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.
31
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.
56
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.”
58
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.
66
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.
69
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.
71
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.
72
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.
73
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.
75
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.
77
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.
79
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.
81
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.
92
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.
93
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.
98
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).
100
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.
101
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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