flood’s effects used the river gauging stations to determine

exactly how much the river rose. Sometimes the KWPA was unable to obtain specific gauge

readings because of washed out roads and bridges, or not enough trained technicians were

available. For the 1969 floods they often relied on modeling to determine local peak flood levels.

After the 1972 flood, crews in planes surveyed areas unreachable by land to determine the extent

186 Malekani et al., “Flood,” 8. 187 Alavi, “Floods,” 7. 188 Alavi, “Floods,” 2.

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of flooding.189 The Resource Investigations Project (RIP), a research subdivision of the KWPA

affiliated with the DRC, also compiled data from 588 questionnaires collected from around the

flood-affected areas.190 The estimate of 1,440 million rials in damage and death count of twenty-

eight individuals arose from these questionnaires.191 Most of the economic damage of both the

1969 and 1972 floods stemmed from inundated agricultural lands, and then the increased

urbanization around Ahvaz and Khorramshahr alongside the Karun River. Almost half of the

flooded area along the Karkheh River was cultivated land. The Dez Dam was able to stem

flooding along the Dez River and prevent flood damage in that basin.

Whereas as traditional economic relief to farmers came in the form of takhfif reduction,

relief funds were provided to farmers in the new system.192 Officials based payments to replace

materials, crops and livestock and repair property on current market values with no attempt to

calculate depreciation. In their view,

These costs may have actually included improvements which go beyond the strict cost of

restoration of a given structure to its pre-flood condition . . . [enabling] property owners

to frequently replace the damaged or lost buildings with new and far better ones within a

short time after the flood.193

The extension of damage payments may have allowed villagers to replace or upgrade their

property, but the reports did not indicate any other financial aid. Specifically, if farmers owed

monthly payments on loans, they may have still been required to make those payments without

consideration for extenuating circumstances. The damage payments appear to have come from

the state, through the KWPA, while detailed reports on Khuzestani banking institutions around

189 Malekani et al., “Flood,” 3. 190 After a flood in March 1972, RIP officials also visited villages to survey damages, interview residents, and

collect questionnaires. Malekani et al., “Flood,” 3. 191 Alavi, “Floods,” 8. 192 Alavi, “Floods,” 9. 193 Malekani et al., “Flood,” 14.

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1970 say nothing about flood policy.194 As Khuzestan’s farmers became more embroiled in the

bureaucratic framework of modern financial institutions, the relevant authorities may have taken

a less personal and holistic consideration of their ability to fulfill financial obligations than the

provincial elites of the past.

CONCLUSION

For most of Khuzestan’s millennia-long history of interactions between societies and

floods, the seasonal high waters were not phenomena Khuzestanis could control. Residents of the

flood plains had to accommodate the regular exuberance of the rivers they depended on to grow

crops. Larger settlements were built on raised elevations to avoid the annual destruction. Near

annual destruction of weirs and other structures necessitated communal construction products

that either created bonds between villagers, between villagers and landlords, or both.

This mode of flood accommodation continued until the Development and Resources

Corporation completed the Dez dam in 1963. The dam represented both mankind’s control over

nature, an aspect of the modernization theory framework embraced by DRC and Iranian officials,

and an increased control of the Iranian state over the country. Flood control did not rest solely on

the Dez dam. It formed just one, although major, node within a network for flood prediction,

mitigation, and property repair. Technological developments paralleled institutional

developments, such as state departments dispensing financial provisions for lost property.

194 Public Administration Service, “Credit Requirements for Improved Traditional Agriculture, Dez Irrigation

Project,” 1971, DRC Records (811:1).; Development and Resources Corporation, “DIP Credit Program to Support

Improved Traditional Agriculture,” 1972, DRC Records (811:2).

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Chapter 3: Public Health and Forced Treatments

The rural public health programs of northern Khuzestan in the mid-20th century

diminished the personal and communal autonomy of villagers while alienating Iranians from

their environment. Although plans for modern medical services in Iran date back to at least the

early 19th century,195 the elite and the army enjoyed most of those services. No broad program

for addressing rural public health surfaced until the 1950s. Even in the mid-20th century, the

fundamental goals of the rural health programs were not to alleviate rural morbidity and raise the

standard of living for the sake of villagers themselves. Armed with faith in scientific knowledge,

the state intended to create productive laborers for whatever national projects it considered

necessary. Born from a systemic imperative to control “the rabble” and increase national

prestige, ministry agents attempted to impose a vision of an orderly and hygienic society in

Khuzestan. A disdainful lack of interest in dialogue with lower classes led to coercive public

health projects disconnected from local needs and realities.

KHUZESTANI HEALTH IN THE QAJAR PERIOD

The fundamental change in Ottoman Egyptian public health outlined by Mikhail

corresponds broadly with events in rural Iran nearly 150 years later: Egyptians and Iranians

traditionally considered disease a natural phenomenon, “something [they] expected and to which

they had adapted their lives.”196 Willem Floor divided the traditional medical institutional

infrastructure of 19th century Iran into spiritual healers, Galenic-Islamic physicians, and

traditional healers, but the three classes often overlapped and a person might incorporate aspects

195 Willem Floor, Public Health in Qajar Iran (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2004), 167-8. 196 Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2011), 201.

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from all three into their practice.197 The physicians who blended Galenic and Islamic medical

traditions represented the apex of the social hierarchy, tending to khans and shahs. Those with

interest in this path studied commentaries on Galen, Hippocrates, Razi, and Avicenna, and often

apprenticed under experienced physicians. This Galenic (or “Humoral”) tradition “considered

illness to be an imbalance in the body’s four elemental humors” and curing illness meant

restoring a person’s proper humoral balance. This same humoral concept is evident in Iranian

curative culinary ideas of garm (warm) and sard (cool) foods, and prescribing the correct diet

was one of the traditional Iranian physicians’ most important roles.198 Islamic medicine (or

“Prophetic” medicine) was largely derived from the traditions of the Prophet Mohammad’s

sayings and actions, and in Shi'i communities, those of the Imams.199 Afkhami identifies the

primary difference between Galenic medicine and Islamic medicine as what each perceives to be

the source of disease, respectively humoral imbalance or the divine/supernatural.

This Galenic-Islamic concept of disease, which also prevailed in Ottoman Egypt, “was a

function of place,” or environment.200 This was “the traditional miasmatic/humoral epistemology

that had dominated Iranian medico-intellectual trends for over a millennia [sic].”201 It is unclear,

however, to what degree these miasmatic/humoral ideas pervaded the rural villages of

Khuzestan. Galenic-Islamic physicians rarely operated outside of the cities and primarily tended

to the elites, whether shah, khans, or others. When Austen Layard visited the sick son of

Mohammad Taqi Khan in the Bakhtiari Mountains above Shushtar in the early 19th century, he

197 Floor, Public Health, 77-79. 198 Amir Afkhami, “Iran in the Age of Epidemics,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2003) 4-6. Egyptian physicians also

paid close attention to the role of food in health. Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 213. 199 Afkhami, “Age of Epidemics,” 7-8. 200 Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 203. 201 Afkhami, “Age of Epidemics,” 123-124.

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found three medical care-givers present. One was a seyyed, another was a seyyed who also “had

the reputation of being a skillful doctor,” and the third was a physician from Isfahan.202 These

medical professionals may have followed the khans to the garmsir of the upper Khuzestan plains

and travelled further to the sheikhs of Fellahiye and Mohammareh (modern-day Khorramshahr),

passing through villages and spreading miasmatic/humoral ideas that way. However, since

international traffic often passed through Kermanshah and Basra instead of Khuzestan, the

chance was lower that Galenic-Islamic physicians would pass through villages on the course of

their travels.

Spiritual healers in Iran included dead saints, denizens of the spirit world, and living

magical/prayer doctors.203 The tombs and shrines of dead saints still exist all around Iran and

perform a variety of functions. In Khuzestan, the Tomb of Daniel at Shush,

Was believed by the Arabs to be a telesm, or talisman, upon which the prosperity of

Khuzistan and its inhabitants depended. They attributed to its destruction all the

misfortunes which had since befallen them – the plague, the cholera, bad harvests, the

bursting of dams, the breaking down of bridges, war, and other calamities.204

Locals believed the tomb’s talisman had been stolen or destroyed around the time of Sir Henry

Rawlinson’s visit in 1836.205 Kasravi read in a Shushtar census volume that the talisman had

been stolen from its underground hiding spot at the tomb by British intelligence operatives and

agreed that the local population attributed epidemics of plague and cholera to its

202 Austen Henry Layard, Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia, vol. 1 (London: J. Murray, 1894),

145 203 Floor, Public Health, 80-99. 204 Austen Henry Layard, Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia, vol. 2 (London: J. Murray, 1887),

298.; Shush is located on the western edge of the former Dez Irrigation Project. 205 Rawlinson himself claimed a seyyed (perhaps a European in disguise) had destroyed the talisman before his own

arrival. Henry C. Rawlinson, “Notes on a March from Zoháb, at the Foot of Zagros, along the Mountains to

Khúzistán (Susiana), and from Thence Through the Province of Luristan to Kirmánsháh, in the Year 1836,” Journal

of the Royal Geographic Society of London 9 (1839): 69.

