OLD GAMES, NEW TRAGEDY - The outcome in Syria will seriously affect its neighbours Diplomacy K.P. Nayar What is happening in Syria is part of an inevitable unravelling of a region’s chequered history. It is history’s revenge for the past sins of colonial powers that it is taking place as the world approaches the centenary of the First World War when it all began. Syria, as we know now, is an artificial nation state whose boundaries were drawn out of a larger land mass with a long history. Its creation was the culmination of a process that was set in motion when two diplomats, one British, the other French, drafted a secret agreement which aimed for the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire and the sharing of its spoils between the two leading colonial powers. The secret pact, signed on May 16, 1916 by Pierre Paul Cambon, the French envoy in London, and Edward Grey, Britain’s longest-serving foreign secretary to date, is named after its two diplomat authors, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. The Sykes-Picot agreement provided for an arbitrary carving up of the Arab lands of the Ottoman empire between France and Britain: central and southern Mesopotamia, Baghdad and Basra provinces went into British hands while the coastal areas of what is now Syria and most of today’s Lebanon came under French control. The rest of Syria as well as the Kurdish areas of what became Iraq and the lands which were eventually christened Jordan were allowed to have nominal Arab tribal chiefs functioning under French tutelage in their northern parts and under British control in the south. Crucially, there was free trade between the French and British spheres of influence and free passage as well. Jerusalem was promised an international administration, primarily because Imperial Russia had interests there. For that reason, the Russian government was given a copy of the pact although Moscow was not a party to the agreement. The secret arrangements worked out by Sykes and Picot may never have seen the light of day had not the Russian communists discovered a copy of the agreement after they came to power in the October Revolution of 1917. Within days of assuming power, the communists published the secret pact. The worst perfidy of all in the sordid history of colonial meddling in Arab affairs at this time was that only three weeks before the Bolsheviks exposed the French and the British, the latter had made the Balfour Declaration, hypocritically promising a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Simultaneously, and equally hypocritically, the British were making false promises to Arabs, and at the same time, secretly undermining nascent Arab nationalist aspirations. It was only in 2002, perhaps for the first time, that the British even acknowledged their colonial mistakes. In an interview when British public opinion was being torn down the middle under the pressure to go to war in Iraq, then foreign secretary Jack Straw, said: “The odd lines for Iraq’s borders were drawn by Brits. A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past. … The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis — again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one.” But then Straw admitted in the interview that “I am a liberal with a small L. ... India, Pakistan — we made some quite serious mistakes. We were complacent with what happened in Kashmir, the boundaries weren’t published until two days after independence. Bad story for us, the consequences are still there. Afghanistan — where we played less than a glorious role over a century and a half”. Sadly for the people of the West Asian region and for the rest of the world, all of this will not end here. Nor is it likely to be a happy ending. The British parliamentary vote against any involvement by the government in air strikes against Bashar al Assad’s Syria on th
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 14:45:05 +0000
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