Sykes-Picot Archives - Politics Today https://politicstoday.org/tag/sykes-picot/ Fri, 12 May 2017 03:34:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 Breaking Myths: Arab-Turkish Interaction and the Syrian War https://politicstoday.org/breaking-myths-arab-turkish-interaction-and-the-syrian-war/ Fri, 12 May 2017 03:34:30 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/breaking-myths-arab-turkish-interaction-and-the-syrian-war/

It seems there are some coincidences which suggest hope lies in the future for Turkey and the people of the region. Recognizing that Turkey’s power lies in its history — when the country was at the center of an empire — Turkey is opening itself to the partners who share the same history. The Turkish government’s reification of Muslim identity, rather than ethnic, has both spatial and temporal significance.

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The ongoing Syrian war is a slice of history which we, out of amnesia, tend to isolate. A century ago, when the British and French were planting flags of Arab nationalism across the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Arabs barely knew that seeds of a multipronged division were being sown. As Arabs woke from the dust of World War I they were to find themselves under a new configuration — Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. These nation-states were designed by Britain and France under the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

The Western colonists had primarily deployed two forces to accomplish this project: Arab nationalism and Sharief Hussain of Mecca’s so called “Arab Islamic rebellion” against “Turkified Ottomans.” While Arab nationalism served to separate Arabs from Ottomans, at least imaginarily, Hussain’s revolt served to divide the Arab region internally. In return he got a reward for his sons, Faisal, Abdullah and others, from his colonial masters. However, knowing that they had been used as an accessory to serve colonial interests, Arab nationalists would soon turn against the West, and their struggle continued for decades in the form of the socialist-secularist Ba’ath Party and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.

However, both Arab nationalism (a supra-nationalism) and nation-statism were flawed from the very beginning. They produced dictators that would last right into the twentieth first century (Bashar al Assad as its latest product). Their failure was imminent because they rejected one significant reality about the Arab world: the Arabs had historically exhibited loyalty towards their Islamic heritage (macro identity) and their local clans or tribes (micro identity). Ottomans for centuries had maintained this balance through the fluid nature of their governance system that allowed people from diverse cultures to live a stable life.

The current war in Syria is actually a continuation of this historical legacy left by the colonial powers. Hafiz al Assad (Bashar al Assad’s father) established his regime in 1971 riding on an Arab nationalist wave after working with the Ba’ath Party for decades. Today’s dictator Bashar al-Assad inherited the throne on his father’s death in 2000. So far the war has consumed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions.

Amid the destruction and gloom caused by the war, a peculiar phenomenon has been developing outside of Syrian territory. There have been wars in the Middle East in the past as well, but migration towards Turkey at such a large scale is something not seen before. During the earlier wars, migration by people escaping death remained confined within the Arab region. The Syrian war, for the first time, has driven large numbers of people towards Turkey, the last remaining stable country in the region: others are either torn by wars or already hosting millions of refugees.

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At the moment every big and small city in Turkey hosts thousands of Arabs who have escaped the war. Apart from the southern provinces of Gaziantep, Hatay, Kilis and Şanliurfa there are thousands of others living in Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara, Konya, Kayseri and Mersin. This has produced some unforeseen consequences, opening new avenues for multidimensional interaction between the former Ottoman partners, Arabs and Turks, at a massive scale. Currently Turkey offers a rare image of its former self, when it was the center of an empire of peoples from diverse cultures and colors. It is an image of the time when multiculturalism was not an ideology, but the natural flow of life.

There are primarily two levels of interaction between Arabs and Turks: conscious and unconscious. The conscious level involves interaction between two peoples under formal and informal settings such as debates, discussions, conferences, seminars, and normal interaction between two individuals. These practices lead to knowledge sharing and the clearance of confusion. The Turkish and Arab interchange mainly falls within the paradigm of Islam and the main reference point are the Ottomans, since both are Muslims and share a common political and social history.

