Shifting Sands

by Raja Shehadeh

  The task of formulating a policy fell to Winston Churchill when he became Colonial Secretary in February 1919. His principal adviser was T. E. Lawrence, an advocate of indirect rule or enlightened imperialism. It was under Lawrence’s influence that Churchill adopted the ‘Sharifian’ plan of dividing the British sphere of influence into a number of states to be headed by the Sharif of Mecca and his sons. Lawrence pressed hardest the claims of Emir Faisal. The Sharifian plan went some way towards mitigating Britain’s sense of guilt for letting down the Sharif, but it had two other, more practical, merits to recommend it. First, as Lawrence pointed out, as imported rulers lacking a power base of their own, the Hashemites would be dependent on Britain. Second, as Churchill pointed out, because they were a family, Britain would be able to play them off against one another to attain its own ends.

  The first step in implementing this Sharifian plan was to offer Faisal the throne of Iraq. The invention of the Iraqi throne provided a neat solution to Britain’s own problem of carrying a spare prince. It also entailed a handsome consolation prize to the prince in question for the throne he had lost in Damascus. Faisal’s ascent to the throne in Baghdad was carefully stage-managed by Sir Percy Cox, the high commissioner for Iraq, and his assistant Gertrude Bell, whose obsession with the Hashemites and passion for king-making matched that of Lawrence. Other candidates were persuaded to withdraw, while Sayyid Talib, who proclaimed the slogan ‘Iraq for the Iraqis’, was arrested and deported. The remaining opposition to Faisal, mostly from the Kurds and the Shiites, was neutralised. A referendum was then arranged to give Britain’s candidate a veneer of popular legitimacy. Ninety-six per cent of Iraqis, it was claimed, wanted Faisal as their king, and he duly ascended the throne on 23 August 1921. As one critic of British policy noted, the 1921 settlement had two notable results: first, it introduced anti-British sentiment as a fundamental principle of Iraqi politics and, second, ‘it justified and sanctioned violent and arbitrary proceedings and built them into the structure of Iraqi politics’.3

  Equally arbitrary and equally calculated to suit Britain’s own political, strategic and commercial interests was the delineation of Iraq’s borders. These took little account of the divisions within Iraq along linguistic or religious lines into Kurds in the north, Sunni Muslims in the centre and Shiite Muslims in the south. The logic behind the enterprise was not easy to fathom. To one observer it seemed that ‘Iraq was created by Churchill, who had the mad idea of joining two widely separated oil wells, Kirkuk and Mosul, by uniting three widely separated peoples: the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites.’4

  The second stage in the execution of the Sharifian plan was to let Faisal’s elder brother, Abdullah, rule over the vacant lot which the British christened, if that is the right word, the Emirate of Transjordan, bolstered by financial assistance from Britain. A statement was issued excluding Transjordan from the provisions for a Jewish national home, which initially applied to the whole area of the Palestine mandate. Churchill was well satisfied with his handiwork and frequently boasted that he had created the Emirate of Transjordan by the stroke of his pen one bright Sunday afternoon and still had time to paint the magnificent views of Jerusalem.

  The fiercest Arab hostility towards Britain was provoked by the latter’s policy in Palestine. On 1 July 1921 Britain set up a civil administration headed by a high commissioner to govern the country directly. The promise to support a national home for the Jewish people contained in the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the terms of the League of Nations mandate. At the time of the Balfour Declaration the Jews constituted less than 10 per cent of the population of the country. So from the very start a tragic contradiction was built into the mandate: Britain could only meet its obligations to the Jews by denying to the Arab majority their natural right to self-determination. Palestine was to be the exception to the universally valid rule that a territory belongs to the majority of the people who live there.

  Moreover, the enthusiasm with which Britain embraced the Zionist cause in 1917 had largely evaporated by the early 1920s. The conflicting promises, statements and declarations made by the allies regarding Palestine created a smokescreen of almost impenetrable density. One of the very few honest remarks on the subject was made in retrospect by the author of the Balfour Declaration. ‘In short, so far as Palestine is concerned,’ wrote Balfour, ‘the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.’5

  In the conduct of negotiations over borders, British representatives were capable of acting in a most arbitrary and autocratic manner to further Britain’s imperial interests. During the negotiations in 1922 to define the frontiers of Iraq, Kuwait and the Najd (the forerunner of present-day Saudi Arabia), for example, Sir Percy Cox reprimanded Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Rahman al Faisal al Saud, the mighty Sultan of the Najd, like a naughty schoolboy and reduced him to tears. Ibn Saud was forced to yield land to Iraq but was later compensated at the expense of Kuwait. The borders imposed by Cox, who was known to the Arabs as Kokkus, deliberately restricted Iraq’s access to the Persian Gulf. These borders did not fully satisfy any of the parties, least of all Iraq, which felt it was entitled to the whole of Kuwait. They therefore continued to generate friction and instability.