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disappearance.206 Various communities around the region tied rags to trees to “make a demand

for a cure or protection from the fairies.”207 Clement De Bode, traveling in Khuzestan at the

same time as Layard, noted that nomadic tribes around Behbahan tied colored rags to trees

around the shrines of saints as offerings in the hope of “the attainment of some worldly object,”

which certainly could have included protection from disease.208 These popular expressions of

reverence for figures of Khuzestan’s landscape also highlight the localness of Khuzestani notions

of diseases and cures. The potential for ridding communities of disease lay within villagers’

grasp through the local power of talismans and shrine offerings.

Individuals who harnessed the power of magic or prayer had a variety of methods for

protecting people from disease, but perhaps one of the most widespread practices involved

writing a prayer on paper or in a cup and drinking liquid that had touched it. If the prayer was

written on paper, the paper itself was often swallowed. Iranians also wore written prayers or

Qur’anic verses as charms somewhere on their bodies.209 Layard attempted to administer his own

medicine to Mohammad Taqi Khan’s sick son but instead the traditional medical men bathed

him in melon juice and Shiraz wine, and then had him drink water from “a porcelain coffee-cup,

on which a text from the Koran was written in ink.”210 Layard also described itinerant dervishes

traveling in the area of Dezful who were always “ready to prescribe a remedy for every ill, or to

give an amulet which is warranted to preserve the wearer against every accident.”211 Further to

the west, traveling from Shush,

206 Ahmad Kasravi, Tarikh-e ponsad sale-ye Khuzestan (Tehran: Donya-e Ketab, 2006), 179-180. 207 Floor, Public Health, 85. 208 Clement De Bode, Travels in Luristan and Arabistan (London: J. Madden and co., 1845), 282. 209 Floor, Public Health, 88-91. 210 Layard, Early Adventures, vol. 1, 148. 211 Layard, Early Adventures, vol. 2, 38-9.

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Seyyid Abou’l-Hassan, on account of his descent from the Prophet . . . was always a

welcome guest in tent or cottage, and especially among the wandering tribes, the

presence of such persons being rarer than in the towns, where they are generally too well

known to be much respected. As soon as [he] entered a tent, he was surrounded by men

and women begging for charms or ‘du’as,’ and his time was chiefly occupied in writing

verses from the Koran on bits of paper or parchment, to be enclosed in little bags and tied

round the necks of women who wished for offspring, and of children suffering from sore

eyes . . . The seyyid himself had little belief in these nostrums . . .212

The villagers and nomads of Khuzestan normally had to rely on their own community for disease

prevention and cure. They did not often receive visitors with enough education to write Qur’anic

verses, much less a trained Galenic-Islamic physician, and so any such visits were a rare

opportunity to gain protections they could not produce themselves.

Most Iranians in the 19th century did not live in or near cities, and so common medical

knowledge tended to reside with the older women and men of the community who had witnessed

more accidents, disease, and curative attempts over the course of their lives than the younger

villagers and gained knowledge of medicinal home remedies.213 This was a local knowledge,

transmitted to younger generations over the course of life rather than through carefully planned

curricula in places like the Dar al-Fonun in Tehran. The nature of knowledge transmission for

traditional healers made the practices particular and local so that it is difficult to know how such

individuals in the upper Khuzestan plains commonly dealt with malaria, trachoma, intestinal

parasites and the myriad other diseases afflicting the population. The barbers and frequent

bloodletting (hejamat) reported in other parts of Iran are not as evident in English-language

sources on Khuzestan, although people may have still practiced it. De Bode reported the

application of mumiya (a type of resinous substance) mixed with melted sheep’s fat to heal heavy

212 Layard, Early Adventures, vol. 2, 332. 213 Floor, Public Health, 141.

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bruises.214 Mumiya was an uncommon kind of bitumen only found in some areas of the Zagros,

including near Shushtar and Dezful, and so the villagers of the plains may have used it.

However, its scarcity and cost imply that its use was not widespread.215

In considering Floor’s categories of 19th and 20th century Iranian medical practitioners,

we should add a fourth category of EuroAmerican amateurs and professionals. These foreign

medical actors began regularly visiting Iran with the establishment of the British and French

embassies at the beginning of the 19th century and slowly increased in number afterwards.216 Due

to the increasing importance of the Persian Gulf to Britain, British agents and businessmen began

to survey Khuzestan and the Karun River during the same period.217 In the course of their travels

over nearly all of Khuzestan, they carried their own medicine and often dispensed it among both

khans, sheikhs, and villagers. The above accounts of Khuzestani notions of disease and health

come from the writings of just a few of these travelers. Foreign presence in Khuzestan continued

to increase as the British sought to open up trade through the Karun and later cemented their

presence with the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC). Through this

increasing presence, some rural Khuzestanis became familiar with modern medicines but British

interests in public health were generally narrowly restricted to areas directly adjacent to oil

industry operations. Khuzestani villages with no economic significance to the British were left

under the responsibility of the Iranian Ministry of Health, which before 1949 meant that they

were left to themselves.

214 De Bode, Luristan and Arabistan, 324. 215 Floor, Public Health, 160-161. 216 Floor, Public Health, 167. 217 Shahbaz Shahnavaz, Britain and the opening up of South-West Persia 1880-1914 (London: RoutledgeCurzon,

2005), 9.

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EPIDEMICS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE IN

KHUZESTAN

Epidemics were a constant presence in the lives of Khuzestanis throughout the 19th

century. Major cholera, plague, and typhus outbreaks struck in 1821, 1831, 1853, 1867, 1871,

1877, and 1890.218 These years most likely represent only the most major outbreaks, with

smaller epidemics occurring regularly between them.219 According to Kasravi, the spring 1831

plague outbreak left such a cultural imprint that Khuzestanis still told tales about its devastating

effects in the 1920s. He believed that half of the population of Shushtar and its surrounding area

either died or fled.220 The 1877 plague struck around 8,000 Shushtaris and killed more than 1,800

people.221

Epidemics did not exist in a vacuum. They often preceded or followed agricultural

disasters and weakened communities to the point that other diseases later killed survivors of the

initial epidemic. Locusts swarmed the agricultural area around Dezful in 1865, drought and

famine struck in 1866, and cholera spread into Iran from Iraq that same year.222 After Khuzestan

began to recover from the October 1853 cholera outbreak, malaria and typhus spread through the

region and rising grain prices the next year meant the urban poor had a harder time obtaining

218 Ahmad Latifpur, Khuzestan dar asr-e Qajar vol. 1 (Tehran: Entesherat-e Farhang-e Maktub, 2013), 249-263.;

Ahmad Seyf, “Iran and Cholera in the Nineteenth Century,” Middle Eastern Studies 38, no. 1 (2002): 176. 219 According to Shahnavaz: “Up to and even after 1898 . . . there was hardly an epidemic-free year. In 1893, due to

outbreaks of cholera, small-pox, and remittent fever [a type of malaria], there was a ‘considerable mortality’ in

Muhammareh and upper Karun . . . Two years later it was influenza, and in 1901 small-pox. The next year a

combination of cholera and small-pox caused distress. During the summer of 1904 the whole region in the south was

visited by plague and cholera . . . Another epidemic of cholera . . . hit Muhammareh and Khuzestan in 1911.”

Opening Up, 118-119. 220 Kasravi, Khuzestan, 178-180. Austen Layard traveled regularly through Shushtar less than two decades after the

epidemic and reported nearly 20,000 casualties of the plague. Early Adventures, vol. 2, 42. 221 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 249-258. 222 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 252, 262.; Afkhami, “Age of Epidemics,” 50.

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food. The situation lead to a rise of disorder in Shushtar and Dezful.223 In this way, epidemics

formed one part of a natural cycle that Khuzestanis had coped with for millennia, as had other

societies around the world.

Just as Mikhail noted that traditional Islamic injunctions against fleeing from plague did

not stop “all (or any) Muslims” in Egypt from doing so, such proscriptions did not stop residents

of Dezful or Shushtar from fleeing epidemics.224 Abd al-Ghaffar Najm al-Molk, sent by Naser al-

Din Shah to report on Khuzestan in 1881,225 noted that the urban elites had fled quickly in years

of plague and peasants eventually followed. These Khuzestanis settled across the Ottoman

border in Basra, Hillah, and especially in Amarah. Dezfulis alone had over 1000 homes in these

new areas.226 Hossein Qoli Khan, the governor of Khuzestan at the time, noted that ulama and

seyyeds also fled from Shushtar after the cholera outbreak of 1890.227 Although Khuzestani

villagers lacked the tools of modern medicine to combat epidemics, their mobility afforded them

at least one avenue of agency.

Many more epidemics swept through Iran in the 19th century, but it is not always clear to

what degree they affected Khuzestan. The region’s limited commercial and political status at that

time afford it less space in historical records. The Karun was only opened to international traffic

by Naser al-Din Shah in 1888 and twenty-five years later “the British were less than satisfied

with the ‘development’ of the area.”228 Most pilgrims, traders, and travelers chose routes around

Khuzestan. The popular pilgrimage route from Iran to the holy cities in Iraq lay north of

223 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 251. 224 Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 214. 225 Arash Khazeni, Tribes & Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 2009), 68. 226 Abd al-Ghaffar Najm al-Mulk, Safarname-ye Khuzestan (Tehran: Elmi, 1962), 26. 227 Latifpur, Khuzestan, 262. 228 Shahnavaz, Opening Up, 35, 45.