The unconscious interaction is a psychological experience. Its significance is more lasting as it is deeply rooted in cultural sharing. Mere living together, the frequent visibility of one another in schools, universities, localities, markets and work places, the sharing of cultural objects like food and clothing, are the ways unconscious interaction is exercised. Since mythological nationalist ideologies unleashed by the West over the past two centuries have sustained on simplification of the complex and complication of the simple, unconscious interaction offers a promising resistance tool against such divisive and stereotypical ideologies. People directly experiencing one another leaves no scope for a middleman’s manipulation.

Wars destroy hopes. They destroy myths as well. For the past century lies about Arab-Turk antagonism have been groomed. The current interaction is demolishing the false myths; turning them upside down. The phenomena of the Arab-Turkish interchange is strongly backed by Turkish media coverage of the Syrian war. At this time most of the European media, politicians and intelligentsia are preoccupied with two things: creating paranoia about foreigners who are stealing “our jobs,” and focusing on the identity of the refugees coming to Europe. However, Turkish media has mostly been highlighting the daily miseries of the Syrian war, the human character of the refugees and so on. This works as a major driving force for Turkish national perception about the refugees; they are treated more with compassion than paranoia. Besides, Turkish people’s hospitality for migrant “Muslim brethren” draws inspiration from the 1400-year-old Islamic tradition. When Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and his followers were persecuted and forced out of Mecca, they migrated to Medina amid fears of a plot to murder the Prophet. Madinaites welcomed them all.

It seems there are some coincidences which suggest hope lies in the future for Turkey and the people of the region. Recognizing that Turkey’s power lies in its history — when the country was at the center of an empire — Turkey is opening itself to the partners who share the same history. The Turkish government’s reification of Muslim identity, rather than ethnic, has both spatial and temporal significance. Spatially it connects Turkey more closely with its neighborhood, which is religiously Muslim and ethnically diverse. Temporally it connects the country with its rich and outstanding past. This policy absorbs not only external but also internal political dynamics as the country itself is over-growingly multi-ethnic. It is important to note that hatred among people living in Africa, the Arab world, and in certain Asian countries against their former Western colonial masters has not ended, but on the contrary has grown due to a new wave of right wing radicalism that dominates in the Western countries. At a time when the West is becoming inward, Turkey is becoming more outward and the country is projecting itself as an inclusive and tolerant political power in a swiftly changing regional environment.

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]]> The Troubling Legacy of the Sykes-Picot: A Century-Old Chaos in the Arab Middle East https://politicstoday.org/the-troubling-legacy-of-the-sykes-picot-a-century-old-chaos-in-the-arab-middle-east/ Wed, 18 May 2016 05:04:17 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/the-troubling-legacy-of-the-sykes-picot-a-century-old-chaos-in-the-arab-middle-east/

If the Sykes-Picot arrangement is to be overwhelmed by new territorial reshuffle, this should not come in the form of further partition; instead, it should take the form of territorial enlargement if the inhabitants so wish. This, we call, “self-determination”.

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Precisely a hundred years ago, on 16 May 1916, the iniquitous Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) was signed between Britain and France –Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot- whose goal was to partition Anatolia and the Arab Middle East among the two should the Ottoman Empire be defeated in the First World War. Although second-rank party to the agreement, Russia was to be given parts of eastern Turkey (defined as “Armenia”), Istanbul and the Turkish Straits. This secret partition was made behind the back of Sheriff Hussein who had been given assurances for an Arab Kingdom under his own leadership. Not surprisingly, the agreement gave the lion’s share of the booty to the British Empire.

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To be sure, the two powers, the British and the French, stood for their own imperial interests and not for the interests of the inhabitants of the region. Sykes-Picot Agreement was in fact amended a few times to carve up the Middle East along the lines that reflected the shift in the relative military strength and diplomatic posture of the two colonial powers, in addition to the intervention of the League of Nations. Eventually, the newly created Iraq and Jordan, alongside Palestine were put under British rule, whereas Syria and the newly created Lebanon (and parts of southern Anatolia) were given to the French. The pretext for this territorial plunder was both simple and predictable: that the Arabs were too “backward”; they therefore could not possibly govern themselves; thus, they needed the helping hand of the “civilized nations” which, in this case, were Britain and France. Meanwhile, the Anatolian portion of the Sykes-Picot could not be parted from the “Turks” since Russia withdrew from the agreement in 1917 following the Bolshevik Revolution and partly because the people of Anatolia managed to eject the invading forces in 1922.

