1.
Journalist
[archival]: Syria is splintering and fragmented further as the long Civil
War continues, as chief international correspondent for BBC World News Lyse
Doucet has reported extensively from the Syrian War.
2.
Lyse
Doucet [archival]: When I’m in the Region, not a day goes by without
someone mentioning the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the kind of post-War Agreements
at the turn of the last…
3.
Mark
Colvin [archival]: The Balfour Declaration and the Sykes, who would have
thought that these things would emerge from the first half of the 20th Century
to dominate the picture now.
4.
Lyse
Doucet [archival]: …this is it, and People are saying that it’s the
first chance of a redrawing of the boundaries that we have seen since the end
of the First World War and where Britain and France drew the boundaries of the
Middle East and that these are in danger of unravelling.
5.
Quince:
The Sykes-Picot Agreement Lyse Doucet was discussing with Mark Colvin in 2013
was signed between Britain and France on 16th May 1916, 100 years ago, and it redrew the Borders
of the modern Middle East.
Hello, this is Rear
Vision on RN and via your ABC radio app, I’m Annabelle Quince, and today we take a look at
the Sykes-Picot Agreement, why it was drawn up, how it reshaped the Middle
East, and if the Borders it created 100 years ago are likely to survive.
But let’s start
with the men the Agreement was named after, Mark Sykes and François
Georges-Picot. James
Barr is the author of A Line in the Sand.
6.
Barr:
Mark Sykes was
a conservative MP and he was the assistant to the Secretary of State for War,
Lord Kitchener, and that’s what made him a player in this particular Negociation.
Now, he’d had a very strange upbringing and he had two very strange parents. His father Sir Tatton, his
three passions in life were Church Architecture, milk pudding, and the
maintenance of his body at a constant temperature. And Mark Sykes’s mother, Jessica, was an
alcoholic, sadly. But the two of them, they had an unhappy Marriage but they
took Mark Sykes repeatedly to the Middle East. And there’s no doubt that Sykes
was absolutely entranced by what he saw, like many People who have been ever
since then.
Effectively he was
an adventurous tourist, and this all culminated in 1915 with the publication of
a book. He
wrote a two-inch thick tome called The Caliphs’ Last Heritage, and it
was in part a travel diary, a rather dyspeptic travel diary, and partly a
description of the decay of the Ottoman Empire, from its zenith in the 16th Century
to this rather crumbling, backward cul-de-sac, if you like, of Europe by the
beginning of the 20th. The Caliphs’ Last Heritage came out at the
beginning of 1915, just as a Debate was beginning to rumble about the future of
the Middle East.
François Georges-Picot, on the other
hand, was a bit older than Sykes, he was in his mid-40s. And the Picot family
were well-known imperialists. And François Georges-Picot would have started out
or wanted to start out as a lawyer. But aged 28 in 1898, he changed Careers.
But the date when he changed careers is very important because he went and
joined the French Foreign Office, the Quai d’Orsay, as a junior diplomat. And that was the year of the Fashoda Incident,
and this was a struggle between Britain and France for the Control of the Upper
Nile.
And that year in
1898 there was a Confrontation between British forces led by Kitchener and the
French expedition which was about eight men strong on the Upper Nile at
Fashoda. And in these circumstances, François Georges-Picot joined the French
diplomatic service. And I think this really coloured his view of Life. Many
French People felt that jingoistic Britain had made Threats that the French
should have stood up to. And François Georges-Picot certainly absorbed that
lesson and decided that in future Negociations with the British he would take a
much tougher line.
7.
Quince:
While the Agreement between these two men was signed at the height of World War
I, according to Rashid Khalidi [], the substance of the Agreement can be found
in the colonial aspirations of Britain and France.
8.