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Khuzestan.229 Although quarantines were regularly established at Mohammareh, the

governments in Tehran and Istanbul worried more often about Qasr-e Shirin, between

Kermanshah and Baghdad.230 Bushehr deflected international trade bound for Shiraz to the south

of Khuzestan.231 The province was not completely insulated, however, and epidemics still visited

it. In fact during the cholera epidemic of 1903, the focus on quarantines at Bushehr prompted

some merchants to send their goods from Isfahan to Ahvaz via the Lynch road, which ran

through the Bakhtiari Mountains and past Shushtar into the heart of Khuzestan.232

During the 19th century, the primary public health concern of the Qajar government on a

national scale lay in border protection against epidemics but global efforts had greatly reduced

that threat by the 1920s. Under Reza Shah, public health policy morphed into concern for

productivity and nationalist sentiment through the promotion of exercise and sport among the

middle and upper classes.233 This interest in the well-being of Iranians did not extend to the

lower classes. Whereas the state felt the need to promote vigor among its growing class of

professionals whose jobs lacked strenuous physical requirements, it only needed the lower-class

laborers alive so they could continue their already physically-demanding work. If nothing else,

the urban poor needed to be controlled and sanitized so they could be prevented “from wrecking

the whole nation-building project and infecting it with their latent pathologies.”234 These

229 Shahnavaz, Opening Up, 51. 230 Afkhami, “Age of Epidemics,”, 93, 328, 439. 231 Afkhami, “Age of Epidemics,” 204. The political battles between Britain and Iran over control of its quarantine

regimes occupy a large part of Afkhami’s study. He also provides maps in his appendices for the progression of

epidemics into Iran. They indicate paths through the Kurdish region, the ports on the Persian Gulf, and from Central

Asia while Khuzestan does not appear as a major disease passage. Afkhami, “Age of Epidemics,” 467, 468, 484,

485, 232 Shahnavaz, Opening Up, 114. 233 Cyrus Schayegh, “Sport, health, and the Iranian middle class in the 1920s and 1930s,” Iranian Studies 34, no. 4

(2002): 341-369. 234 Schayegh, “Sport, health, and the Iranian middle class,” 348-349.

76

observations by Cyrus Schayegh only applied to Tehran, the larger central cities, and their

immediate surroundings at the time. The emerging modern elite of Iran largely continued to

ignore the rural masses in distant areas from the cities.235 Although the early Pahlavi state and

elite may have felt disgust toward the lower classes, its attempts to control the urban poor like an

infectious disease contrasted with a lack of interest or ability to extend itself into Iran’s villages.

In the first half of the 20th century, British/APOC interests, khans, and sheikhs offset the

power of the Iranian state in Khuzestan and the relationships of these groups with lower classes

differed fundamentally from the state’s. Khans, sheikhs, and other landlords maintained

traditional sharecropping relationships with villagers, essentially uninterested in what villagers

did as long as they received their harvest yields. Landlords or their agents often mediated

disputes between villages but the daily life of a peasant was her or his own business. Provincial

elites invested in dams, canals, and other agricultural infrastructure to draw out harvests from the

land. Public health was not a primary concern.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company entrenched itself in Khuzestan in the first decade of the

20th century and introduced a novel system of public health. This new provincial power broker’s

approach stemmed wholly from the acute need for labor. While APOC needed British and Indian

employees for engineering and administrative purposes, it needed Iranians for “road-making; for

handling and transporting, by mule and ass, the machinery . . . used in constructional work; and

for assistance in the elementary operations of rig building and drilling.”236 APOC officials

235 Stephanie Cronin, “Riza Shah, the fall of Sardar Asad, and the ‘Baktiyari plot,’” Iranian Studies 38, no. 2

(2005): 211. 236 J.W. Williamson, In a Persian Oil Field: A Study in Scientific and Industrial Development (London: Ernest

Benn Limited, 1927), 145.

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instituted employee health services both to keep labor functioning and to retain it after

employment. Williamson surveyed the APOC operations in the mid-1920s and wrote,

It was not sufficient to attract the tribesmen to service with the Company by the prospect

of regular pay and the additional comforts [i.e. commodities] that pay could bring . . .

Gradually they came in increasing numbers into employment and problems immediately

arose as to their health, their housing and training . . . From the outset it was recognized

that proper provision for dealing with sickness was at least as important as attractive

pay.237

APOC’s interest in providing healthcare for its employees was fundamentally capitalist in its

desire for steady and reliable labor. The company’s medical services helped retain tribal

employees who were prone to high turnover, kept them physically healthy enough to work, and

attempted to mold new Iranians with modern notions of hygiene and disease.

Williamson’s comment about the importance of employees’ health, housing, and training

reflected a belief in the connectivity of these three factors that also manifested a century earlier

in Ottoman Egypt and decades later in the Dez Irrigation Project. Prior to these modernization

efforts, an individual’s health was inextricably linked with their environment. Through housing

and other infrastructural measures in company towns, APOC health officials introduced the

primacy of sanitized and delineated social spaces. Ottoman Egyptians had previously

experienced this through quarantine zones that separated families and friends irrespective of pre-

existing social institutions.238 In APOC’s Khuzestan company towns, laborers left behind their

villages and black tents to live in “rows on rows of sanitary well built [sic] houses.”239 The

orderliness APOC attempted to impose on the living spaces of its inhabitants by keeping animals

out of yards and building sewage systems was not just for cleanliness and disease prevention. It

237 Williamson, Persian Oil Field, 121-122. 238 Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 230-241. 239 Williamson, Persian Oil Field, 141.

78

also functioned to “intervene directly in the domestic space of the family and to modernize it.”240

The housing for the company’s labor class held the dual function of providing a sanitary

environment and also transforming the individual’s conception of what constituted a correct

domestic space. These functions of housing dovetailed with the company’s vision of the role of

education in health care.

Education and public health were bound together in the eyes of both APOC and the DRC

officials. Reiterating capitalist notions of human beings as exploitable resources, Williamson

complained about “this wastage of partly trained human material” when young Bakhtiari

apprentices left for the sardsir in the late spring of each year.241 Whereas Reza Shah’s

government and Iranian intellectuals largely promoted sports and physical education among the

middle and upper classes, APOC promoted these programs without cost among the youth “drawn

from various classes” in its company towns in order to expand the available pool of labor.242 The

notions of public health inherent in labor housing were reinforced at school, as Williamson noted

with satisfaction that the “sanitary arrangements and the equipment of both the primary and the

secondary school are good. There is a daily medical inspection and a keen watch is kept on the

health of the pupils.”243

Although these APOC attempts to transform Khuzestani notions of disease and hygiene

were pervasive in their company towns, their scope applied “only to the areas of the Company’s

240 Kaveh Ehsani, “Social Engineering and the Contradictions of Modernization in Khuzestan’s Company Towns: A

Look at Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman,” International Review of Social History 48, no. 3 (2003): 386. 241 Sardsir denotes regions where nomadic tribes spend the summer months and garmsir denotes winter grounds.

Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “Garmsīr and Sardsīr,” by Xavier de Planhol, accessed January 10, 2018. 242 Williamson, Persian Oil Field, 150-152. At Masjed-e Sulayman, these programs were only available to sons of

employees. The lack of attention to girls raises the issue of how APOC operations may have played a role in 20 th

century gender dynamics. 243 Williamson, Persian Oil Field, 153.

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operations. Elsewhere the public health department of the Persian Government [safeguarded] the

health of the Persian communities.”244 Most of APOC’s activities were at higher elevations along

the Zagros foothills, away from Khuzestan’s primary agricultural zones.245 In reality, the

operations of Iran’s Ministry of Health barely existed outside of Khuzestan’s largest cities and

much of the rural population continued to live without modern medical services.246

THE DRC AND EXPANSION OF PUBLIC HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE TO THE UPPER KHUZESTAN

PLAINS

Malaria emerged as the top public health concern throughout Iran after the threat from

plague and cholera subsided. In the early 1950s, over five million annual cases of malaria were

recorded in Iran’s population of about 17 million. The Ministry of Health partnered with the

Point IV program, the World Health Organization, and the Near East Foundation to launch a

national campaign against malaria in 1951.247 The ministry had a regional office in Ahvaz, but

“very few people in the field.” Deputy Minister of Health, Dr. Jamshid Amouzegar, claimed the

ministry’s limited budget did not permit it to expand activities in Khuzestan and made it difficult

to offer salaries for recruiting doctors from other areas of Iran.248 Only one Health Educator

existed for the entire province, and the ministry’s lack of Arab or Arabic-speaking employees

prevented it from effectively engaging with a significant segment of the population.249 By the

244 Williamson, Persian Oil Field, 133. 245 Kaveh Ehsani lists the primary APOC towns in Khuzestan as Abadan, Masjed Soleyman, Omidiyeh, Aghajari,

Haftkel, Naft-e Sefid, Gachsaran, and Lali. “Khuzestan’s Company Towns,” 362. 246 Carl E. Taylor, “Report and Recommendations on a Health Program for the Khuzestan Region,” 1959, DRC

Records (885:8), 14. 247 Byron J. Good, “The Transformation of Health Care in Modern Iranian History,” in Continuity and Change in

Modern Iran, ed. Michael E. Bonine and Nikki R. Keddie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 72. 248 “Note of Meeting held on February 13th, 1958. Subject: KDS Role in Public Health Activities in Khuzestan.

