The first inkling the French gained of Sykes’s scheme was from the man himself, when he disclosed his thinking to French officials as he passed through Cairo that summer. Alarmed by Sykes’s suggestion that the British claim could stretch as far north as Damascus, they reported what he had said to Paris.
In the French capital an imperialist pressure group, the Comité de l’Asie Française, had for several months been pushing their government to lay claim to Syria and Palestine, but their emotional argument that France should reclaim lands she had conquered during the Crusades gained little traction. The rather more concrete news of British scheming from Cairo was a godsend. It forced the French government to take up the matter with London.
One member of the Comité was a former lawyer named François Georges-Picot, who had switched careers to join his country’s diplomatic service. Compared to Sykes, Georges-Picot remains an enigmatic figure. But one biographical detail is extremely significant: the year that he decided to make the switch from law to diplomacy was 1898 – the year of Fashoda. France’s capitulation to British pressure at Fashoda would have dominated his early years as a diplomat and it is certain that, even seventeen years later, the episode rankled with him because he referred to it repeatedly. Fearing that his country would capitulate again, when news of Sykes’s plans reached Paris, he arranged for himself to be posted to London to negotiate a deal on the future of the Middle East. Having served as France’s consul in Beirut immediately before the war, he was familiar with the region. He was also determined to defend France’s interests very forcefully.
One further revelation – the discovery that Britain was secretly in talks with Sharif Hussein of Mecca – convinced the French that their suspicions of their ally’s ambitions in the Middle East were justified. While Sykes’s committee had been pondering the fate of the region, the British in Cairo had simultaneously been corresponding in secret with the cantankerous and autocratic ruler of the Islamic holy city of Mecca. Hussein had promised he could swing Middle Eastern Arabia against the Sultan’s jihad, if the British helped him break free from Ottoman control.
The British high commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, was responsible for this highly sensitive correspondence and initially dismissed the Sharif’s claims as grandiose. But as the Gallipoli campaign turned into a disaster, the appeal of the Sharif’s offer grew stronger and McMahon’s negotiating position weaker. At the same time he received convincing (but, it transpired, exaggerated) intelligence suggesting that the Sharif was as influential as he claimed to be and just as capable of backing the jihad, if Britain’s response was unsatisfactory. Hurriedly McMahon offered his government’s support for a large independent Arab state which, because he was aware of Sykes’s conflicting intentions, he tried to avoid defining too precisely.
The French ambassador in Cairo only got wind of Sharif Hussein’s demand four days later, which he reported to London. With impeccable French logic, he and his government assumed that McMahon would reject the Sharif’s demand because it so clearly conflicted with the scheme that Sykes had outlined to them that summer, rather than coming up with a fudge, as McMahon had done.
Ahead of their first meeting with Georges-Picot the British realised that they would now need to admit what they had actually offered to the Sharif. According to one witness at the meeting on 23 November 1915, Georges-Picot reacted to the news with ‘complete incredulity’. Syria was ‘near the heart of the French,’ he told his counterparts, before he deftly linked his refusal to give any ground to the most explosive issue, Britain’s failure to pull her weight so far in the war. ‘Now, after the expenditure of so many lives, France would never consent to offer independence to the Arabs, though at the beginning of the war she might have done so.’
It was in the aftermath of this disastrous encounter that Sykes attended Downing Street. The vivid minutes of the Cabinet meeting on 16 December record him arguing for ‘a belt of English-controlled country’ stretching from the coast of Palestine to the head of the Persian Gulf that would not only improve imperial security but prevent the French interfering directly in the politics of Mecca. When Arthur Balfour pressed him about where this cordon’s northern frontier with the French zone should lie, Sykes must have gestured to the map. For the minutes of the meeting record him replying, ‘I should like to draw a line from the “e” of Acre to the last “k” in Kirkuk.’
When a second meeting with Georges-Picot five days after the Cabinet meeting again ended in an impasse over the ownership of Mosul, the British government turned to Sykes. ‘He is certainly a very capable fellow, with plenty of ideas, but at the same time painstaking and careful,’ wrote one minister, who was convinced that Sykes was fluent in both Arabic and Turkish when in fact he could speak neither.
Sykes met Georges-Picot for the first time the same afternoon, 21 December, and rapidly hammered out a deal using the Acre–Kirkuk line that he had described to the Cabinet the previous week. Territory to the north of this line, including Mosul, would come under French protection; territory to the south, under the British.
To square the contradictory promise to the Sharif with Georges-Picot’s territorial demands and his own idea of a defensive cordon across Arabia, Sykes proposed that each power could exercise full control in specific ‘Red’ British and ‘Blue’ French coastal zones within these territories if they wished to. The misleading implication was that in the desert hinterland between these coloured zones, the Arabs would enjoy relative independence. But landlocked countries are usually dependent on their coastal neighbours, and the evidence suggests that Sykes was perfectly aware that it was impossible to reconcile the allies’ and the Arab claims. He admitted at one stage that his task was ‘to get [the] Arabs to concede as much as possible to [the] French and to get our Haifa outlet and Palestine included in our sphere of enterprise in the form of a French concession to us’.4
But Georges-Picot would not concede over Palestine. Sykes wanted it to complete his scheme of imperial defence; Georges-Picot for its prestige. They reluctantly agreed that the Holy Land should have an international administration, a compromise that enabled them to finalise the ‘Anglo-French Agreement’ on 3 January 1916.
