Colonial powers did not set the Middle East ablaze

7/24/2019 Colonial powers did not set the Middle East ablaze

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June 29, 2014 1:14 pm

Colonial powers did

not set the MiddleEast ablaze

By Roula Khalaf

To blame Sykes-Picot is to ignore the fact of deeply

entrenched territorial nationalism in Arab states

AFP

When itlaunched its spectacular offensivethrough northern Iraq in June, theIslamic

State of Iraq and the Levant,known as Isis, bulldozed a berm on the border with

Syria. Smashing Sykes-Picot, the jihadi group tweeted to its followers. The stunt

worked wonders, reigniting the debate over the 1916 secret British-French

agreement that carved the Arab territories of a collapsed Ottoman Empire into

separate states.

Sykes-Picot is dead, declared some; it is at the root of the present mayhem in the

Middle East, said others. As Iraq and Syria teeter on the brink of break-up, zeroing

in on the artificial borders defined by the Sykes-Picot accord has a certain appeal. It

offers a simple explanation for the extraordinary sectarian mayhem. It also makesthe case for partition of the two Arab states less contentious. If people seem bent on

killing each other because colonial powers unwisely lumped ethnic and religious

communities together artificially, would they not be better off living apart?

Focusing on Sykes-Picot also conveniently obscures more recent foreign meddling,

particularly the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which ousted Saddam Husseins
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Baathist regime and sparked a sectarian struggle for the state. It suggests that the

mistakes in Iraq were not committed a decade ago, but before anyone in the George

W Bush administration was born.

Yet, while debating European colonialism might be a worthy exercise, relating

todays events to colonial borders is misleading.

True, the boundaries designed by Mark Sykes, a British diplomat, and Franois

George-Picot of France, who divided up Arab territories into spheres of influence,

took more account of European interests in the aftermath of the first world war

than those of the populations concerned. The agreement also contradicted British

promises made to the Arabs, and ushered in a period of colonialism the legacy of

which the region has yet to shake off entirely.

But the Middle East is hardly the only part of the world to have borders defined by

colonial powers. Nor have Arab societies been rebelling against the bordersdesigned by the British-French duo.

As Reider Visser, a historian of Iraq, has noted, the Sykes-Picot borders were not as

artificial as some think. They corresponded for the most part to administrative

arrangements that had been in place under the Ottomans for decades, if not

centuries. Syria and Iraq referred to specific geographic entities long before the

collapse of the empire. Under the British and French mandates, the main

protestation over borders was about the partitioning of Greater Syria into several

mini-states, with one part also added on to Lebanon. The separate entities did not

survive for long, linking up with Damascus in an independent Syrian state. Toblame Sykes-Picot is to ignore the fact that territorial nationalism is deeply

entrenched in Arab states today, despite the repeated outbreak of sectarian

violence.

Isiss ambition of creating a transnational Sunni Islamic state is not widely shared.

Islamists calling for an Islamist umma (nation) and who base their argument on a

purely religious and communal basis are a minority opinion, argues Paul Salem, a

Lebanese political analyst at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

With the exception of Iraqi Kurds, whose history of persecution has solidified their

attachment to ethnic identity over national belonging, few Syrians, Iraqis,

Jordanians or Lebanese are clamouring for partition.

In the early decades after decolonisation, Arab nationalism that transcended

borders was a dominant ideology. But it was undercut by repeated Arab defeats in

wars with Israel. As Toby Dodge, author ofIraq: From War to New


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Authoritarianism, says, the disillusionment with Arab nationalism, combined

with the oil boom, led to states being deeply committed to territorial nationalism.

Consider Lebanons experience during the 1975-90 civil war. Partition was raised

repeatedly as a solution, yet the conflict ended with a new power-sharing

arrangement that maintained the countrys territorial integrity. In the last years of

the war, much of the violence was between rival groups within each of the main

communities (Christian, Sunni and Shia Muslims.)

The Sunni in Iraq and Syria could well end up in separate enclaves, at least for a

time. But their rebellion is not aimed at secession. The battles they are waging

some peacefully, others violently are not for territory but control of the state.

To emphasise Sykes-Picot in theMiddle Easts current predicament, is to miss the

regions real problem: the tragic failure of successive postcolonial governments to

build inclusive states that would reinforce a national identity. It is the tyranny ofSyrias ruling Assad clan, the dictatorship of Iraqs Saddam Hussein and the

ineptitude of Nouri al-Maliki, the current prime minister, that have driven the

Middle East to catastrophe, rather than century-old lines drawn in the sand.

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Colonial powers did not set the Middle East ablaze