Present: G.R. Clapp, Dr. J. Amouzegar, J.J. Gouldan, T.A. Mead,” 1958, DRC Records (885:1). 249 T.A. Mead, “Medical and Health Problems in Khuzestan,” 1958, DRC Records (885:6), 10.

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time the DRC signed its contract with the Plan Organization in 1956, the primary public health

action taken by the Ministry of Health in rural Khuzestan was the deployment of mosquito spray

trucks. In 1953, 882 villages (est. population 317,000) were sprayed with DDT and the spray

program expanded to 2,702 villages (est. population 483,000) by 1956.250

DRC executives hired Dr. F.G.L. Gremliza as their top public health official and he

quickly developed research and treatment agendas. In an early survey conducted between

December 1958 and June 1959, he recorded 36 cases of malaria among 10,660 people (25

villages) in the Dez Irrigation Project.251 A malaria survey conducted in 1960 and 1961 found

only fifteen cases. He considered the anti-malarial campaign of the Ministry of Health well-

developed enough to refrain from an extensive program of treatment and instead remain vigilant

for new cases, although the last malaria epidemic had just occurred in 1957.252 Some public

health officials felt they had the disease comfortably under control while others warned of the

possibility of future outbreaks. Carl Taylor warned in 1959 that, although previous incidence

rates of 80-90% had fallen to 4-5%, there were signs that mosquitos were developing resistance

to DDT. Additionally, many of the Zagros nomads inhabiting the outskirts of the DIP area risked

re-introducing the disease because they were still too mobile in the mountainous terrain for

spraying strategies to have any effect.253 His warnings proved prescient as outbreaks in the fall

seasons of 1963, 1964, and 1965 led to 3,146 total cases appearing among a population of

roughly 13,500 people. While Gremliza, one of the DRC’s top medical officers, described

250 Jamshid Amouzegar, “A Report on Public Health Problems of Khuzestan (Ostan 6),” 1957, DRC Records

(886:2), 10. 251 F.G.L. Gremliza, “Operation of a Mobile Medical Field Unit and Public Health Survey in Dez Irrigation Project

Area for the Period September 1959 through June 1960,” 1960, DRC Records (885:7), 49. 252 F.G.L. Gremliza, “Report on the operations of a mobile medical field unit and on a public health survey in the

Deshteh-Mishan area of the Khuzestan Region: December, 1958, to June, 1959,” 1959, DRC Records (886:3), 30. 253 Taylor, “Report and Recommendations,” 6.

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malaria as “a pure ecologic process,” he rejected the expanded irrigation system as a factor in

malaria’s resurgence and concurred with Taylor about the importance of DDT resistance.254

There were several organizations providing health care in Khuzestan by 1958: the

Ministry of Health, the National Iranian Oil Company, the Red Lion and Sun Society, Queen

Soraya’s Charity, the Iranian State Railways, the Imperial Foundation, the Iranian Army, and the

Workers Social Insurance Organization. Between these organizations, Abadan, Masjed

Soleyman, Dezful, and Andimeshk each had a single hospital while Ahvaz had three hospitals. A

few “health centres,” dispensaries, and clinics also existed in the larger urban areas. Ahvaz might

have had as many as seventy private practitioners while Dezful had only a few. Although

Williamson wrote in 1927 that APOC hospitals often provided medical services to locals

unaffiliated with the company,255 in 1958 the NIOC and Railways Administration institutions

only offered services to their own employees.256 In a 1956 survey for the DRC, P.A. Satralker

rejected hospitals at Dezful and Shushtar as unsuitable for DRC use. The closest acceptable

hospital to the operations in the upper Khuzestan plains was located at Ahvaz.257

Whatever services those organizations offered, villagers in the rural areas around

Shushtar, Dezful, and Susangerd enjoyed few of them. Typhoid, dysentery, trachoma, intestinal

parasites, typhus, schistosomiasis, endemic syphilis, and leishmaniasis are just some of the

diseases rural populations of the upper Khuzestan plains continued to encounter without

254 F.G.L. Gremliza, “Selected Ecological Facts on Health in the Dez Pilot Irrigation Area,” 1966, DRC Records

(886:5), 89. 255 Williamson, Persian Oil Field, 124. 256 Mead, “Health Problems,” 2. Dr. Mead notes on this page that the three hospitals at Ahvaz were operated by the

Ministry of Health, the Railways Administration, and the Red Lion and Sun Society. Williamson described an

impressive APOC hospital at Ahvaz in 1927, and it is unclear what happened to that institution. It is possible

APOC/NIOC eventually considered it redundant as other hospitals opened in the city and consolidated operations at

Abadan and Masjed Soleyman. 257 P.A. Satralker, “Diseases and other Health Hazards in Khuzestan Region – Iran,” 1957, DRC Records (885:2),

Appendix: Map of Khozisthan No. 2.

82

institutional support until the DRC arrived.258 The earlier ravages of plague and cholera had

subsided because the diseases were not endemic to Khuzestan and the region benefitted from

efforts by global powers to protect themselves by controlling the spread of those diseases. APOC

was seriously concerned with the threat of malaria to its labor force by the 1920s but struggled to

contain the disease and was not primarily concerned with the agricultural areas of upper

Khuzestan.259 The agriculturalists of the upper plains only came under consideration for

extended public health services once the Pahlavi state considered them to be economic assets.

The state’s perception of an individual’s ability to contribute to the modern capitalist economy

determined their access to health care.

When the DRC arrived in Khuzestan in 1956, its medical officers de-emphasized malaria

because of the Ministry of Health’s spraying activities and instead identified schistosomiasis as

their top priority.260 Schistosomiasis is a disease caused by parasitic worms and the type found in

Khuzestan, Schistosoma haematobium, affects the urinary system. Common symptoms include

inflammation, ulcers, fibrosis (thickening and scarring of connective tissue), calcification (a

build-up of calcium), bacterial infections, and bladder stones, but the most common symptom is

hematuria (blood in the urine). Female S. haematobium lay hundreds of eggs per day while

inside human bodies and when their hosts urinate or defecate near water sources, the larvae hatch

and search for aquatic Bulinus truncatus snails. After a maturation period of several weeks, the

next stage of larvae leave the snail host in search of human hosts in the water. When the larvae

258 Satralker, “Health Hazards.” 259 Afkhami, “Age of Epidemics,”, 397. 260 Schistosomiasis is sometimes referred to as “bilharzia” or “bilharziasis.”

83

meet human skin, they penetrate it and migrate along the bloodstream through the heart, lungs,

liver, and portal veins until they reach the intestines or bladder and the cycle restarts.261

The ecology of schistosomiasis and Bulinus truncatus were not yet well understood by

1956 and the DRC medical officers quickly developed research agendas in their effort to control

it. Through experiences in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia, development specialists and

scientists were acutely aware of the possibility that their projects could introduce serious diseases

into previously unaffected areas.262 Although World Health Organization researchers proposed

that the two most heavily infected areas, the lower Karkheh and agricultural areas of Dezful,

might have contained schistosomiasis for a long time, they acknowledged that the disease might

have been in the process of spreading.263 Carl Taylor was afraid Lor and Bakhtiari tribesmen

would contract the disease in the spring or fall and transport the worm over the mountains to the

plateau proper.264 DRC executives and medical officials agreed on the possibility of increased

irrigation providing wider breeding grounds for B. truncatus and the need for preventative

action.265

261 Bruno Gryseels, “Schistosomiasis,” Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 26, no. 2 (2012): 388-389.;

Gremliza believed in 1959 that schistosomiasis was not present in DIP canals but Iranian public health professionals

determined that not to be true by 1970. F. Arfaa et al., “Progress Towards the Control of Bilharziasis in Iran,”

Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 64, no. 6 (1970): 912. 262 For examples in other regions, see: Mari K. Webel, “Mapping the Infected Landscape: Sleeping Sickness

Prevention and the African Production of Colonial Knowledge in the Early Twentieth Century,” in “Forum:

Technology, Ecology, and Human Health Since 1850,” Environmental History 20, no. 4 (2015): 722-735.; Emily

O’Gorman, “Imagined Ecologies: A More-Than-Human History of Malaria in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area,

New South Wales, Australia, 1919-45,” Environmental History 22, no. 3 (2017): 486-514. 263 J. Gaud and L.J. Olivier, “Report on Bilharziasis in Iran with Special Reference to Khouzistan Development

Plans,” 1959, DRC Records (886:1), 9. 264 Taylor, “Report and Recommendations,” 6. 265 Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,” 51.; Amouzegar, “Health Problems,” 8.; J.J. Goulden to New

York Office, Attn: G.R. Clapp, “Bilharziasis Survey – Karkheh Irrigation Project by Dr. Gremliza,” 11 December

1957, DRC Records (885:1); John Oliver to J.J. Gouldon, “KDS role in Khuzestan: Public Health Activities,” 7

January 1958, DRC Records (885:1).