The secret deal was formalised in an exchange of letters between Britain’s and France’s foreign ministers that May. Today, the map their two negotiators signed can be found in Britain’s National Archives. The dividing line, territories and zones are all marked in coloured pencil. The most intriguing detail is the signatures, near Basra in the bottom right-hand corner. Georges-Picot signed in black ink; Sykes, by contrast, preferred pencil.
Whether conscious or not, the contrasting choice of writing implements certainly reflected each side’s attitude towards the pact. Georges-Picot, and the French government more generally, were happy with what he had wrung out of the British and determined to hold them to it; Sykes and his colleagues, on the other hand, were uneasy about the deal, which they convinced themselves was a hypothetical expedient required to reassure the French rather than – as it turned out to be – an oddly resilient blueprint that heavily influenced the post-war negotiations on the future of the region.
The British immediately looked for a way to wriggle out of what they quickly renamed the Sykes–Picot Agreement, starting with the most serious loophole: its unsatisfactory settlement of Palestine. Sooner or later the agreement would become public, and when it did so it would be vulnerable because public hostility to imperialism was growing. Within weeks of signing his name upon the map, Sykes himself had started making overtures to the Zionists. His intention was that Britain should assume sponsorship of their so far unsuccessful campaign to establish a Jewish state in Palestine – a strategy duly publicised in the Balfour Declaration. British imperialism would advance, in Zionist clothing.
Days after the 1918 armistice the British prime minister, Lloyd George, used a meeting with his French counterpart, Georges Clemenceau, to confirm French acquiescence to Britain’s claim to Palestine. At the sam
e time he seized on Clemenceau’s weakness to demand Mosul (which Sykes had happily conceded to Georges-Picot) because, by then, the importance of its nearby oilfields had dawned on British strategists. Clemenceau needed Lloyd George’s support at the impending peace conference in order to regain Alsace-Lorraine and was forced to agree. The eastern end of Sykes’s Acre–Kirkuk line was thus rerouted northwards round Mosul, although the border was not finalised until late in the 1920s after Britain had accepted French and American participation in Iraq’s (British-dominated) oil company, by which time Sykes was long dead. Military weakness also meant that France was unable to hold the large area of Anatolia it claimed under the agreement against well-organised and motivated Turkish forces led by Mustafa Kemal.
Yet to those who argue that these significant changes destroy the argument that Sykes–Picot had any impact on the region, the awkward fact remains that the deal foresaw the partition of the region between Britain and France, which was what then came to pass once the United States had retreated into isolationism. The need to attract investment to finance oil extraction in Iraq provided a further argument to deny autonomy to the Arabs, who had no recent record of self-government. And finally the likelihood of another global war made Britain unwilling to upset the French. Arthur Balfour put it candidly during the Paris peace negotiations. Although ‘we had not been honest with the Arabs or the French,’ he admitted, ‘it was now preferable to quarrel with the Arabs rather than the French, if there was to be a quarrel at all’.5
In 1920 the League of Nations awarded mandates to France to govern Syria and to Britain for Palestine and Iraq, tasking them with preparing these new countries for rapid independence. In an effort to disrupt rising Arab fury at this outcome, both mandated powers then subdivided their new possessions. The French carved Lebanon from Syria in an attempt to create a predominantly Christian bridgehead. The British, facing uproar in Palestine for their support for Jewish immigration, divided the mandate in two down the rift valley, creating Transjordan. To make amends, and further confuse opponents, they parachuted in two of the Sharif’s sons to rule Jordan and Iraq. The French embarked on a cynical policy of divide and rule that explains, for instance, why the Alawite sect, to which Bashar al-Assad belongs, still dominates the Syrian army and society.
Soon after the League of Nations had awarded the mandates, it made the mandatory powers responsible for defining their borders. The dividing line that Sykes suggested to the Cabinet five years earlier inspired an interim frontier between Lebanon and Palestine, and between Syria and Jordan and Iraq as far as the Euphrates. It was refined and eventually finalised, once the greater question of the status of Mosul had been resolved, in 1931. Local politics and rivalry between British and French political officers failed to change it substantially from the crayon line that Sykes and Georges-Picot had drawn on their map. Sykes’s idea of ‘a belt of English-controlled country’ survives today in the way that Jordan joins the two other countries once run by Britain, Israel and Iraq, keeping Syria and Saudi Arabia apart.
Oddly, however, it was less what the Sykes-Picot Agreement did and more what it didn’t do that makes it resonate. Given Britain’s promise to the Sharif, its failure to acknowledge Arab aspirations provided evidence of bad faith. Its failure to resolve the future of Palestine led the British, with terrible consequences, to pursue an alliance with the Zionists that precipitated the Arab-Israeli conflict.
