Protocol of Constantinople

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Map of the Ottoman Vilâyets Mosul from 1897 with the border line at that time; the areas east of the Diyala or Sirvan river still belong to Iran.
Estuary of the Shatt al-Arab with the cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr

The Constantinople Protocol laid down the exact course of the border between Iran and the Ottoman Empire . It was signed in Istanbul on November 17, 1913 .

Contract partners were the Ottoman Empire and Iran, represented by the Qajar dynasty . As early as 1847 , under British and Russian pressure, they committed themselves in the Treaty of Erzurum to precisely mark the borders between their states. The European concept of state borders was previously unknown in the Orient. After the conclusion of this contract, a commission for the precise determination of the border, in which the Ottomans and Persians as well as the Russians and British were involved, began its work, but largely stopped after the Crimean War . Again under pressure from the British and Russians, a new commission was set up in 1911, the work of which was concluded in the 1913 Protocol of Constantinople. Here the interests of the British for a port for their Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Khorramshahr prevailed; the line of the flood on the left bank of the river was defined as the border in the Shatt al-Arab . The negotiating parties also tried to separate Shiite and Sunni Kurdish tribes and relocate Arabs west of the border and Iranians and Turkmens east of it. As a result, the area east of the Diyala ( Arabic ) / Sirvan ( Persian ) around Qasr-e Shirin, including the oil concession of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, was ceded by Iran to the Ottoman Empire. Only about 40 miles of the border in the Qotur area were not regulated.

Later, neither Iran nor Iraq recognized the border in Shatt al-Arab as legal successors to the Ottoman Empire. In 1980, Saddam Hussein used the conflict, along with the cession of Khusistan to Iran, as a pretext for the start of the First Gulf War .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c The Iran-Iraq Border: A Story of Too Many Treaties , Randall Lesaffer, Oxford Public International Law
  2. Nationalism in Kurdistan , prehistory, conditions of origin and first manifestations up to 1925 Günter Max Behrendt, series: "Politics, Economy and Society of the Middle East" ed. from the Deutsches Orient-Institut, Hamburg, 1993, ISBN 3-89173-029-2 , p. 33: “Definitive borders that can be made precise to the millimeter can only be produced and maintained over the long term by highly organized territorial states. This type of state has only existed for a historically short time, even the most powerful empires of the Middle Ages were not able to do so - however, it was not a desirable goal for them either.
  3. BOUNDARIES i. With the Ottoman Empire , Keith McLachlan, Encyclopædia Iranica
  4. International Boundary Study, No. 28: Iran – Turkey Boundary , College of Law, Florida State University, Digitized Legal Collections