84

Iran’s Institute of Parasitology and Malariology began surveying the area for

schistosomiasis nearly ten years before Gremliza joined the DRC but the German doctor was not

a new arrival to Khuzestan.266 He had spent over eight years working around Susangerd prior to

joining the DRC and spoke Arabic.267 By the end of 1958, Gremliza convinced the DRC to

establish a Mobile Medical Field Unit (MMFU) for the project area and assumed management of

it to visit communities in the lower Karkheh (Dec. 1958 – June 1959) and Dez agricultural area

(Sep. 1959 - June 1960). MMFUs were the first systematic extension of public health to the rural

upper Khuzestan plains. Recognizing that many rural Khuzestanis were too remote to access the

clinics and hospitals of the cities, Gremliza envisioned the MMFU as an efficient means to

provide basic healthcare to as wide a segment of the population as possible.268 In other words, he

sought breadth over depth. The MMFU team of twelve men, including Gremliza, surveyed

approximately 20,660 people in the lower Karkheh and Dezful agricultural area over 18

months.269 The schistosomiasis treatments they gave villagers were not simple, one-time

injections. Both adults and children received one injection per day for ten days, and villagers

sometimes experienced side effects like abdominal pain.270 These treatments introduced a system

of disease control in Khuzestan that continued well into the 1970s.

266 Arfaa et al., “Present Status of Urinary Bilharziasis in Iran,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical

Medicine and Hygiene 61, no. 3 (1967): 358.; David Lilienthal wrote about Gremliza in his memoirs, “He and his

wife had spent seven years in the saddest spot I know, the Susangard area almost on the Iraq border. These abjectly

poor Arabs had been given no attention for – well, never. He ministered to them, they adopted a little Arab girl,

learned how confidence and respect and love are won, among the desperately poor – or anyone. The Journals of

David E. Lilienthal, Vol. V: The Harvest Years 1959-1963 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 261. 267 J.C. Miller to Mr. Jandry, “Dr. Gremliza – Schistosomiasis,” 18 April 1958, DRC Records (885:1). At least part

of this time was spent working for the Imperial Foundation. 268 F.G.L. Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,” 1-2. 269 Gremliza, “Survey in the Deshteh-Mishan Area,” 34.; Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,” 4.; The

MMFU did not survey in July or August of 1959, presumably because of the heat. 270 Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,” 35.

85

The second role of the MMFU was to help the DRC, and therefore the state, “view” the

region it intended to “return” to prosperity, and so Gremliza organized project protocols to

ensure the highest participation rate possible.271 He anticipated popular reluctance to engage with

teams of surveyors who brought only questionnaires and no tangible benefits.272 He recruited

MMFU team members from the operating areas and visited village sheikhs ahead of the

MMFU’s arrival, explaining that “the improvement of conditions within the village must depend

upon the accumulation of reliable information about it and its problems.”273 The MMFU was

able to survey at least 95% of the inhabitants of most the Karkheh area’s seventeen surveyed

villages.274

The MMFU team collected more than just information on schistosomiasis. MMFU team

members took turns drawing maps of the forty-two surveyed villages in the Karkheh and Dezful

areas, each being checked and signed by Gremliza. The maps included housing type, gardens,

irrigation canals, pumping stations, locations around the villages where teams found both dead

and live B. truncatus snails and the locations of which homes had cases of schistosomiasis and

leprosy. Karkheh surveys listed the village’s sheikh, population, survey participation rate,

principal occupations, domestic animals, crops and dairy products, government facilities, general

sanitation, housing type, number of houses, water supply, pumping stations, standard of living,

number of bathhouses, number of latrines, manner of excreta and household refuse disposal,

presence of health officers, infant mortality, schools, and literacy. The Dezful surveys included

271 Many of the primary sources for this chapter are the monthly and quarterly reports created by the DRC and its

affiliates for the Iranian government. 272 Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,” 2. 273 Gremliza, “Survey in the Deshteh-Mishan Area,” 9, 12-13. 274 Gremliza, “Survey in the Deshteh-Mishan Area,” 13.; Gremliza blamed the 80-85% participation rate average of

the six villages in the DIP on the absence of village leaders. 25 total villages were surveyed in the Dezful area.

86

those categories and added more like the number of mosques, shops, road conditions, electricity

supply, and the common birds of the area. The surveys listed individual disease incidence and

prevalence rates, differentiating between age and gender. If the DRC wanted to know more about

the populations within the Dez Irrigation Project, it had found the perfect man for the job in Dr.

Gremliza.

Schistosomiasis spread through the contamination of water with human waste and

subsequent human contact with that water, so DRC officials prioritized water sanitation in their

public health program. Of the 32 villages in the appendices of Gremliza’s surveys, he described

the primary waste disposal of 31 villages as “indiscriminate and on the surface in alleys, open

spaces, and gardens.” Only two villages had latrines and the water supply of all but three villages

was untreated.275 In the absence of a latrine system, rural Khuzestanis defecated and urinated

next to whatever bodies of water lay near the village and facilitated the life cycle of S.

haematobium.276

Despite the heavy focus of Iranian and American public health officials on

schistosomiasis and village sanitation, villagers of the upper Khuzestan plains did not consider

themselves to be living in exceptionally dangerous conditions. Gremliza wrote in his conclusion

of the Dezful survey that, “the attitude of the people of the surveyed zones was, nevertheless,

passive rather than active, and they accepted what was done without expressing any wish to

275 Gremliza, “Survey in the Deshteh-Mishan Area,” appendix.; Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,”

appendix. 276 Satralker, “Health Hazards, 21.; Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,” 54.; Amouzegar wrote in

1957: “Abadan is the only city in Khuzestan which could be said to have a piped water supply, but even at that

incomplete. A municipal supply is now being installed for Khorramshahr. Plans are already underway by the Plan

Organization for Ram-Hormoz, Dezful, Andimeshk, Khoram-Abad, and Behbahan.” “Health Problems, 5.

87

participate.”277 Gaud and Olivier reported that “in spite of the apparent high prevalence, the

people do not complain of the infection, though they recognize haematuria as abnormal.”278

Mead added,

The question is put, village by village, ‘Are there any sicknesses here?’ and the answer is

always, ‘No.’ What they mean is not, of course, that they are in perfect health, but that

there is no major epidemic at the moment . . . there is a heavy incidence of disease of all

kinds . . .279

Until the late 1950s, the Iranian state and international non-governmental organizations had

ignored the people of the upper Khuzestan plains, who retained their traditional conceptions of

disease. The anti-malarial teams who began spraying villages in 1949 had no need to engage

with locals and challenge their beliefs. Once the Iranian state decided that upper Khuzestan could

benefit the national economy, it began to exercise control over both villagers’ homes, bodies, and

instruct them in a colonial manner on proper personal hygiene.

HEALTH FOR LABOR & THE LOSS OF AUTONOMY

Khuzestani villagers were forced to give up control of their personal and communal

autonomy in exchange for medical care. The patients’ reluctance to take part in Gremliza’s

surveys did not stem from the novelty of the MMFU’s medicines but rather the conditions under

which those medications were given; Khuzestani villagers had actively pursued foreign medicine

from European travelers since the 19th century.280 Gremliza represented a systemic shift in public

health. He was able to procure high rates of participation not only because of the care he took in

277 Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,” 51. 278 Gaud and Olivier, “Report on Bilharziasis,” 8. 279 Mead, “Health Problems,” 11. 280 Isabella Bird, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), 336.; E.R. Durand, An

autumn tour in western Persia (Westminster: A. Constable & co., ltd., 1902): 125.

88

engaging each village, but also because of the subtle coercion of his discussions with village

sheikhs: health care in exchange for information. The almost-aggressive approach to public

health in the Dezful agricultural area as typified by Gremliza intensified as direct responsibility

shifted fully to the Iranian state over the course of the 1960s.

Like APOC earlier in the 20th century, DRC officials believed in the importance of public

health because laborers had to be healthy in order to work. Gremliza, considered one of the most

sympathetic DRC officials to the local population, wrote,

The planning of irrigation projects in the Khuzestan necessarily considers the general

health of the population, its hygiene and medical care, because the cultivators in these

areas will be required to undertake a workload which will be greater than that previously

required of them.281

He and other DRC officials promoted the practice of concentrating medical service within

“accessible areas of economic, social, or political importance” because servicing all of

Khuzestan’s rural population did not make economic sense.282 The dependency of public health

on economic productivity meant that the state was more motivated to insert itself into the

personal and communal lives of Khuzestanis without regard for their agency or privacy. Some

aspects of the public health program moved beyond Gremliza’s subtle threats to increase

participation and instead overtly coerced villagers to participate in programs the state deemed

necessary.