Khalidi:
The actual Partition Agreements between Britain and France as far as the Middle
East, known as Sykes-Picot, and other similar deals between Britain, France and
Russia about other parts of the Ottoman Empire, were signed during this Crisis Period
of World War I, as you say. But in fact the Great Powers had been laying out
the Areas in which they wanted to have a sphere of influence from many, many
years before that. Britain had already developed in trust in southern
Mesopotamia, what is today Iraq, in Palestine the French had already done so in
Syria, and similarly with the Russians and Italians and so forth in other parts
of the Ottoman Empire.
And in the years
immediately preceding World War I, these understandings were made much more
definitive in a series of railway Agreements. And we find that in fact there’s
a remarkable overlap or similarity between the pre-World War I railway
understandings between these Powers and the deals that they actually cut during
World War I. So it is in that sense that there were several precursors to the
actual Sykes-Picot Partition that took place during World War I.
9.
Quince:
So particularly for France and for Britain, what was it they were looking for
in terms of developing these spheres of Interest?
10.
Khalidi:
Well,
France specifically was interested in a couple of things. They claimed that
French Interests went right back to the Crusades, arguing that most of the
Crusaders were French or French-speaking, and that that provided them with sort
of an anchor for the legitimacy of their claims. They also had economic Interests all over
Syria in particular. The railway system between Damascus, Homs and
other Regions was French owned. The silk Industry of Lyon had developed a Relationship
with growers of mulberry trees and rawsilk produces all over Syria, mainly in
Lebanon but other parts of Syria as well. So France had both these emotional
and religious claims to various solid economic Interests. They owned the
tramways in various Cities, they owned the electrical Companies, the gas Companies
and so forth.
For the British it was partly economic and partly strategic. In
Palestine and in Iraq they claimed a variety of Interests, but one of the most
important Interests was to control the shortest route between the Mediterranean
and the Gulf. And in addition they had a strategic interest in seeing that the
area on the other side of the Egyptian frontier, what is today Israel-Palestine,
was an Area in which there would be no Railway building such that the Ottomans
could not bring Troops right up to the frontier. They were very worried about
the Ottoman Empire being able to push into Egypt. That’s a fear that went right
back to 1906. And in fact in that sense the British were prescient
because during World War I the Ottomans did push an Army across the Sinai
Peninsula right up to the Suez Canal.
11.
Barr:
By the end of 1914 the Western Front was in deadlock and so was the Eastern Front,
and People particularly in Britain started to try to think of ways to win the War,
to break the deadlock. And a group of People called the Easterners decided that
the best way was to launch an Attack on the Ottoman Empire. And the thinking behind
that was that if you knocked the Ottomans out of the War, you could open a new Front
in south-east Europe and the Germans would be forced to divert Resources there,
and that would weaken them on the Western and Eastern Fronts so that Britain
and France on the Western Front and the Russians on the eastern could then
defeat Germany. So that was the Grand Strategy.
And the assumption
at the Time, partly because of People like Sykes who had portrayed this
crumbling, decrepit Empire, was that the Ottomans would cave in pretty quickly.
And that’s partly why the British embarked on this strategy of landing at
Gallipoli, in the Dardanelles. They thought that if you landed 150 miles away
from Constantinople, that it would take a matter of weeks to defeat the Ottomans
there and march through European Turkey and up to the capital and that would be
the end of the War. Now, that of course opened the hypothetical question of
what would happen to the Ottoman Empire after the War, after its defeat. And it
was at that point that Britain and France started to think a bit about what
they would do about it.
12.
Journalist
[archival]: The French opened the game by asking for a great deal, for
the whole of the Levant, beginning on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey itself,
and running down to what is now the Gaza Strip in southern Palestine. The French wanted all this coastline and a substantial part
of the hinterland of that coast, including Palestine. This was not acceptable
to the British. The British certainly didn’t want the French sitting on the
Egyptian Border, threatening the Canal, Britain’s gateway to her Indian Empire.
13.
