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Michael C Williams- Farewell to Sykes-Picot?
In a statement in the British Parliament last week (House of Commons, October 16) the Foreign
Secretary, Phillip Hammond said in a debate on the struggle against ISIS that now was “effectively
Iraq’s last chance as nation state”. That sombre assessment followed a visit by the UK Foreign
Secretary to Iraq a few days earlier where he had used the expression’ last chance saloon’ to
describe Iraq’s dire predicament.
Iraq, like Syria, was a consequence of the First World War and of the infamous, in Arab eyes,
agreement between Sir Mark Sykes and Francois-Georges Picot which led to the division of the
former Ottoman Turkish domains by the two leading European powers, Britain and France. That
agreement, now almost a century old, appears in tatters as both countries are broken, exhausted by
years of war and sectarian division for which there is no easy repair. In that regard, we might look to
Eastern Europe after 1989 for precedents.
Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall all the countries of Eastern Europe have moved gradually to
joining the EU and NATO without problems except two. The former Czechoslovakia broke into two
states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in what was known as the ‘velvet divorce’. The fate of
Yugoslavia offers a more tragic example. That country broke up in a series of successive wars in
Croatia, Bosnia and finally Kosovo which lasted throughout the 1990’s. Like Syria and Iraq,
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were fashioned into states at the peace conference following World
War I at Versailles in 1919. Perhaps Yugoslavia with its mix of Catholic Slovenes and Croats,
Orthodox Serbs and Moslems in Bosnia and Kosovo resembles most the ethnic and religious diversity
of Syria and Iraq.
Like Yugoslavia in Eastern Europe, Syria and Iraq are the most diverse countries in the Middle East,
apart from tiny Lebanon, with substantial Sunni, Shia and Christian (of all denominations)
communities as well as smaller numbers of Druze, Yazidis and Alawites and, of course, the thirty
million Kurds, cited by many as the largest ethnic group without its own state. Since independence
from Britain and France, Syria and Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Egypt, have been governed with an
iron rod by dictators who have brooked no opposition. The political narratives of the two key Arab
countries have never conceded much of democratic substance in their decades of highly centralised
authoritarian rule.
That has now broken down and, most probably, irrevocably. That does not mean that Syria and Iraq
will disappear. At the least they are likely to stumble on for some years but the substance and
strength of the two states has drained away and each is now little more than a collection of fortified
and autonomous enclaves fed by outside patrons that include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the
United States. In neither country is there one coherent group, be it the still strong rump of the Assad
government, or the opposition Syrian National Council or ISIS, that is likely to emerge after three
years of bloodletting as dominant. While in Iraq years of sectarian bloodletting following the US/UK
invasion of 2003 have led the three main communities of Sunni, Shia and Kurds to go their own ways
with Shia dominated governments in Baghdad reinforcing the tacit dominance of Iran. It is for that
reason that ISIS receives much of its financial and other support from private backers in Saudi Arabia
and the other Gulf monarchies.
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All of this would not matter were it not for the fact that ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has,
by its very name, and also its own references to the British and French diplomats whose 1916
agreement shaped the modern Middle East, set as its goal the destruction of that imperial diktat and
its replacement by a Sunni caliphate stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Such a
state would of course have no place for Shia, Kurds, Christians and all the other minorities of the
region. Disturbingly the ISIS dream has attracted Sunni support given their alienation from post 2003
governments seen as Shia dominated in Iraq and the failure of the West to substantially aid the
opposition against the entrenched Assad regime.
In this regard it is worth noting that the Sykes-Picot agreement itself paid little regard to ethnic or
religious communities and was anyway changed within years by the British and French. Under the
original maps drawn up by the two diplomats France was allocated not only Syria and Lebanon but
also northern Iraq with the present ISIS capital of Mosul. The French sector also included most of
Kurdistan. Britain was to take southern Iraq and what is now Jordan. Later discussions between the
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and the British Premier David Lloyd George amended
this ceding all of Iraq to Britain. This was confirmed at the international conference in San Remo in
1920 which endowed the two countries with mandates from the recently created League of Nations.
The very fact that the agreement was substantially amended within two years underlined the
absence of any acknowledgement of sectarian differences in the region.
The changes in the Sykes-Picot agreement underlined the artificiality of what was an inherently
imperial project which paid scant regard to geography, terrain or ethnicity. Contemporary Syria and
Iraq are not alone in this regard. For most of the period since the Second World War regime and
country have been identical in the Arab world. The overthrow of the brutal dictatorship of the
regime of Saddam Hussein by the United States invasion of 2003 broke that connection and in so
doing has led to the steady erosion of Iraq as a nation state. A similar process is now underway in
the fellow Baathist state of Syria with at least three groups now contending to control the country –
the Assad regime, the Syrian national Council (SNC) and the Islamic State (ISIS). Another example in
the Arab world is Libya where the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi held the country together for
decades but where the writ of the present government barely extends beyond the capital Tripoli and
the country as a whole is riven by tribalism and factionalism.
War is often the midwife of new states. In modern Europe Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo
only became states because of the wars of the 1990’s. More recently, East Timor and South Sudan
are also new states that have arisen from conflicting former colonial territories. The danger is real
that Syria and Iraq may yet give way to new states. What is certainly sure is that a return to strong
Syrian and Iraqi states as imagined by Sykes and Picot is highly unlikely.
Lord Michael C Williams is Distinguished Visitng Fellow at Chatham House and a former diplomat.