An MMFU team established in the village of Shamoun in 1963 maintained state

supervision by continuing the types of surveys begun by Gremliza of endemic diseases and

281 Gremliza, “Survey in Dez Irrigation Project Area,” 1.; 282 Gremliza, “Survey in the Deshteh-Mishan Area,” 30.

89

collecting blood and urine samples.283 By April 1964, three more MMFUs had been established

in the villages of Najafabad, Ghaleh Nov Askar, and Balenjun. Two more public bathhouses

were built in Najafabad and Ghaleh Robe Bandebal and the health officials kept track of times

per month the villagers bathed. Water pool fill-in, urine sampling, and the other surveillance

activities instituted at Shamoun spread to these other villages.284 Official reports to the

International Bank for Rehabilitation and Development estimated that health agents

headquartered in the three bathhouses were dispensing 3,000-4,000 “medical treatments” per

month.285 The MMFUs traveled from their bases in these villages to visit surrounding areas,

examining over 31,000 villagers for epidemic diseases in the Dez Irrigation Project by 1967.286

The permanent presence of multiple MMFUs searching for schistosomiasis and other

contagious diseases in the DIP allowed health agents to enter into villagers’ lives on a regular

basis. By 1970, villagers no longer had to endure ten days of injections for schistosomiasis

treatment as in Gremliza’s surveys, but the treatment was still unpleasant. At that point, villagers

took Ambilhar tablets for four days under agent supervision, once in the morning and once in the

evening, and the agents examined villagers’ mouths afterwards to ensure they ingested the

medication. The side effects of this mass chemotherapy treatment were more severe than those

reported by Gremliza, including abdominal pains, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, and insomnia.

283 KWPA, Quarterly Report 10 on Dez Multipurpose Project for Loan 247 IRN, January 31, 1963, DRC Records

(527:4).; On March 14, 1963, an inspection of Shamoun by Mohammad Reza Shah symbolized yet another manner

of state supervision. KWPA, Quarterly Report 11 on Dez Multipurpose Project for Loan 247 IRN, April 30, 1963,

DRC Records (527:4). 284 KWPA, Quarterly Report 15 on Dez Multipurpose Project for Loan 247 IRN, April 30, 1964, DRC Records

(527:6). 285 The report does not define these medical treatments. KWPA, Quarterly Report 14 on Dez Multipurpose Project

for Loan 247 IRN, January 31, 1964, DRC Records (527:5). 286 Out of a total estimated DIP population of 115,430. In the rest of Khuzestan, 18,297 individuals were examined

in areas deemed foci of schistosomiasis by Iranian public health officials. Research was supported by the Institute of

Public Health Research at Tehran University’s School of Medicine and was funded by the Ministry of Health, the

Near East Foundation, and the Plan Organization. Arfaa et al., “Status of Urinary Bilharziasis,” 361.

90

Health agents re-visited the examined villagers three months, six months, and one year after the

initial chemotherapy to collect urine samples and check for successful treatment. 7,317 DIP

villagers underwent this treatment in 1967 and 1968, and 88.8% completed the entire four-day

process. To monitor the possible spread of schistosomiasis, health agents procured urine samples

from children less than 10 years old in villages around the DIP. If the child’s test results were

negative after three days of urine testing, the agents returned each subsequent year to repeat the

procedure and see if the child had newly contracted the disease.287

Schoolchildren and their families were further stripped of their autonomy when the

Iranian state began supplementing the meals of some schools with “necessary vitamins and

proteins” and excluding other schools in order to observe the effects on the general health of the

children.288 By July 1968, 1,358 children in twenty-eight schools of the DIP had been given

“multi-purpose food powder” in their meals while a single school without supplements

represented the control group. Quarterly reports charted how much weight the children gained

and how many remained classified as underweight. A March 1970 report noted the “nutritional

feeding program” had been suspended because of Nowruz holiday but whether education

officials were continuing to supplement children and not others for the purposes of

experimentation is unclear.289 Mentions of this program in the archival material I gathered are

scarce and the reports never mention whether such a program had been discussed with the

affected communities or if school officials instead withheld knowledge from them.

287 Arfaa et al., “Control of Bilharziasis,” 913-14. 288 KWPA, Quarterly Report 27 on Dez Multipurpose Project for Loan 247 IRN, April 20, 1967, DRC Records

(527:7).; KWPA, Quarterly Report 32 on Dez Multipurpose Project for Loan 247 IRN, July 31, 1968, DRC Records

(527:8); 289 Development and Resources Corporation, “Monthly Progress Report of Field and Project Advisory Services,

February 20, 1970 to March 20, 1970” 1970, DRC Records (558:2).

91

DELINEATION OF THE CITIZEN

The delineation of the modern Iranian citizen as defined by the state involved both the

proper constitution of the individual citizen and the proper public spaces in which he or she

would move around. Concern for creating a proper citizen led to hygienic instruction in

educational curriculum. Concern for the proper spaces in which these modern citizens would live

manifested in monitoring the neatness of villagers’ homes and reconstructing villages according

to the sanitary standards devised by the DRC and state public health officials. Grace Goodell

argued that the Pahlavi state’s obsession with neatness in the Dez irrigation area derived from the

“compulsion to impose its own order” rather than concern for the well-being of its citizens.290

Several state tactics certainly seem to prioritize control or order over function with no benefit

even toward producing healthy labor for capitalist enterprises.

In the spring of 1963, Shamoun became the first village to undergo a “health education

and sanitation program.”291 Heavy machinery filled in stagnant pools of water surrounding the

village that health agents identified as breeding grounds for mosquitos and B. truncatus snails

and “200 tons of waste was removed from one street” over the course of five weeks. Health

agents dispensed toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap to thirty boys and administered hygiene

training in the village school. The project team also built a cattle yard outside of the village

because of officials’ concern with the widespread practice of farm animals sleeping inside the

villagers’ homes. A public bathhouse was constructed with office facilities for MMFU staff and

agricultural village workers. In this way, the state’s presence was physically established in the

290 Grace Goodell, The Elementary Structure of Political Life: Rural Development in Pahlavi Iran (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1986), 157. 291 KWPA, Quarterly Report 10.; Gremliza, “Ecological Facts,” 79.

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structure representing a new order of public health in the village. Officials did not believe

villagers could be trusted to implement or maintain the official vision of village sanitation on

their own and so agents settled into this central structure to ensure they complied. In the village

Goodell observed, orders from the Plan Organization instructed the village agents to enforce the

following rules,

Peasants must not disobey a Justice Corpsman, must not light cigarettes on the threshing

floor, must repair their house walls after a storm, must send their daughters to school,

must sweep up all the manure, must not leave tools lying around the house, must bring all

their animals out for vaccination when dulat’s veterinary contingent appears, must use

toilets eight feet deep and three feet wide with cement bases according to the Swedish

Plan of Hygiene for the Middle East, must obey all orders of all State officials, must not

eat three-day-old bread, and so forth . . . a $1.50 fine for the peasant who fails to stop up

a rat hole in his section of the threshing floor, $3.25 for the second offense . . . Another

serious fine for the mother who allows her child to pick up a dead rat by the tail, double

the fine for his playing with it, $4.50 for the second offense . . .292

These were the strictures applied in post-land reform peasant-owned villages, where the residents

had much more freedom than in the shahraks. Many of these rules doubtlessly went unenforced,

but they demonstrate the degree to which the state intended to insert itself into the lives of

villagers who had lived independently until the arrival of the DRC and land reform.

Although the Iranian state strove to delineate proper spaces for modern citizenry, it was

not all powerful. Health officials remained unsatisfied with the overall personal hygiene

practices of villagers. By June 1968, 57% of livestock owners in the Dez Irrigation Project still

kept their animals inside their homes. 49% of village homes had modern toilets (which was

actually a huge increase). 135 out of 141 families in the DIP still drew their drinking water from

the Dez River or the canals it fed, while village health workers tried in vain to keep livestock out

292 Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political Life, 148.

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of the canals and worried about city waste flowing downstream from Dezful.293 After the KWPA

built a drainage canal in Najafabad in its 1964 sanitation efforts, villagers soon began digging

clay out of it to use for repairing their homes. The drainage canal then failed to function properly

and B. truncatus snails reappeared in the village.294

The state was able to enforce public sanitation measures most effectively in the shahraks

it built for the entry of industrial agribusinesses into the DIP. The exaggerated manifestations of

the state’s power in these new towns highlighted the farcical disconnect between the state’s

vision of a modern society and the needs of rural Khuzestanis.

Beyond the school a visitor from Toronto or Tokyo would be shown the clinic and

ambulance center with classrooms for popular instruction, modern medicinal labs, five or

six consultation rooms equipped with clinical tables, shiny new cabinets, sinks, desks,

sterilization and storage facilities, even the doctor’s implements in drawers – all having

been ready for opening for five years.

Elsewhere in the model town visitors would see the mortuary for ritual preparations for

burial, a slaughterhouse for butchers, two ample bathhouses, and a technical high school

to retrain younger peasants for jobs modern agriculture required. Like the clinic, these

facilities, although equipped and ready, had never been used, despite the fact that the

workers had petitioned the Ministry [of Water and Power] repeatedly to make them

available and other Ministries – Health, Education, Labor – had offered staff . . . An

engineer told me that before the shahrak had been built, peasants to be moved into it had

listed these particular facilities as those they considered the primary needs of their new

urban center.295

Instead of using the bathhouses, shahrak residents built showers from the public faucets around

town.296 Although health agents in the villages decried the lack of sanitary toilets, state engineers

constructed the shahrak’s toilet pits only a few feet deep so that they were overflowing by

293 Ahmad Qasemi, Barrasi-e Vaz’-e Ejtema’i va Eqtesadi-e Rusta-ha-ye Mantaqe-ye Tarh-e Abyari-e Sad-e

Pahlavi (Dezful) (Tehran: Vezarat-e Amuzesh va Parvaresh, 1968), 38-39. 294 Gremliza, “Ecological Facts,” 81. 295 Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political Life, 172. 296 Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political Life, 257.