Barr:
The French were already suspicious of what Britain was up to. By the beginning
of 1915 there was quite a serious division between the British and the French,
because while the British were increasingly interested in attacking Gallipoli,
the French were still foursquare behind an assault on the Western Front. And
what this meant in practice was that while the British saved up and
concentrated on training the volunteer Army that would eventually fight the Battle
of the Somme, the French launched repeated offensives, and these were extremely
costly. So by the
beginning of 1915, the French had lost far more men than the British
had. And in the British mind, this created a sense of Debt and a sense of Guilt.
But it also raised the question about whether the French really had it in them
to carry on fighting at this rate.
The other thing was
that of course when Sykes came to Cairo and told the French about the scheme,
the French started to suspect that the true purpose behind Gallipoli was
actually an imperial one, it wasn’t really about winning the War at all, it was
more about enhancing the Security of the British Empire. And François
Georges-Picot was among those who argued that it was Time to confront Britain
about this and reach some sort of deal. So in August 1915, François Georges-Picot
effectively posted himself to London as a diplomat. François Georges-Picot went
to see the British for the first Time in October 1915. It became very clear at this meeting that there
was going to be no deal, and Georges-Picot was absolutely adamant that France’s
Ambitions in the Middle East had to be respected by the British, and the
British on the other hand weren’t going to give either.
In the meantime or very soon after that, the
British also had to admit something else they were doing behind the scenes
which was negotiating with the Sharif of Mecca. The Sharif of Mecca, descendant of the Prophet
Mohammed, had agreed to launch an uprising against the Turks if he got
some British support. And in exchange for that the British had offered him a
large Empire after the War, which encompassed much of the area that we now
think of as Syria, Lebanon and Israel, Jordan and Iraq.
14.
Khalidi:
Well, the deal is known as the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence between Sharif Hussein of
Mecca, ruler of Mecca under the Ottomans, and Sir Henry McMahon. So
McMahon, operating under orders from London, got in touch with Sharif Hussein
and asked him whether he would be willing to join the Allies and oppose the
Ottoman Empire. And Sharif Hussein said, well, you know, I have a variety of
requirements. And among them were the Idea of Arab Independence, in which
Sharif Hussein told the British was that he wasn’t simply negotiating on his
own behalf, he was speaking on the behalf of Arab Nationalist Societies all
over the Arab Provinces. We want Independence for the Arabs from the Ottomans. And
this was what was negotiated between the British and the Sharifians and the Hashemites. The
Arabs understood this as Independence in almost all of the Arab provinces, with
the exception of a couple of Regions where either Britain or its ally friends
had Interests. And how that was to be squared with Arab Independence was never
clarified.
The British
understood it somewhat differently, because at the same Time other British
representatives than Sir Henry McMahon, in fact Sir Mark Sykes, were
negotiating with the French and with the Russians for the Partition of the
Ottoman Empire, and for a set of Arrangements that differed quite markedly from
at least what the Arabs understood the British had promised them.
15.
Barr:
When Georges-Picot heard about this he was absolutely astonished, because the
French had some inkling this was going on but they had never thought the
British would actually cave in to what Sharif Hussein wanted because they
regarded him as a very, very unimportant character. But it became clear that
the British were going to support that. And at that point, Georges-Picot played
his ace. This was to play on this British Guilt about how the War had gone so
far. So Georges-Picot said, Look, we might have agreed to this Arab Empire, but
having lost so many People so far, there’s no way that France will just accept
these kinds of claims, you have to come to a deal with us.
Those were the
circumstances in which Sykes went to the War Council in December 1915. The negotiations with Picot
were deadlocked. He went along proposing dividing the Middle East down a straight
line from the Mediterranean to the Persian Border. At that
point someone asked him, ‘Where do you propose putting that line?’ And Sykes
says to them, ‘I should like to draw a line from the e of Acre to the last k in
Kirkuk.’ And the War Cabinet, who had many other things to worry about at that Time,
welcomed his Intervention. And it’s very interesting because one of them
emerged from the Meeting under the impression that Sykes, from what he’d said,
could speak both Turkish and Arabic, but in fact he could speak neither Language.
