100 years ago, Sykes-Picot messed up; We’re paying for secret MidEast map drawn in WWI

One-hundred years ago this month, British colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Marie Denis Georges-Picot divided the Middle East loosely and arbitrarily between Great Britain and France. Following that division, which became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a series of further — and often contradictory — treaties and conferences resulted in power battles, internal uprisings, coups, and revolts. 

A century later, the Middle East — with an explosive array of conflicts, including an ongoing civil war in Syria that has seen hundreds of thousands of deaths — is still experiencing the aftershocks of the 1916 Sykes-Picot pact. Scholars tackled the subject earlier this month at a conference hosted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think tank.

Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, director of JCPA’s Project on Regional Middle East Developments, explained in a policy paper that Sykes-Picot failed because it was drawn up not with the Middle East’s interests in mind, but with a mixture of British and French interests. 

“Britain was particularly interested in access to petroleum in Iraq. France, for their part, wanted access to Mediterranean harbor cities like Beirut,” former Israeli ambassador to Canada Alan Baker noted.

The secret map drawn up by Sykes and Picot established the geography for French and British colonial rule and influence. It also established new national borders, failing to take into account the local people, demographics, or socio-cultural and religious aspects of the territories they divided. 

“Sykes-Picot is the poster agreement for the poisonous legacy of European imperialism in the Middle East,” said Richard Drake, professor of history at the University of Montana.

James A. Paul, author of the 1991 book “Syria Unmasked” and former executive director of the Global Policy Forum, said that Sykes and Picot did so many things wrong that “it is hard to count them.” One of the consequences of those “mistakes,” he said, is what is known today as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.