94

1974.297 Mirroring health agents’ disgust at the common practice of farm animals sleeping inside

villagers’ homes, animals were forbidden in shahraks. The state initially forbade residents from

building walls around their homes because it wanted to be able to inspect their neatness from the

street. Officials became increasingly frustrated with the “clutter” that accumulated in yards and

began threatening to fine residents in 1974. The Ministry of Water and Power then initiated a

campaign to clear the house lots with the claim that cluttered yards fostered schistosomiasis.

Later that year, it reversed course and decreed that all homes had to be surrounded by brick

walls. “More important than inspection from the street were homogeneity and regularity,”298

reminiscent of the laborers’ quarters in the oil company towns. The shahraks also permanently

“fixed” the sanitation problems of their inhabitants’ original villages because officials sent

bulldozer teams to demolish them after the residents were relocated. These new towns

paradoxically represented maximal state power to intervene in the lives of Iranians and minimal

ability or will to improve their quality of life. These paradoxes magnify the state’s true

unconcern for the welfare of rural Khuzestanis to an exaggerated degree, clarifying the more

subtle dynamics at play in the traditional villages.

The Khuzestan Water and Power Authority had only built two more village bathhouses in

the DIP four years after the initial bout of construction in 1963-64, bringing the total to five by

1968.299 If many villagers still lived in conditions that propagated disease, it may have been

because the state had not yet renovated their villages and they did not have the resources to

improve their own public health infrastructure on their own. Table 1 (p. 95) shows the responses

297 Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political Life, 175. 298 Shahrak residents also regularly attempted to keep animals anyway. Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political

Life, 179-180. 299 Qasemi, Barrasi, 38.

95

from villagers in a survey undertaken by the Ministry of Education about how they responded to

illness. 83% responded that they would find a doctor. Ten years before, very few villagers in the

upper Khuzestan plains had any access to doctors. After 1958, the DRC and Khuzestan Water

and Power Authority constructed roads, promoted the purchase of automobiles, and established

nodal MMFUs to expand access to healthcare of the villagers but access was still incomplete.

Percentage Number of

Families Answer

83% 117 Find a doctor

13.48% 19 Rest

2.12% 3 Nothing

0.7% 1 Home Remedy

0.7% 1 Find an apothecary

Table 1: Actions of villagers in the DIP when catching a sickness. Adapted from: Ahmad

Qasemi, Barrasi, 39.

Villagers with medical emergencies requiring immediate care often could not access it and any

moderately complicated injuries or diseases still required villagers to travel to Ahvaz or Tehran.

In the early 1970s, residents could do nothing for a dying boy that drank pesticide in a village on

96

the edge of the DIP because the only local truck was gone for the day. In another case, a worker

at Safiabad collapsed while unloading cement from a truck. The KWPA determined he could not

be treated locally and transported him to Tehran. His family did not see him again until after he

died and officials directed his wife to his grave in a public Tehran cemetery after she traveled to

the capital to find out what happened to him.300

Although villagers’ access was still far from certain, they had experienced a definite

epistemological shift concerning the nature of disease. Table 2 (p. 97) shows responses from a

1968 survey asking villagers to identify causes of disease. Over 72% of respondents attributed

disease to sanitation and bacteria. In the village Goodell observed, residents also seemed to

prefer modern medical practitioners over traditional medicines or charms.301 Most, or at least

many, understood modern notions of disease and desired modern services but continued to lack

reliable access to them. The shahrak residents’ requests for clinics and bathhouses makes it clear

that villagers considered these to be desirable.

Since European travelers began increasingly traversing Khuzestan in the early 19th

century, villagers had generally been willing to accept non-traditional medicines. They lacked

many (but not necessarily all) of the dogmatic biases found among urban populations and

Galenic-Islamic physicians; such professionals usually avoided their villages. The logic behind

quinine’s effectiveness did not matter as much as the fact that it worked. Villagers did not avoid

modern medicines out of superstition but rather lacked access to them. After 1958, such

medications became more prevalent in the upper Khuzestan plains through Mobile Medical Field

Units and other initiatives while the state simultaneously expanded rural education efforts.

300 Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political Life, 94, 241-242. 301 Goodell, Elementary Structure of Political Life, 92, 260.

97

Percentage Number of

Responses Answer

66% 93 Filth and contaminated water

7.8% 11 Overwork

6.38% 9 Microbes

5.67% 8 Heat and cold

4.93% 7 Other

9.22% 13 Don’t know

Table 2: What villagers in the DIP believe cause sickness. Adapted from: Ahmad Qasemi,

Barrasi, 40.

ALIENATION FROM THE ENVIRONMENT

Thinking about Khuzestan, the Deputy Minister of Health wrote that “the basic problems

in connection with any development program are those associated with the control of the

environment.”302 Since the entire Dez Irrigation Project was conceived with faith in modern

society’s ability to shape the environment to its will, as discussed in Chapter 1, this should come

as no surprise. Development officials conceived both disease, rivers, and the actual population as

obstacles to economic growth if not properly harnessed. While state engineers forced the Dez

302 Amouzegar, “Health Problems,” 1.

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River into new canals with little concern for the traditional irrigation system, health agents

obliged Khuzestani villagers to undergo chemotherapy with nasty side effects and reshaped

villages to fit the state’s vision of a modern society.

Disease was primarily a common and natural, though unpleasant, phenomenon for

villagers of the upper Khuzestan plains prior to 1958. Canals and animals, for example, were

integral parts of village life. Canals not only fed crops but also provided sites for social

interaction as women washed kitchenware and clothes. Canals both provided water for the house

and acted as sites for waste disposal. Animals also provided for villagers through their labor and

bodies as food. Most villagers could not afford herds of animals and so the few a family owned

were valuable enough to sleep inside the same room in which the family slept. Canals and

animals, as well as disease, were not separate from society but inseparable.

When the Iranian state decided Khuzestan could potentially contribute to the country’s

economy and prestige, public health agents executed a program that separated canals, animals,

and especially disease from society. Canals and livestock became calculable means to an

economic end and disease a potential obstacle. All of these new programs were to be controlled

by the state because it did not trust villagers to fulfill their proper roles in a modern society. The

state ignored and diminished villagers’ autonomy when it reconfigured villages, experimented on

schoolchildren through nutritional supplements, and coerced thousands of adults and children

into prolonged chemotherapy treatments with horrible side effects. The state succeeded in

educating rural Khuzestanis about modern theories of disease, but villagers were never

categorically opposed to modern medicine or sanitation measures. They simply lacked the

opportunities urban Iranians had to learn about them and lacked the resources to attain them. The

99

Pahlavi government carried out this forced modernization without engaging in dialogue with

villagers because their welfare was not its true concern. All of these actions were part of a desire

to produce a workforce that could work longer and more efficiently to produce commodities and

capital for the state. Accordingly, the state quantified the villager’s quality of life through the

number of bicycles, radios, electric fans, and other commodities purchased by villagers.303

The state’s fundamental lack of true concern for the residents of the upper Khuzestan

plains and self-absorbed logic manifested itself most evidently in the shahrak clinic full of

medical equipment, which was arguably intended primarily for display. The Dez Irrigation

Project was not only meant to contribute to Iran’s economy but also to demonstrate the prestige

and capability of the Pahlavi state. Iran’s professional, technical, and political classes yearned to

be seen as equal to the EuroAmerican powers that dominated the globe, and it intended to do so

by lifting Khuzestanis up out of the mud into sanitized, white-washed homes.

303 Development and Resources Corporation, “Monthly Progress Report of Field and Project Advisory Services,

May 22, 1969 to June 21, 1969,” 1969, DRC Records (557:8).

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Conclusion

People concerned with Iran’s environmental problems usually emphasize the primacy of

water, and this environmental history centers it accordingly. Water is so integral to life that

disruptions in its usual modes of use can have a wide range of social repercussions. This thesis

examines changing social relationships with the natural environment in the province of

Khuzestan during the last decades of the Pahlavi state through the lenses of irrigation, floods,

and disease. Before the 1950s, villagers of the upper Khuzestan plains could not control annual

flooding, so they established villages bearing in mind an area’s proclivity to flood destruction.

Floods inevitably destroyed (or at least degraded) homes, bridges, and irrigation structures

almost every year and the communal construction and repair projects regularly reinforced

communal ties. Neighbors worked side by side to accomplish tasks that directly benefitted most,

if not all, project participants. The large amounts of water in Khuzestan meant residents were

exposed to an abundance of mosquitoes and water-borne parasites. Malaria, schistosomiasis, and

other diseases were ever-present in village life, and residents had to depend on themselves for

any medical treatments they needed. Rural Iranians lived intimately, if not peacefully, with their

natural environment.

20th century state initiatives degraded this relationship between society and environment

because of a modernist faith in humanity’s power over natural phenomena and a capitalist drive

to replace traditional modes of labor with new jobs integrated into a cash economy. Engineers

designed plans for new canals and a massive modern dam that foremen and their professional

crews built with over one million tons of concrete.304 Village health agents coerced residents into

304 Development and Resources Corporation, “A Financial Report on Funds Received and Accounted for from

March 29, 1956 to June 21, 1963,” 1964, DRC Records (558:3), 80.