16.
Khalidi:
I do not believe he knew much in the way of local Languages.
I don’t think he understood either Turkish or Arabic very well, and I don’t
think that he had much of a sense of the pulse of the Peoples of the Region,
even though he had travelled extensively. He knew the Geography very
well. And he knew something about the Middle East. He had been there many, many
times for lengthy trips, by himself with a guide.
So this was not a
man who was ignorant of the Region, and that was really true of most the People,
including several People in the Cabinet. Churchill had fought in the Sudan.
Kitchener commanded the Army in the Sudan. Curzon had travelled across Persia
and Central Asia on a donkey. You had in the case of both the War cabinet
itself and officials advising them, like Sykes and Lawrence and so forth,
Gertrude Bell, People who had spent chunks of Time in the Region. In the case
of Kitchener he actually knew both Arabic and Turkish.
So you had People
who knew a great deal about the Middle East but they knew it, as it were, from
a distance, they knew it as aristocrats, they knew it as upper-class Englishmen
who looked down upon almost everybody else in the World, including People in
their own Society, not to speak of lowly Peoples, in their eyes, such as the
Arabs and the Turks. And you can see this in everything they write. I mean, the
condescension is palpable. [Accurate.]
17.
Quince:
You’re with Rear Vision on RN and via your ABC radio app. I’m Annabelle
Quince and today we’re tracing the history of the Sykes-Picot Agreement which
was signed in 1916 and established the modern boarders of the Middle East.
18.
Barr:
Sykes and Picot met for the first Time in December 1915, and they were able to agree
to a carve-up of much longer lines than Sykes had proposed to the council a few
weeks earlier. But what they couldn’t agree on was the future of Palestine, because
from the British point of view Palestine needed to be part of the strategic
cordon across the Middle East that would protect India. But the French had a
rather more sentimental view of it. They wanted Palestine because they thought
back to the Crusades, they also thought back to the fact that France had long
been recognised by the Ottoman Empire as the protector of all Christians in the
Ottoman Empire. They had had a semiformal status like that. And so the
French wanted Palestine because of the presence of the holy places there, and
they wanted to revive that kind of crusading glory, as they saw it.
So Sykes and
Georges-Picot couldn’t agree on the future of Palestine, and so what they
agreed instead is that it would have an international Administration. That was
a pretty horrendous compromise, certainly for the British for whom the idea of
an uncertain international administration right on their frontier, right close
to the Suez Canal which was the artery of the British Empire, that was
something that they just did not like.
19.
Journalist
[archival]: After a good deal of give and take, the Agreement the French
and British finally came to produced a Map which looked like this. The Area which is now called Syria and the Lebanon was to be
in the French sphere of influence. The Area which is now Jordan, southern
Palestine, and a good deal more besides, was to be in the British sphere of
influence. Most of the area which was later Palestine was called in the Agreement
the ‘brown Area’. The brown Area was not to be under the Control of any
particular Power, for the ostensibly high-minded reason that the holy places
were there.
20.
Barr:
So no sooner than Sykes and Georges-Picot had cooked up
this deal and cooked up this particular compromise, the British started
thinking about how they might get around it, and they didn’t have to think that
far back because already the British had been wondering about how they might
use Zionism, the political Campaign to get a Jewish State in Palestine, how
they might use that Campaign in their own interest. And a member of the British
Cabinet, Sir Herbert Samuel, had written a paper about this back in the
end of 1914, and he had highlighted the strategic arguments behind settling
Jews in Palestine. They would be grateful, he argued, and Britain would
essentially create what another British general called a buffer Jewish State on
the east side of the Suez Canal.
