One hundred years ago, the Middle East was divvied up
between the French and the British. The historian Maurus Reinkowski
talks with DW about the long-term effects of the colonialist splitting
up of the spoils.
The terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement were set forth in a letter dated
May 9, 1916. The agreement was signed by the French and the British on
May 16. The secret deal envisioned the subdivision of much of the
Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I. The French were to control
an area extending southeast from what is today Turkey, across northern
Iraq and Syria and all the way to Libya. The British, on the other hand,
were to rule an area that would include what is now central and southern
Iraq. The area between the two - today Syria, Jordan, western Iraq and
the northeastern portion of the Arabian Peninsula - was to become an
Arab kingdom under a joint French-British mandate.
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Maurus Reinkowski: Until then, the Ottoman Empire had ruled the region.
Paris and London, however, were of the opinion that the Ottoman Empire
would not survive. Sykes-Picot was intended to prevent any conflicts
that might arise when divvying up spoils after achieving victory in WWI.
Nonetheless, there were indeed major disagreements between the French
and the British about the exact demarcation. So the agreement was in
fact only a first attempt at a division that would turn out quite
differently in the end.
Why is the agreement a cause for much emotion in
the Arab world a century later?
The Sykes-Picot Agreement is generally seen as a symbol of the very
complicated and complex reordering of the region after the First World
War. There is a whole list of other important agreements and
declarations. I would just like to point out the Balfour Declaration
here. It was issued in November 1917, and in it British Foreign
Secretary Arthur James Balfour granted London's Jewish community a
national homeland in Palestine. Or the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence,
in which Hussein bin Ali, the leader of the Hejaz, and Sir Henry
McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, expounded upon the creation
of an independent Arab state. All of these agreements were a kind of
tapestry of plans and promises.
The reason Sykes-Picot is so prominent is because of the story of its
discovery. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Commissioner of
Foreign Affairs Leon Trotsky published the agreement as a particular
example of the perfidy of the Entente powers and their purely imperial
ambitions. The map that accompanied the agreement also clearly
illustrated that imperial mentality. They simply drew a line, hundreds
of kilometers long, stretching from Kirkuk to Haifa.
In the Arab world, there is a kind of popular wisdom that recounts the
long history of the West's animus toward the Orient, the Arab people and
even the Islamic world. The Sykes-Picot Agreement fits rather nicely
into that kind of conspiracy theory: It was secret and served to further
the ambitions of the major powers.
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When "Islamic State" (IS) blew up border checkpoints between Iraq and
Syria two years ago, they gained media attention by referring to the end
of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, announcing that a new Islamic caliphate
would replace the old "artificial" Arab states created by colonial
powers. Can IS count on support from people who are hostile toward
nation-states?
Yes, I certainly think so. But before I go further, a historian's note:
The opening of the border between Syria and Iraq did not do away with
the Sykes-Picot border, because Sykes-Picot never envisioned such a
border in the first place. That border arose from a later French-British
agreement that finally fixed the division between the French and British
mandates in the early 1920s.
Nevertheless, the basic symbolism still works quite well. There is a
great uneasiness among the Arab people when it comes to the long history
of Western influence in the Middle East. People tend to see many aspects
of the misery that haunts the Middle East today as being rooted in the
Western policies so well-documented in the period following World War I.
However, if you were to ask someone from Lebanon or Jordan if they would
like to join Islamic State or would be willing to accept some type of
greater Syrian state - even one free of the Islamic leanings of IS - a
large majority of them would say no. The people are generally rather
satisfied with their nation-states and have no desire to exchange them
for an imposed identity as part of any larger entity.
What role does Sykes-Picot play in political
Islam?
Sykes-Picot is a building block for the experience of the dominance and
obtrusiveness of the West in the Arab - or even the Islamic world. But I
think Sykes-Picot has become so prominent because of the fact that the
destabilization of Iraq in the mid-2000s and Syria since 2011 has been a
destabilization of exactly that region defined in the agreement.
Sykes-Picot really didn't play any role in the Iranian Revolution, nor
was it important for al Qaeda.
Were the Kurds the big losers in the agreement?
The option of a Kurdish entity in Eastern Anatolia, where the Kurds
represented a relevant majority of the population, was not dealt with in
Sykes-Picot, but was vaguely outlined in the Treaty of Sevres in 1920.
The Treaty of Sevres, however, could not be implemented because of the
Turkish national movement under Ataturk. And it was replaced in 1923 by
the Treaty of Lausanne, which recognized Turkey under international law.
The Kurds were not even mentioned in the Treaty of Lausanne: They quite
literally disappeared under the table. Therefore, there is definitely a
sentiment that the Kurds, as perhaps the most populous people in the
region not to be given their own country, suffered a grave historical
injustice.
A century ago European diplomats boldly drew borders into the Middle
East. Are there blueprints for a more just demarcation of the region
today?
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That is the big problem: the vision of wanting to create a more just
order on the one hand - for instance, giving the Kurds the possibility
to live in their own federal state - and being prisoners of Realpolitik
on the other. Western countries think very much along the lines of
Realpolitik. They want to maintain existing borders as much as possible
because they have no idea whether drawing new borders might not set off
a domino effect.
One might easily imagine that there could be a division in Iraq because
conditions there are relatively clear: Shiites in the south extending to
Baghdad, Sunnis in the middle and Kurds in the north. The situation in
Syria is far more difficult because there is no stable balance of power.
One simply doesn't know to whom one would give land.
I suspect that politicians will move forward cautiously and attempt to
maneuver through the situation as unscathed as possible, provided that
many basic parameters remain stable: the guarantee of Israel's right to
exist, the protection of the Arab Gulf monarchies that are so important
for the stability of the region, and also the affirmation of Turkey's
current position as a privileged partner of the USA and Europe.
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