Updated: May 18, 2016 01:50 IST
West Asia lies in tatters. Parts of the border between Iraq and Syria
have been virtually erased by the Islamic State.
Syria itself is divided
among multiple groups.
Iraq’s government has no control over at least a
fourth of its territory. Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region, has
demanded freedom from Baghdad.
The Syrian Kurdistan region is being run
by the Kurds themselves for the first time in several decades. The
regional map is fractured in many more ways. What triggered this crisis?
Part of the blame lies with a century-old agreement between Britain and
France that is viewed as the source of the modern map of West Asia.
When the British and French signed the Sykes-Picot
pact a century ago — on May 16, 1916 — to divide the huge land mass of
the Ottoman Empire between themselves, their primary concern was to
retain their colonial interests.
In the process, the map prepared by
diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot ignored local
identities, leaving several ethnic and social contradictions
unaddressed. Even when actual boundaries were identified after the First
World War, the focus was on colonial and regional interests, not on the
political preferences of the people.
Against this background, it may
not be a coincidence that over the years the most powerful political
ideologies that emerged from the region directly or indirectly
challenged the Sykes-Picot system.
Both Nasserism and Ba’athism sought
to transcend the territorial nationalist boundaries. Egypt and Syria
even went ahead to declare a United Arab Republic, an experiment that
collapsed after the 1961 coup in Damascus. And now, even Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, the leader of the IS, calls for an end to the “Sykes-Picot
conspiracy”.
The modern map of the region may not bear any great resemblance to the
original lines drawn by Sykes and Picot. What matters more now than the
actual Sykes-Picot map is the legacy of the agreement: foreign
interventions.
From the colonial carve-up to the Iraq war or the fight
against the IS, foreign involvement in the region continues, and often
exacerbates the crises rather than solving them.
Equally problematic has
been the failure of West Asia’s leaders to live up to the challenges of
their respective states.
Over the years, they resisted reform and ran
largely oppressive systems rooted in social conservatism and patronage.
They showed no interest in tackling the problems the Sykes-Picot pact
failed to address, such as the Kurdish question.
Their authoritarianism
simply sharpened the social contradictions in their states, while
intra-regional rivalries made peace elusive.
The rise of the IS is a
result of these external and internal problems.
If the Iraq war
unleashed sectarian and jihadist demons, they found a battlefield in
Syria where President Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship triggered a civil
war, which was in turn worsened by his regional rivals.
Both the
interventionists from abroad and the warring dictators at home should
rethink their approaches. Else, the ghosts of Sykes-Picot will continue
to haunt West Asia.
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