So in 1916, just
after Sykes and Picot had done their deal, the British start approaching the
Zionists. And the key person in this in fact is Lloyd George because he
appreciated the point of this scheme more than any other minister, and he
started making assurances to the Jews that they would get this very early in
1916. This
culminates at the end of 1917 in the Balfour Declaration where Britain
makes the promise to the Zionists that they will get a Jewish national home in
Palestine. So the Balfour Declaration arises out of this loophole in the
Sykes-Picot Agreement. If the Sykes-Picot Agreement had left Palestine in
British hands unequivocally, I don’t think there would have been the same pressure
to join Forces with the Zionists. But instead because it left a loophole, the
British went and approached the Zionists and offered them their support, and
that was a way of undermining the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
21.
Khalidi:
The
Balfour Declaration had a strategic objective. Whatever sympathy Balfour may
have had for Jews or Zionism, the primary objective of the Balfour Declaration
was to establish exclusive British Control over Palestine. That was
not actually achieved until 1919 when Lloyd George and Clemenceau met in London
and agreed that instead of being internationalised, Palestine would come under
British Control. But the Balfour Declaration was sort of a pawn in that chess
game with the French, leading of course to the joke I suppose it is, that
Palestine was a thrice promised land, it had been promised to the French and
the Russians, promised to the Arabs, as the Arabs understood it, and then
promised to the Zionists.
22.
Quince:
So when and how did the Arabs discover that their Agreement in a sense with the
British meant nothing?
23.
Khalidi:
They found out after the Russian Revolution that the British and the French had cut a secret deal behind
their backs, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, because Leon Trotsky, who was the first
commissar for foreign affairs of the Bolshevik Government in St Petersburg,
released all of the secret Treaties that the Czarist Government had negotiated,
including the Sykes-Picot Agreement and others about the Ottoman Empire, and it was a huge shock and the British had to send someone
racing to Mecca to reassure the Sharif of Mecca that in fact the Agreement didn’t
say what in fact it did say and that their correspondence with Sharif Hussein
meant what he thought it meant.
They found out
about the Balfour Declaration because it was a public statement of the British
Cabinet. And so they received two quite rude shocks in November of 1917, one
being that their Agreement with the British was in some measure compromised by
the secret Agreement the British had negotiated with the French and that their
understanding of their Agreement with the British extending to Palestine was
compromised by what the British had just promised the Zionist Movement.
24.
Woodrow
Wilson [archival]: The World must be made safe for democracy…
25.
Journalist
[archival]: When Wilson went to Europe the first Time, the World’s
heartbeat was with him. In France, they lighted candles in his Honour. He was
cheered as no conqueror ever was. In Rome, his picture hung in almost every
home. In England, his path from the Channel coast to Charing Cross Station was
strewn with flowers. This indeed was a man of Peace. But less than a year later,
the man of Peace was a mere man of Politics. He had made two trips to Europe
and spent six months at that green baize table with Clemenceau, Orlando and
Lloyd George. And to keep his dream alive had been forced to compromise and
conciliate, barter and bargain to such an extent that the Product he brought
home for approuval was already suffering from the anaemia which was the old World’s
chronic Disease.
26.
Barr:
So the Sykes-Picot Agreement did survive, or it survived in part. The question
of why it survived is a really interesting one because at the end of the War
nobody would have expected it to, least of all Sykes. Sykes thought that the Agreement
was embarrassing really and that it would never survive People’s desire to run
their own affairs. But the reason it did so. Several
reasons, but the most important one, the most instant one was Oil because by
the end of 1918 the British had appreciated that there was Oil in northern Iraq
in the area that Sykes had agreed to give to Picot. So around Mosul, the city
that Sykes always rather hated, there was Oil there. And that was something
that the British deeply wanted because they were worried about their own Oil
stocks.
At the end of 1918 the
British Prime Minister, by then it was Lloyd George, meets the French Prime
Minister Clemenceau, and at this point the French desperately need British
support to get back Alsace-Lorraine, so the Territory they had lost to Germany
in 1870. And Lloyd George seized on that weakness to
rewrite the Sykes-Picot Agreement for the first Time. And Clemenceau asked him,
‘What are we to discuss?’ And Lloyd George says, ‘Palestine and Mosul.’ And
Clemenceau says straight out, ‘You can have them.’ And Lloyd George
leapt on French weakness to get this part of northern Iraq and join it onto
British Territory. So the reason why the line ‘from the e of Acre to the last k
of Kirkuk’ didn’t quite survive was because of Lloyd George at the end of the
First World War.
