Sykes-Picot Agreement

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Sykes Picot

 

Not sure why I was reading about this but:

Skyes-Picot Agreement:  aka Asia Minor agreement.  Secret treaty between UK, France and Russia which basically set forth terms for dividing up areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire after WWI.  Basically, this is seen as the original source for the current chaos in the Middle East.  Portions of the Ottoman Empire were divided into the country/state boundaries of Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine.  Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine were under British influence, Syria and Lebanon under French Influence.

 

Here is a good BBC article about why this caused a mess.  Basically the Sykes-Picot Agreement caused three problems:

 

  1.  The agreement was made without any Arab agreement.  Thus, the UK and British went back on their promise to Arab stakeholders that rebellion against the Ottoman Empire during WWI would mean independence for them (or at least a voice in it).  Thus, the continued colonial presence in the middle east from the 1920s to the 1940s bred a nationalistic disposition for independence rather than a government building mindset in those countries.
  2. The intent was to draw boundaries that were divided based on sectarian/tribal groupings.  This is how the region lived for several centuries–trading together well, but living in jurisdictions defined by tribal groupings.  Incidentally, Sykes and Picot had an affinity to drawing straight lines, and they thought they were grouping sects well together.  However, this intention did not materialize, and territories did not group sects together appropriately.  For a while, these sectarian differences were muted–first by the push for independence among Arab people, disregarding their sectarian differences, and later by strongmen suppressing populations to keep the sectarian differences in check.  During the Arab Spring in 2011, these latent tribal differences bubbled to the surface.
  3. The state system created by Sykes-Picot stalled people in the states to decide on a national identity–liberalism vs. religious ideology.

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