VIENNA,
May 18, 2016
Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot
One hundred years ago on Monday, Britain and France
signed a secret agreement carving out “spheres of influence” that
ultimately created the modern Western Asia.
Yet no
one was celebrating the anniversary as Secretary of State John Kerry and
his counterparts from Europe, the Arab States and Iran began gathering
in Vienna for the latest international effort to end the civil war in
Syria.
The effort is also supposed to usher in what
is delicately called a “political transition” that would ease out
President Bashar Al-Assad. At least that is the goal of the Western
allies and the Arab states; the Iranians and Russians seem to have a
different view.
Colonial manipulation
The
Sykes-Picot Agreement, named for its British and French authors and the
map it produced, is now widely considered a low point in colonial
efforts to manipulate the region to fit the interests of outsiders.
And
yet the remnants of the agreement, which came to light after documents
proving its existence emerged during the Russian Revolution in 1917,
loom over everything Mr. Kerry and his fellow foreign ministers are
doing here.
Rarely in the past century have the
shifting borders established by the agreement looked blurrier, and the
effort to maintain them shakier.
In October, the
ministers, who formed the so-called International Syria Support Group,
agreed that “Syria’s unity, independence, territorial integrity and
secular character are fundamental.” Yet some of the key players in the
slow-motion effort to get a transitional Syrian government in place say,
when granted anonymity, that they think unity and territorial integrity
are simply not possible.
One of the few players who
observed the anniversary at all on Monday was Masoud Barzani, the
president of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region. “On 100th anniversary of
Sykes-Picot Agreement, borders/sovereignty have become meaningless,” he
wrote on Twitter. “Sykes-Picot is over.” Maybe so. Yet in Vienna, giving
voice to that thought is considered an extreme breach of diplomatic
etiquette.
Decentralisation of power
When
the State Department offered up a senior official to preview the talks
for reporters here on Monday afternoon, the official insisted that
splitting up the country was not under discussion.
He
allowed for the possibility of a form of decentralisation in which
different groups — the Kurds, Mr. Assad’s government and the opposition —
receive some autonomy. But the goal, he said, was an intact Syria.
Of
course, to say anything else would be to lose crucial members of the
Support Group, starting with Turkey, which fears that a breakaway
Kurdistan would soon claim Turkish territory as well. Others, led by the
Saudis, care less about Syria’s borders and more about getting rid of
Mr. Assad. While the official American position is that he has to go,
the reality is that few in Washington are in a rush: The last thing they
want is a power vacuum in Damascus that the Islamic State would try to
fill.
Still, it seems safe to say that if anyone has
come out of the Syrian debacle nearly as hated in the region as Mr.
Assad, it is probably the diplomats who rearranged the region: Sir Mark
Sykes and François Georges-Picot.
Sykes, an
aristocratic racehorse breeder and Boer War veteran, died three years
after the agreement was reached, killed by the Spanish flu while in
Paris during the 1919 peace talks after World War I. Picot, the son of a
historian and known for his skills as a lawyer and a diplomat, lived to
be 80. He died in 1951, three years after the creation of Israel.
Not
surprisingly, with the region in danger of disintegration, lively
debate has sprung up over whether the two men condemned West Asia to a
century of chaos. Some historians have noted that Sykes and Picot’s map
drew no hard lines; it was about regions of influence.
Out
of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the British ultimately obtained
mandates over Palestine and Iraq; the French got what is now Syria.
Areas experiencing some of the hardest-fought battles now, like Mosul,
were attached to the Kingdom of Iraq. The two men have their defenders.
Writing in
Foreign Policy
recently, Steven A. Cook and Amr T. Leheta of the Council on Foreign
Relations argued that it was time to give the two colonial masters a
break, because whatever is happening today is probably not their fault. —
New York Times News Service
The British obtained mandates over Palestine and Iraq; the French got what is now Syria
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