To be sure, the two powers, the British and the French, stood for their own imperial interests and not for the interests of the inhabitants of the region.

As the secret arrangement gradually became operational with the eventual defeat of the Central Powers, including Germany and the Ottoman Empire, the seeds of hate and mistrust began to be sown in the region. This very fragmentation led to the frustration of the Arab aspirations for a united Arab state and led to the never-ending internecine bickering and even conflict among the much truncated Arab “sub-nation-states”. The Sykes-Picot thus symbolizes the extension of British and French case of colonialism into the former Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire. This instance of colonialism was “legalized” under the rubric of the Mandates System as sanctified by the League of Nations which was founded in 1919.

Whatever the designation, this carve-up was a full-blown attack against the aspirations of the Arab peoples for collective self-determination in the Middle East. The final nail in the coffin of the failure to achieve “Arab unity” was the case of the UN General Assembly Resolution No. 181 which partitioned Palestine between Jews and Arabs, while Jerusalem was designated as an “international city” under the administration of the UN. The great chunk of territory (56 percent) was literally “donated” to the Jews that constituted less than one third of the population in Palestine.

The Cold War was indeed the scene of Israel’s neo-colonial uprooting of the Palestinians to the extent that most of the indigenous inhabitants of the area were forced to flee their homeland; thus, most became refugees. The creation of the state of Israel in historic Palestine was surely a painful legacy of the Sykes-Picot arrangement. More of this legacy can be traced in the ceaseless internecine conflicts, chaos and instability in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Jordan after the Second World War. Inter-state wars likewise exploded among a number of Arab states as in the case of Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990). Furthermore, Israeli armed aggression against Egypt in 1956 and against Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in 1967 which led to Israel occupying land four times as big as its territory.

It is no exaggeration to claim that the fraudulent order of the Sykes-Picot has brought untold tragedies to the Arabs (and to the minority communities like Kurds) living in the Levant and Iraq.

It is no exaggeration to claim that the fraudulent order of the Sykes-Picot has brought untold tragedies to the Arabs (and to the minority communities like Kurds) living in the Levant and Iraq. The two old colonial powers that were “architects” of the current rancorous territorial boundaries and the dismal states system in the Middle East have since incessantly sought to maintain the status quo in the region at whatever cost. The USA later joined in the scramble for imperial supremacy in the region principally on account of its rich reserves of oil, but also because of geopolitical vitality and the presence of Israel which had by then become a “very special” US ally. That is why the US and its European allies mobilized the whole gamut of the UN system, particularly the Security Council, to “liberate” the tiny Kuwaiti state after it was occupied by Iraq in August 1990, although it was known that the Security Council had almost always chosen to close its eyes to similar direct and indirect armed aggressions elsewhere during the Cold War. Iraq had to be punished heavily as a deterrent to other potential “Saddams” who would dare to tear up the Sykes-Picot straitjacket in the Middle East.

This, then, suggests that the Sykes-Picot order also signifies the refusal of the West-sponsored Westphalian system to allow the Arab inhabitants of the Middle East to unite under one flag, thus becoming like other “nation-states”.  Arabs were, in the early 1920s, and still are a single “nation” on account of the unity of their language (Arabic), ethnicity (predominantly Arab), and (a prevalent) religion (Islam). It isn’t an exaggeration to claim that, since the end of the I. World War, Arabs have come to represent an arrested nation which has been forced to be partitioned among a list of artificially carved-up sub-states. So long as the Arab world remains fragmented as “sub-nation-states”, the regional order established by the spirit, if not by the substance, of Sykes-Picot will continue to sap the energy of the Arab body politics in the Middle East.

