When World War I ended in 1918, the winners, principally Britain and France (for the US electorate had decisively rejected President Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy in November 1918), set about redrawing the map of Europe and the Middle East to suit their own interests and advantage.
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll look at how they created the circumstances for World War II and made a pullulating mess of the Middle East which still suppurates today.
First a bit of context. In 1914 the European landmass was dominated by empires: the German stretching from France into western Poland, the Austro-Hungarian from Germany to the Balkans, the vast Russian empire from eastern Poland to the Pacific, and the immense, crumbling Ottoman empire from Thrace on the Balkan shore of the Black Sea through Turkey to the countries of today’s Middle East.
By contrast the empires of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands were overseas settler colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, except of course for Ireland.
By the end of World War I, Europe was transformed; the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires had collapsed in defeat. What was to take their places? The American government under President Wilson had been pressing for national self-determination for the peoples of the empires in Europe, but who were they and where were the boundaries of their nations?
The British and the French had other fish to fry. They were concerned about the fate of the lands of the Ottoman empire, which inconveniently lay across the route to their Indian and Asian colonies. Indeed the first action the British took when the Ottomans declared war on the side of Germany and Austro-Hungary was to grab Egypt, securing the Suez canal.
Matters became complicated when the various Arab groups came together at Mecca in June 1916 under the Emir of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali. They proclaimed a kingdom stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Aden at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, today’s Yemen.
Britain’s man in Egypt, Sir Henry MacMahon, backed what became known as the Arab Revolt, promised to recognise the kingdom and send military forces to assist. Hmm. There’s a helluva lot of oil and gas in there and the Persian Gulf which exports it.
Unknown to the Arabs (and probably to MacMahon), the British and French governments had already made plans for the Arab lands of the Ottoman empire which was already on the path to defeat and dismemberment.
In May 1916, after six months’ negotiating, Sir Mark Sykes and François-Georges Picot agreed on dividing control of the lands without any reference to local susceptibilities, religion or ethnicity.
They had a map. Sykes said: “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk”, and the pair agreed to do so with a ruler. The line goes arbitrarily through Sunni, Shia, Christians, Alawites, Druze, Arabs and Kurds. You can still see the signed map in the archives.
Acre is a port on the Mediterranean and Kirkuk a city near the Iraq/Iran border. The map is marked ‘A’ north of the line and ‘B’ south of it. France would have control of A, which became Syria, and Britain of B, which they carved into Iraq, Jordan and Palestine.
So, while the Arabs fought the Turks from 1916 to 1918 to create an Arab kingdom ruled by a Hashemite, the family that ruled Mecca since the tenth century, claiming descent from Mohammed, the British and French had decided there’d be no Arab kingdom. Instead they would carve out client states for their own convenience to maintain control of the region and its oil and trade routes.
The cynical, colonial attitude was summed up by an aide to French General Gouraud in Damascus: “Either build a Syrian nation that does not exist... by smoothing the rifts which still divide it or cultivate and maintain all the phenomena, which require our arbitration that these divisions give. I must say only the second option interests me.”
To this day Arabs regard the Sykes-Picot deal as the original sin, the epitome of the treachery, betrayal, double-dealing and chicanery of western powers imposing their will, inventing states and supporting undemocratic governments.
There was worse to come. Next week the French and British ‘mandates’.
To this day Arabs regard the Sykes-Picot deal as the original sin, the epitome of the treachery, betrayal, double-dealing and chicanery of western powers imposing their will, inventing states and supporting undemocratic governments