  What was left of the Ottoman Empire after the allies had nearly finished carving it up became the modern state of Turkey. The collapse of empires invariably has consequences for international order and so it was in this case. The Ottoman Empire had provided a political system that was far from perfect, but it worked. During the First World War Britain and France destroyed the old order in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, but they did not spare much thought for the long-term consequences of their actions. In the aftermath of the war they built a new political and territorial order in the region on the ruins of the old order. They refashioned the Middle East in their own image. They created states, they nominated persons to govern them and they laid down frontiers between them. But the new states, for the most part, were small and unstable and the rulers lacked legitimacy, while the frontiers were arbitrary, illogical and unjust, giving rise to powerful irredentist tendencies.

  The new order settled Europe’s century-long Eastern Question: who and what would succeed the Ottomans? But it also raised a new Middle Eastern Question within the Middle East itself, and that was whether the people of the region would accept the new state system, which was based on European ideas, European interests and European management. Would they be able and, if so, would they be willing to operate by the new ground rules? The answer is that powerful local forces, both secular and religious, rejected the new state system and the ground rules that went with it. Indeed, it has been this absence of legitimacy that has been a central feature of Middle East politics ever since the old order was blown away.

  To Arab nationalists the new order meant betrayal by the allies of their wartime promises, military occupation, the division of the area into spheres of influence and exploitation of its raw materials. Hostility towards the authors of the new order was further fuelled by what they saw as the planting in Palestine, in the heart of the Arab world, of a dangerous imperialist bridgehead in the form of the Jewish national home.

  In short, the post-war order imposed by the Entente powers created a belt of turmoil and instability stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Its key feature was lack of legitimacy. This situation may be termed the post-Ottoman syndrome. It laid the groundwork for conflicts that continue to plague the region. In this sense the Paris peace settlement is not just a chapter in history, or past history as Americans are apt to say. It is the story of our own times. It lies at the root of the turmoil and instability, countless territorial disputes, struggles for national liberation, rebellions and revolutions, civil wars and interstate wars that have become such familiar features of the international politics of the Middle East in the post-Second World War era. The post-1918 peace s
ettlement is at the very heart of the current conflicts between the Arabs and Israel, between Arabs and other Arabs, between some Arabs and the West. Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell, who served in the Palestine campaign during the First World War, summed it up in one line: ‘After “the war to end war” they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a “Peace to end Peace”.’6

  THE DIVISIVE LINE: THE BIRTH AND LONG LIFE OF THE SYKES–PICOT AGREEMENT

  James Barr

  THE SYKES–PICOT AGREEMENT came crashing back into the headlines in the summer of 2014 after a propaganda video shot by the Islamic State showed a bulldozer carving a passage through the sandbank that delineates the Syria–Iraq border. It was certainly a graphic illustration of how the jihadi group had become a transnational phenomenon that controlled the vacuum left by the failing Syrian and Iraqi states. But the Islamic State propagandists tried to vest it with greater symbolism. It was the ‘end of Sykes–Picot,’ they claimed, in a reference to the wartime deal whereby Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them.

  Cue many articles about the 98-year-old Sykes–Picot Agreement, and fierce debate about whether, as Osama bin Laden liked to claim, it can be blamed for Arab woes, or not. Some, pointing to the colonial legacy, said it was responsible; others retorted that the difference between the Sykes–Picot partition and the current political map, or the more recent failings of the states themselves, meant that it wasn’t. The truth lies somewhere in between.

  The map of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Middle East with a diagonal line that ran from the Mediterranean to the Persian frontier. France would rule Zone A and the adjacent northern area; Britain Zone B and the adjacent southern area. The two men signed the bottom right corner. (British National Archives)

  The idea that the deal would still be so controversial would surely have surprised one of the two men involved in its creation, eighteen months into the First World War. Sir Mark Sykes was thirty-six years old when he hurried into Downing Street on the morning of 16 December 1915, clutching a handful of notes, a square War Office map and an expedient proposal that was designed to address French fears about the awkward Eastern Question: what would happen to the Middle East if Britain and France emerged as victors?

  It was ironic that Sykes’s idea would change the Middle East for ever, because the discussion that followed was only superficially about the region. Fundamentally – and this is what made dealing with the issue so urgent – it was about addressing a disagreement that looked as if it might tear Britain’s alliance with France apart.

  By December 1915, eighteen months into a war that some had predicted would be over by the previous Christmas, the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale was under severe strain. There had always had been disagreement over strategy. The French were adamant that a great offensive on the western front was urgently required to drive the Germans from their soil. The British argued for delay while they recruited a vast army of volunteers and reorganised their war effort, for, too often, their troops went into battle without enough ammunition. The consequence, in the short run, was that in the first year of the war the French did most of the fighting and took most of the casualties. Disagreement became distrust. A fortnight before Sykes’s meeting in Downing Street the British ambassador in Paris had been forced to admit (after months of denials) that he was beginning to hear the view among his contacts that ‘we are making use of France against Germany for our own sole benefit and that much greater sacrifices are being made by France’.1

  Events in the Middle East during 1915 had strengthened these misgivings. When the early French offensives failed, a faction within the British government, led by Kitchener and Churchill, proposed a rethink. Looking east, they argued that the defeat of Germany’s decrepit Ottoman allies would break the deadlock by opening a new front in south-east Europe to which the Germans would have to send troops.