The ghost of the colonial yoke of the Sykes Picot is still around us.

The recent attacks launched in Western cities by international terrorist movements such as Al Qaida and ISIS, inter alia, are a testimony that Western neo-colonial and imperialistic interventions at the heart of the Muslim world, combined with the Western support for authoritarian regimes in Muslim countries, have backfired and thus have come to hit the Western “security community”. Today, ISIS is challenging this artificial fragmentation by refusing to recognize any separation between Iraq and Syria.

Strangely, the still hegemonic and imperialistic West is not averse to such eventuality so long as both states are carved up further. This is where the risk lies. If the Sykes-Picot arrangement is to be overwhelmed by new territorial reshuffle, this should not come in the form of further partition; instead, it should take the form of territorial enlargement if the inhabitants so wish. This, we call, “self-determination”.

As for today, that we have not been able to change the term, a colonial-leftover, “the Middle East” into the more respectful “Western Asia”, because less tainted with colonial intrusion,”; testifies that the ghost of the colonial yoke of the Sykes Picot is still around us.

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]]> Sykes-Picot: The Symbol of Western Imperialism in the Middle East https://politicstoday.org/sykes-picot-the-symbol-of-western-imperialism-in-the-middle-east/ Tue, 17 May 2016 05:06:58 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/sykes-picot-the-symbol-of-western-imperialism-in-the-middle-east/

Dividing the region into smaller political units will not bring political stability to the Middle East. The smaller the political units, the more dependent they will be on the global powers; the more interference from foreign powers in regional affairs, the longer the crises will continue.

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Many political scientists and historians consider the First World War as an imperialist war carving up the Ottoman State. During the war, three allied imperialist states –Great Britain, France and Russia– secretly negotiated an agreement to invade the Ottoman territories in the Middle East, since the Ottoman State was the main target of the war.

Exactly one century ago, on May 16, 1916, the French and the British signed a clandestine agreement (the Sykes-Picot), which disintegrated the Ottoman State and created the modern artificial states of the Middle East. This agreement is the main source of today’s quagmire in the Middle East and almost all regional conflicts that have continued since then. The British and the French, intentionally, did not take the demand of regional peoples and the realities of the region into consideration. Not only did they divide the Ottoman State, the only power dominating the region, but they also separated and alienated all ethnic groups such as Arabs, Turks and Kurds living in the region.

The Middle Eastern peoples know what it means to be free and to have a government that will represent them and no solution is possible unless these conditions are met.

At the end of the war, the allied powers forced the Ottoman State to sign the Sevres Treaty, based on which pieces of Anatolian territory, in addition to the British, French and Italians, were given to the Greeks, Armenians and Kurds. The Ottoman military officers resisted the invasion of the Misak-ı Milli (the National Oath) territories –the territory that was declared the indivisible nucleus of the Ottoman State– and, by reorganizing the Anatolian people, the Turkish military leaders initiated an independence war against the invaders. After several years of fighting, the newly reorganized Turkish army drove out the foreign armies from Anatolia and forced the allied powers to sign the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Thus, unlike most of the regional peoples, Turkish leadership fought for independence and the new Turkish state was officially established with the Lausanne Treaty and the current borders were preserved.

Unfortunately, the Western countries, defeated in Anatolia, succeeded in imposing new borders in other parts of the region. There was no strong, effective and organized opposition or resistance against the Western colonization of the region. Sharif Hussein and his sons, the main organized group in the region and close associates of the British, did not challenge the colonization of the region.

It is not exaggeration to assert that the objective of the Western imperialist powers was not to create Western-like nation-states, but to create weak and artificial states dependent on the West. They were well aware that it was impossible to establish states with ingenious borders due to the intermingled nature of the region. The West distorted the multi-ethnic and multi-religious character of the Middle East and ruined the long-time culture of peaceful co-existence. The British and the French established the modern Middle East, not as a result of rational calculations but rather based upon the two young ambitious men’s (British Mark Sykes and French Francois Georges-Picot) aspirations. Consequently, the region was fashioned with a conspiracy mentality, which has dominated the mentality of the peoples of the Middle East.