And the second
reason was really an increasing willingness by the British to bend to French
demands. Because at the end of the War, the British were quite adamant they
were in the Middle East, the French weren’t really, they would impose the Settlement.
But as the Versailles Treaty, the Paris Peace Conference went on, it became
pretty clear that they hadn’t come up with something that was going to prevent
another War, that another War was going to happen sooner or later. And at that
point Britain assumed that it would need France on its side, so it became more
and more reluctant to annoy France over the Middle East.
The French wanted
to get direct Control of Lebanon and Syria. The British had always thought that
they would have a much more hands-off arrangement and give the Arabs at least
some sense of Control. But the fact that the French wanted to do that and the
fact that the British wanted to exploit Iraq’s Oil meant that the British took
a much more and increasingly hardline view of the situation. So from wanting to
give the Arabs some degree of Independence, they moved increasingly to thinking
that they needed a British Government in Iraq because they were very worried
that if they didn’t have that that they wouldn’t be able to get the investors
to pump money in to fund Oil exploration. They thought investors would run a
mile from what one man called an untested Arab Government.
27.
Journalist
[archival]: On
November 21, 1919, François Georges-Picot, the co-architect of the Sykes-Picot Agreement
and the French General Gouraud, arrived in Beirut. And so began the
imposition of the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon. Faisal, who had been
the governor of Damascus now for 16 months, had been consolidating his
position. When he was proclaimed King by the Syrian National Congress, the
French were incensed, and General Gouraud sent in his Troops. By August 7, 1920, Faisal
had been deposed and had to flee to Palestine. The promises to Sharif Hussein
and Faisal of a single independent State were now a distant Memory for the
Europeans.
28.
Khalidi:
The British
ended up with a Revolt in Mesopotamia in 1920. The French had to fight their
way into Damascus in 1920, and had unrest in the northern parts of the Country
for several years after that and a huge Revolt in 1926, ‘25 and ‘26 in Syria
and parts of Lebanon. And there were disturbances in Palestine in 1920, ‘21,
and then again in 1929. So this was not well received by the Peoples of
this Region, and where they were able to rise up, they did. The British managed
to master the Iraqi Revolt using the Royal Air Force, and some of the first
recorded bombings of civilians take place in that Region.
29.
Quince:
Look, just one final question, the lines that were drawn on the map that
created the Middle East back in the end of World War I, can they survive and do
they still have any relevance today?
30.
Khalidi:
We really don’t know. There are all kinds of pressures that seem to be
operating against the existing Nation-States and the existing Borders, whether
from repressed Kurdish Nationalism, whether from the Islamic State, which
claims that it’s going to destroy these Borders, whether from the creation as a
result of Interventions by multiple Powers of failed States in Iraq and Syria.
The other thing is that there are very powerful international pressures against
changing frontiers. There are major players in the Middle East, notably Iran
and Turkey, which have very strong views about changing the Borders and which
have the strength to assert themselves in defence of those views, both of which
are very much opposed, both to the Islamic State and to Kurdish Nationalism. So
I’m not sure that these Borders are going to necessarily disappear overnight.
31.
Quince:
Rashid Khalidi []. My other guest was James Barr, author of A Line in the Sand. The Sykes-Picot
Agreement was just the beginning of the story. Rear Vision now has a new
website that traces the story of the Middle East through the 20th Century and
into the 21st. The rise and fall of Arab Nationalism, Palestine and Israel, the
Iranian Revolution, through to the Arab Spring and the rise of Islamic State.
If you have any interest in Middle East history or politics you need to check
out this page. You can find a link on the RN web page.
I’m Annabelle Quince, and this is Rear
Vision on RN.
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