A Middle Eastern House of Cards

posted on: May 5, 2015

Ninety-nine years ago, on May 16, 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, laid down the borders of the Middle East as we have known them for a century. The diplomats, Francois Georges-Picot for France and Sir Mark Sykes for Britain, had worked out the details in five months of negotiations, from November 1915 to March 1916.
The agreement was marked out on a map with grease pencil in a series of straight lines, most likely to create “uncomplicated borders.” The agreement divided the land that had been under Ottoman rule since the early 16th century into new countries in two spheres of influence: Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine under British control; and Syria and Lebanon under French control.

Sykes-Picot had two fatal flaws. The first flaw was that the agreement was concluded in secret, negating the main promise that Britain had made to the Arabs in the 1910s — that if they rebelled against the Ottomans, they would be granted independence.

The second major flaw of Sykes-Picot was that the straight lines drawn delineating countries’ borders did not correspond to the actual sectarian, ethnic or tribal distinctions on the ground. At first, from the late 1950s to late 1970s, these differences were buried, first under the Arabs’ struggle to eject European colonial powers and later by the sweeping wave of Arab nationalism and the “united front” necessary to confront the challenge of the establishment of the state of Israel.

Both flaws contributed to the chaotic conflict that has plagued the Middle East and is today tearing the region apart at the seams. Instead of building and nourishing the key ingredients of a healthy nation-state such as civil institutions, a free press, free and fair elections, equality, religious tolerance and pluralism, national citizenship, and multiparty systems, Sykes-Picot laid the groundwork for intensified tribalism and violent religious sectarianism. They created a playing field for global and regional proxy conflicts amid a collection of self-serving dictatorial regimes, monarchies and eventually even a theocracy.

Source: ncronline.org