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Today, exactly one hundred years after the Sykes-Picot agreement, the global powers, i.e. the United States and Russia, follow the same logic of the Sykes-Picot and attempt to decide the fate of the Middle East by taking into consideration their own interests rather than those of the indigenous peoples. While trying to redraw the borders of the Middle East, these global powers tend to bypass the regional states and act unilaterally and secretly. In this way, they deny the right of the regional states to play a role in the management of or the solution to the regional problems by which they are directly affected, unlike the US or Russia. For instance, the US and Russia initiated a secret negotiation process to try to manage the Syrian Crisis by excluding related regional states such as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. That is to say, these global powers do not respect the realities on the ground and the expectations of regional peoples but, for the sake of their own interests, undermine the voices of the civilians who suffer the consequences.

Western countries must cease treating the Middle Eastern peoples as juvenile and not mature enough to determine their own fates.

Western countries must cease treating the Middle Eastern peoples as juvenile and not mature enough to determine their own fates. Aware of the global and regional developments, Middle Eastern peoples are nowadays struggling against external intervention as well as domestic tutelage. Maybe the current picture of the Middle East does not leave space for much optimism, but one thing is for certain: the Middle Eastern peoples know what it means to be free and to have a government that will represent them and no solution is possible unless these conditions are met. Both regional regimes and global powers have to be aware of the increasing awareness in the region and behave accordingly. Otherwise, continuous political instability, regional chaos and economic backwardness will continue to detrimentally influence the future of European countries. In today’s increasingly interdependent and interconnected world, it is not the flame but the smoke of the blazing fire that will vitally damage the health of Europe.

Dividing the region into smaller political units will not bring political stability to the Middle East. The smaller the political units, the more dependent they will be on the global powers; the more interference from foreign powers in regional affairs, the longer the crises will continue. The West must stop preferring authoritarian or personalistic regimes to democratic movements. If global powers want to contribute to the stabilization of the region, they must support the mainstream groups, rather than manipulating the fault lines between different groups and abetting violent non-state actors. The future of the region relies on the support of mainstream, democratic and non-violent groups.

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]]> Is the Spirit of Sykes-Picot Still Alive in the Middle East after a Century? https://politicstoday.org/is-the-spirit-of-sykes-picot-still-alive-in-the-middle-east-after-a-century/ Mon, 16 May 2016 05:09:13 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/is-the-spirit-of-sykes-picot-still-alive-in-the-middle-east-after-a-century/

The conditions of the Sykes-Picot agreement are no longer valid, but the spirit of the agreement is still alive. The future of Syria, Iraq and probably Lebanon will be decided by the ‘international community’, meaning with the tacit agreement of Lavrov and Kerry.

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On 16 May, 1916, the famous Sykes-Picot agreement was signed secretly between the United Kingdom and France. The agreement was also approved by Tsarist Russia. The post-Ottoman order in the Middle East and territories of the region were shaped significantly according to this agreement, and secret diplomacy, negotiations and pacts between the great powers, as well as bargains over the extraterritorial zones were the order of day. The legacy of Sykes-Picot for the people of the Middle East has proved to be painful. One-hundred years after the agreement, the Middle East is not a more peaceful or prosperous place.

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Despite the criticisms to the regional order shaped by the Sykes-Picot agreement, the shattering of the existing order and borders in the Middle East constitute a greater challenge today than its survival, as the existing state system in the Middle East is doomed to fail. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen seem to be failed projects in terms of state-making and maintenance, as the mismatches between the social fabrics and the political structures of these political entities has generated deep grievances over the century. ISIS seems to be the new Trojan horse that could prevent the possibility of pluralistic political entities in the region.

The legacy of Sykes-Picot for the people of the Middle East has proved to be painful. One-hundred years after the agreement, the Middle East is not a more peaceful or prosperous place.