  There was another reason why the British wished to deal swiftly with the Ottomans. This was to end the threat of a jihad. After the Ottoman Empire joined the war on the Germans’ side, its Sultan had declared a holy war against his enemies. Jumpy British officials had watched ever since for signs that the British Empire’s 100 million Muslim subjects might rise up in answer to his call. They knew that the war could only be won in Europe, but feared it might be lost if British troops had to be diverted to fight rebellions in Egypt and India.

  The French never shared the British neurosis about the jihad. Their scepticism about the British war plan turned into suspicion when they saw its details. Originally, the British had intended to grab the Ottoman Empire by its throat and kick it in the guts simultaneously through landings both on the Gallipoli peninsula and at the port of Alexandretta – modern Iskanderun – in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean where Syria and Turkey meet and the railway that formed the backbone of Ottoman communications ran near the coast. The French had long entertained hopes of establishing a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, and suspected that the Alexandretta landings were as much a British effort to thwart this dream as they were about winning the war. They were right to do so, because as Lawrence of Arabia, then working as an intelligence officer in Cairo, admitted at the time, ‘The only place from which a fleet can operate against Egypt is Alexandretta.’2 After the French vetoed this part of the plan, only the Gallipoli landings went ahead.

  The wrangling over Alexandretta revealed old tensions that are worth explaining, because their recurrence added to the sense of malaise afflicting the Entente and triggered the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Britain and France had been rivals in the Middle East since the Napoleonic era. They were battling at this point not for its oil wealth – that would come later – but in the belief that control of Egypt in particular was a prerequisite for domination of the real prize: India.

  The Anglo-French struggle had intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century following the completion of the Suez Canal and as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble. In 1875, when bankruptcy beckoned for the Egyptian ruler, Ismail (who was an Ottoman client), the British bought his stake in the canal to prevent the French (the other shareholder) from establishing a monopoly. When the Ottoman government’s default the following year left British investors badly burned, the French rushed in to replace them, becoming the largest holders of Ottoman government bonds.

  The Ottoman default prompted the British to think the unthinkable and abandon their previous policy of propping up the Ottomans. That led them to take over Cyprus in 1878 and Egypt in 1882. When the British then lost control of the Sudan after the murder of General Gordon, the French tried to exploit the vacuum. In 1895 they launched an expedition to claim, and dam, the headwaters of the Nile in an attempt to render Egypt, downstream, uninhabitable. Churchill, then a journalist, dismissed it as an attempt by ‘eight French adventurers’ to claim a territory that was ‘twice the size of France’. But outlandish as it seemed, the threat was plausible enough to precipitate Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan and the subsequent confrontation between his forces and the French in 1898 at Fashoda – the flyblown spot where France had raised the tricolore and was then forced to lower it in defeat. Today, the Fashoda Incident’s nineteenth-century date makes it seem desperately remote, but to gain a sense of how recent it felt in 1915, you only have to imagine that Britain had almost gone to war with France in 1998.

  Old habits died hard. As the plans to invade the Gallipoli peninsula were finalised, the British government anticipated victory and an argument with its allies over the division of the spoils. It set up a committee – what else? – to ensure that Britain’s overriding priority, the security of India, was not simply preserved but reinforced. Sykes, a new Member of Parliament who was Kitchener’s assistant, was the most junior member of this body.

  Sykes possessed an engaging sense of humour and a flyaway imagination but he was not what we would call a ‘details man’. He came from a landed Yorkshire family, an only child who had inherited the b
aronetcy from his late father, Sir Tatton, an odd man whose chief passions were church architecture, milk pudding and the maintenance of his body at a constant temperature. It was presumably in pursuit of the first of these that Sir Tatton had taken him on holiday to the Middle East in 1890.

  Sykes was neither the first person nor the last to be entranced by the sense of going back in time, and he returned to the region repeatedly. When he joined the committee considering the future of the Ottoman Empire in early 1915 he had just published an entertainingly jaundiced history-cum-travel memoir that showed a visceral dislike of creeping modernity, yet sealed his reputation in political circles as an expert on the region. As one reviewer remarked, ‘The facts which he has collected will be of the highest value when the settlement of the Eastern question comes to be undertaken.’3

  In the committee’s early discussions Sykes advocated splitting the region with the French, but his colleagues disagreed. In their view the best way to keep other powers away from India was to turn the existing Ottoman provinces into semi-independent states which Britain would seek to influence but not directly govern. Sykes was sent on a trip to Cairo and Delhi in the summer to canvass support for this idea. But it was vetoed by the military and, like many drafts, the committee’s ended up exactly where it started, with Sykes’s idea of a partition that would give Britain control of territory from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf.