By Ali Abo Rezeg
ANKARA
The Middle East is currently undergoing turmoil similar to what happened 100 years ago after the signing of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, according to some Arab and Turkish political experts.
The assertion came during a series of Friday interviews by Anadolu Agency held on the sidelines of a two-day conference in Ankara devoted to the infamous century-old pact, which divided the Near East into British and French zones of influence following World War I.
"If we go back one century, we see there were major differences between the regional powers over Mosul [in northern Iraq], just like we’re seeing today," said Baghdad University Professor Mahmoud al-Qaisi.
"Meanwhile, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt have unstable relations with Turkey, just like 100 years ago," he said.
"In the Arab region, there are two things that led us to this turmoil," he argued. "The first is our leaders’ failure to build genuine modern states, while the second is a lack of awareness among the Arab public."
Al-Qaisi praised the Turkish model of a strong, modern state with deep-seated state institutions.
"Turkey is a successful, modern state, built by [Mustafa Kemal] Ataturk in 1923," he said. "Although we [Arabs] have enormous natural resources, which Turkey lacks, we continue to suffer poor living standards."
"This," he asserted, "can be attributed to rampant corruption and a penchant for dictatorship.”
Dreams of freedom dashed
Alaa al-Amiri, for his part, a history professor at Baghdad’s Al-Mustansiriya University, described Sykes-Picot as "the agreement by which the Arab dream of self-rule was dashed.”
"The situation in Syria and Iraq is even more difficult now; there is talk of a new carving-up of the region – which should deeply concern regional countries like Turkey and Iran," he told Anadolu Agency.
"Dividing up the region is a key objective for both the U.S. and Israel, which would like to see the region cut up into small, ineffective cantons unable to challenge Israel’s position as regional hegemon," he argued.
"Studying Sykes-Picot will allow us to confront plans to divide the region again and avert the disastrous outcomes that the agreement led to 100 years ago," said al-Amiri.
"We must forge our own future," he said. "We don’t have to accept what the imperialists imposed on us in the form of Sykes-Picot," he added.
"I urge all Muslim regional powers to realize that sectarian tensions will not lead to anything but more division," the professor said.
Nations to sects
Mustafa Bilgin, a professor at Turkey’s Yildrim Beyazit University (which organized this week’s conference), said Sykes-Picot had carved up the region along "nationalist" lines.
"These days, however," he continued, "the same imperialist powers want to divide it along sectarian lines.”
"Some Western countries want to create new micro-states in the region with which they can pressure certain regional powers," he said.
"But the Middle East can’t afford fresh divisions that might eventually lead to a regional war," he added.
Signed on May 16, 1916 by Britain and France, the Sykes-Picot Agreement delineated British and French spheres of influence in the Near East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
The secret talks that led to the agreement – held between French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot and British diplomat Mark Sykes – were later exposed by the communists when they overran Russia in 1917.
Under the agreement’s terms, the area known as the Fertile Crescent was carved up between Britain and France, with historical Palestine (including what is now Jordan) falling to the former and Syria and Lebanon going to the latter.
Iraq, meanwhile, was divided between the two powers, with Baghdad and Basra going to Britain and Mosul going to France.