A century after Sykes-Picot, we are still puzzled by the same questions: Is it possible to institute sustainable and peaceful political order in the region? Will the peoples of the region and the regional political actors be the agents in such transformations? Looking at the ongoing developments in Syria or Iraq, we can reason that the answers to both questions seem to be negative. It is frustrating to recognize that the model and the spirit that reshaped the Middle East are still alive and deciding the fate of Syria, and Iraq and Lebanon may soon fall into the same trap. The declining significance of the Middle East’s oil is the only promising development for the people of the region who have suffered the political consequences of the competition for this resource. The same development seems to be the curse of dictators and the families that have enjoyed prosperity and power over the last few decades.

Sustainable order in the Middle East seems possible only with the institutionalization of pluralistic political entities that would incorporate popular participation and the contribution of local populations in the region. Contributions, or at least the consent of the regional actors such as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are crucial for the sustainability of order in the region. Unfortunately, there is no secret formula that brings all of these actors together in a shared agenda. In particular, the recent developments in the progression of the Syrian Civil War make such a possibility even more difficult. Although the regional powers are more influential today in the politics of the region in comparison to 100 years ago, their relentless competition over power and influence makes the region vulnerable to external great powers. The agreement that would determine the boundaries of new political entities in the Levant is most likely to be sealed by Russia, the US and other members of the UN Security Council. People of the region and the regional powers may play some role in the process, but the final outcome will be determined by the great powers.

The Asad regime, which devastated the country that it was supposed to rule, lost its social base and legitimacy. However, Russia’s involvement in the Syrian Civil War on the side of the Asad regime gave the regime the kiss of life, and it was the indifference of the Obama administration to Syria that facilitated the Russian involvement there. Russia’s intervention and coordination with Israel and the US constrained Iran’s direct involvement in Syria, and Turkey was sidelined in Syria after a Turkish Airforce F-16 shot down a Russian fighter jet that violated Turkey’s airspace. Another important actor, Saudi Arabia, was overwhelmed in the ongoing proxy war in Yemen against Iran. The European powers that bargained over the Middle East a century ago were stuck with the economic problems of the region and the refugee issue. German Chancellor Angela Merkel took the responsibility of dealing with the refugee crisis, but EU policy with regard to the Middle East was completely defensive and lacked a consistent vision. Once seen as an opportunity to control more land and access to oil and other resources, the Middle East turned into a severe risk for the European political actors. A broader instability and refugee flow from the Middle East may be the death sentence for the common EU policies.

A century after Sykes-Picot, the Middle East agenda is again at the table of the great powers.

A century after Sykes-Picot, the Middle East agenda is again at the table of the great powers. The glooming political situation in the Middle East has given Russia a new opportunity to remember its nostalgic superpower status, and Russia has gained some leverage over the US and the EU in Syria, though at the cost of risking its relations with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and, even more so, with Iran. The Geneva parades seemingly included the Syrian opposition at the negotiation table, but, so far, the opposition has gained nothing other than short ceasefire breaks. Keeping the opposition busy at the table and manipulating the ceasefire with periodic ruptures have only helped to increase the legitimacy of Kerry and Lavrov. The Geneva Process failed to deliver even the basic humanitarian necessities of the Syrian people. Hopes for a political settlement seem to be far from realizable.

The conditions of the Sykes-Picot agreement are no longer valid, but the spirit of the agreement is still alive. The future of Syria, Iraq and probably Lebanon will be decided by the ‘international community’, meaning with the tacit agreement of Lavrov and Kerry. The regional actors’ fatigue with Syria, Iraq, ISIS and terrorism will be a catalyst of such a development. The ISIS and Asad regimes will either be contained or completely sidelined; but, for the moment, they are useful tools for the multiplicity of the actors. Peoples of the region and the regional actors who have suffered from these instabilities will be the missing agents of this complicated picture. The world and the region have changed drastically within the last century, but the region is being reshaped with a similar logic. It may be too late for the competing regional actors to change the course of affairs in Syria and Iraq after this point, even if they decide to cooperate for the future of the Middle East.

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