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mass chemotherapy treatments while school officials experimented with the diets of

schoolchildren to see what mixture of proteins might produce the healthiest citizens. These

projects reveal a state faith in the ability of experts to control natural phenomena and

successfully order society without input from local communities.

Khuzestanis have used irrigated agriculture extensively for at least 3,000 years. The

abundance of rivers flowing down from the Zagros mountains toward the Persian Gulf have

always provided a significant amount of water to divert into fields. Although great waterworks

were built in Parthian (c. 250 BCE to 226 CE) and Sasanian (c. 224 CE to 650 CE) times,

regional farmers and landlords were largely left to build and maintain irrigation systems on their

own after Khuzestan left the orbit of the Abbasid Empire around the 11th and 12 centuries CE.

Outside authority and significant investment resources did not return until the 20th century. In the

meantime, villagers built and maintained much smaller canals and dams to water their fields.

Landlords or their representatives were often the organizers of these projects (referred to as

bildar projects in the 19th and 20th centuries). The need for bildars to service irrigation

infrastructure strengthened social bonds between villagers because they were communal projects

with local workers serving local needs. The bildars also strengthened the hierarchical position of

the landlord (or landlords) through their funding and organization of the projects. Although the

centralizing modernists of Iran increasingly drew Khuzestan into the national project through

military operations and the oil industry, this did not significantly affect the bildar mode of

irrigation maintenance – which continued well into the mid-20th century.

Settled communities in Iran have also dealt with floods from the time people began semi-

permanently congregating there roughly 8,000 years ago. Khuzestan’s abundance of rivers may

102

provide many opportunities for irrigation, but it also makes avoiding yearly flood damage

difficult. Rivers drew communities near and so Khuzestanis built their earliest settlements on

hills within floodplains to take advantage of the water while avoiding floods. However,

destruction was unavoidable as raging waters forced communities to rebuild homes and mourn

lost relatives and livestock on a yearly basis. The same community-strengthening bildar groups

that rebuilt irrigation canals could be organized to rebuild homes and bridges. Floods also

provided opportunities for elites to reinforce their social positions by organizing funds and labor

to both repair ancient edifices and build new structures, in both village and city. No one could

hope to control and prevent the disruption from flooding, and so social patterns incorporated

them.

Khuzestan was far from an isolated space, but it did see fewer travelers than Iran’s other

border regions and most wayfarers likely had little reason to visit the villages of the upper

Khuzestan plains. The area was relatively distant from Khuzestan’s centers of Ahvaz and

Mohammareh (now Khorramshahr), both located on the Karun River, and thus connected via the

Shatt al-Arab with Basra and beyond. When villagers contracted malaria, schistosomiasis, or any

of a host of diseases, the medical professionals commonly found around khans, shahs, or large

cities were almost never available. Just as the inevitability of flooding demanded communities

find a way to accommodate it into social patterns, the pervasiveness of disease demanded that

villagers find ways to engage it on their own and carry on living. Villagers had no choice but to

rebuild after floods, and farmers with, say, mild but persistent internal hemorrhaging had no

choice but continue to go out and work in the fields. Debility from disease, though avoided as

best as possible, was a regular presence in society and not foreign from it.

103

Stating that rural communities lived intimately with nature before the arrival of 20th

century modernist projects is not very surprising and reveals very little by itself. Through

irrigation, flooding, and disease we have seen how these intimate socio-environmental

relationships affected social structures. The second half of each chapter in this thesis describes

how a large development project initiated by the Development and Resources Corporation in

1958 altered these socio-environmental dynamics.

American and Iranian officials viewed agriculture in Khuzestan as hopelessly backward.

Early attempts to increase crop production by supplying traditional farmers with diesel tractors

and bank loans eventually gave way to large-scale industrial farms run by international

corporations. A central component of the project from the very beginning involved creating a

new, “more efficient” network of canals to bring water from the Dez River to crop plots.

Engineers with university degrees now determined where to build canals and how much water to

distribute through them, replacing earlier systems where such decisions lay with farmers, mirabs,

and landlords. Whereas previously the landlord was obligated to provide water in return for part

of his crop share, now farmers paid usage fees to the Khuzestan Water and Power Authority.

Contractors from outside of Khuzestan or KWPA crews build and maintained the new canal

system. While bildar projects did not disappear and communities were still intimately tied to

their irrigation systems, the nature in which irrigation strengthened communities had degraded.

The new irrigation system transferred authority from villagers and landlords to ministry

engineers representing the state.

DRC officials intended to provide water to this new canal system year-round by building

Iran’s first modern dam just kilometers upriver from Dezful, but the Dez Dam’s functions were

104

multifold. The Dez Dam would be the first in a series of dams to control the seasonal floods,

protecting agricultural investments and growing city populations. With its ability to raise and

lower river levels on demand, the dam made clear the growing power of the state in a dramatic

way. The flood repair projects that strengthened communities and reinforced elite hierarchical

positions were less necessary, and what damage did occur could be repaired by KWPA crews.

The scale of the dam’s construction necessitated a completely different conception of labor from

traditional projects. Instead of dozens of men laboring for weeks near home, thousands of

laborers came from around the province, country, and wider world to work for several years.

Laborers became professionals with specialized skills in electrical work, heavy machinery

operation, or safety management. They worked for cash instead of the good of their own

agricultural plots. The dam represented the removal of seasonal floods from the lives of

Khuzestanis while more villagers left work on the farm each year to enter into the global

capitalist economy.

These dam and canal projects were part of an effort to increase domestic food production

and strengthen the national economy, and the state needed healthy laborers for such an initiative

to succeed. Since the state decided that the villagers of the upper Khuzestan plains could be

economically useful laborers, they were no longer left to fend for themselves against malaria and

schistosomiasis. In fact, they were not given the option to seek medical care but instead state

health agents forced villagers to undergo preventative and curative treatments with extremely

unpleasant side effects. The villagers thus continued to lose community and personal autonomy

just as they had lost control over their water supplies and building projects. Ministry officials

experimented with the diets of school children to find out what combination of proteins would

105

produce the healthiest citizens. Officials in charge of the new public health programs felt little

respect toward villagers and considered them little more responsible than children, and so plan

development and execution rarely considered villagers’ own needs and desires. The disconnect

between central planning and local need, a well-recognized phenomenon across the globe by

now, led to projects villagers did not want and a lack of access to those they did. These violations

of autonomy and disregard for local conditions stemmed from the fact that national economic

goals rather than any concern for the well-being of rural Iranians formed the fundamental

motivation of that health care program.

An important effect of modernization identified by this paper, aside from estrangement

from the natural environment, is the increasing presence and power of the state directly

contributing to a degradation of personal and communal autonomy. Many decisions regarding

water supplies and personal health were removed as prerogatives of villagers and transferred to

the state. Villagers were certainly amenable to the loss of a certain amount of autonomy in

exchange for more regular water and health services, but what exactly a more agreeable trade-off

might have looked like from the villagers’ view lies outside the scope of this paper. Hopefully

future research can explore local sources to present a deeper picture of how villagers reacted to

and thought about these projects, and what their own desired project goals might have been.

Most Iranians, like many people in developed countries around the world, no longer have

such an intimate and mundane relationship with their natural environment, but Iran’s national

environmental consciousness has risen since the 1970s. It is almost certainly true that a far

greater number of Iranians today explicitly think about their natural environment than Iranians of

fifty or one hundred years ago. Khuzestanis still face serious, environmentally-related health

106

problems but nowadays dust-filled air is the primary concern rather than water-borne parasites.

The entire country is acutely aware of the challenges it faces because of water shortages. On the

positive side, hundreds of Iranian civil society groups were dedicated to environmental issues as

of 2011.305 The Islamic Republic has paid far greater attention to the state of the environment

than the Pahlavi government, although its initiatives have been sporadic and many critics would

say it has still done far less than it should. The importance of a sustainable national

environmental policy seems much more widely accepted in Iran than in the United States, even if

different groups disagree on what it would constitute.

Pressure increases on the Islamic Republic of Iran to act accordingly as growing numbers

of Iranians place high importance on environmentally-responsible policies. However, if resource

development projects like that examined in Pahlavi Khuzestan have the potential to violate

personal and local autonomy, state efforts to protect the natural environment from over-

exploitation can also easily violate them. Forest protection may prevent communities who had

previously harvested timber or hunted local game in the area from doing so. Water conservation

programs limit the amount of water available to farmers to grow crops. So, Iran’s government

must balance the need for dramatic measures to preserve the country’s environment with existing

social and economic structures in order to avoid social disruption. The Islamic Republic of Iran

could avoid violating the autonomy of its citizens by engaging communities and including them

in decision-making processes as it implements measures to mediate socio-environmental

relations. Such a dialogue would produce more broadly acceptable environmental management

305 Simin Fadaee, “Environmental Movements in Iran: Application of the New Social Movement Theory in the

Non-European Context,” Social Change 41, no. 1 (2011): 84.

107

regimes and give Iranians an extra avenue of input into their governance outside of the majles,

producing a healthier society.

108

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