One is left wondering what might have happened had the British committee’s tantalising alternative of semi-autonomy for the Ottoman provinces prevailed. Certainly, it would have given these provinces no more than a semblance of self-rule in the short run. But, in the era of mounting scepticism about empire and amid the calls for self-determination that followed, it might have provided a better basis for transition. However, the exigencies of war and fears for the Entente were not conducive to risk-taking. Instead a settlement that was anachronistic from the outset was imposed. The primacy of great power politics over local aspirations ensured that the Sykes–Picot Agreement was a crucial influence on the political geography and recent history of the Middle East.
WHY DID YOU RENAME YOUR SON? DIARIES OF THE GREAT WAR FROM THE OTTOMAN FRONT
Salim Tamari
THE GREAT WAR on the Eastern Front, reconsidered after the passage of a century, led to major transformations in the way in which the people of the region – from the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to the Arab provinces of the empire – looked at themselves and at the world. What I propose to do is to see how the war and the fighting were reflected in the biographical trajectories of soldiers who fought in it and civilians who endured it, and how the war affected the transformation of their lives and the reshaping of their identity and affiliations during and after the war.
The First World War was fought in the east on four Ottoman fronts. One was the Caucasian front with the Russians; the second was in southern Iraq, mainly around Basra and Kut al Amar; the third, at Suez, Sinai and Beersheba, was known as the Palestine front. The principal front, as far as the Ottoman leadership was concerned, was fought in the Dardanelles at Gallipoli, or Çanakkale as it is known in Turkish, where the main encounter with the British and the Anzac forces took place under the command of Mustapha Kemal, later known as Atatürk and the founder of the Turkish Republic.
The war was so devastating that, according to contemporary accounts, it destroyed one-sixth of the total population of Greater Syria – one of the highest death tolls on all war fronts during that period. The victims, both civilians and combatants, perished as a result of the fighting, hunger, famine and diseases. Tens of thousands of civilians died because of the British naval blockade on food supplies coming into ports like Jaffa and Beirut, as well as from Ottoman governor Jamal Pasha’s sequestration of crops for the Fourth and Fifth Army Corps in Syria. The urban landscape was devastated in a way that recalls, under different circumstances, the destruction that we witness today in Syria and Iraq. At the time, Greater Syria – that is, the Ottoman provinces of Bilad al-Sham, which included Palestine and Mount Lebanon – suffered the highest proportion of deaths of any region in the world, even when compared with Belgium, Britain, Germany and France. The scale of the devastation, although for a smaller population, had a much greater impact in terms of the denuding of the countryside, the dislocation of the urban centres and the disappearance of the younger male population.
The first three memoirs I will examine were written by civilians, among a number of texts published by literary figures from the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Those narratives were published in the form of diaries and memoirs, as well as in semi-fictional accounts. The writers include Khalil Sakakini, who kept a daily diary during the war in Jerusalem. His account is riveting in that it conveys a vivid portrait of the desolation of the city in 1915 and 1916, the famine years. One of Sakakini’s most moving episodes concerns the so-called Volunteer Labour Brigades (tawabeer al ‘amaleh), which mobilised older residents of the region on the home front to perform menial tasks such as street cleaning and digging trenches. Towards the end of 1917 Sakakini was arrested for harbouring the Hebrew poet Alter Levine, who was suspected of spying for the allies. Sakakini was chained and tied to Levine and force-marched to Damascus, where he spent the final days of the war in prison. He later escaped and joined the forces of Emir Faisal in Jabal Druze, then engaged in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans, where he wrote the anthem of the first, short-lived independent Arab state.
Muhammad Kurd Ali’s Damascene memoirs cover his period as a publicist – some critics would say apologist – for the excesses of Jamal and Anwar (Enver) Pashas in Syria and Palestine. He was the chief organiser of two expeditions of Arab public figures and intellectuals to Gallipoli and Medina (in the Arabian Peninsula) to defend the war effort and bring the experiences of the fighters to the general Arab public. He was also active in the advocacy of Arab–Turkish bilingualism in the Ottoman administration, including the schooling and court system, as a means of
integrating the Arabs into the Ottoman system. During the war he became editor of the newspaper al-Sharq, Jamal Pasha’s instrument for propaganda in the Arab provinces. Today Kurd Ali is best known as the author of the Khitat ash-Sham (Chronicles of Syria), a multi-volume work covering the geography and history of Greater Syria over six centuries, and a treatise of Ottoman modernity in the Levant. His war memoirs, however, were remembered as a blot on his integrity as a scholar and he was criticised as an apologist for Ottoman attacks on ‘Arab separatism’ – that is, on his fellow countrymen who were allied with the Arab nationalists against the Ottomans.
The most important fictional work to come out of the Great War in Arabic is The Life of Mifleh al-Ghassani (1921) by the Palestinian writer and journalist Najib Nassar. Subtitled ‘A Page from the Events of the Great War’, the novella is a thinly disguised autobiographical war memoir of the author, who spent 1916–17 hiding from the Turkish gendarmes in the Bedouin encampments of the Jordan Valley, escaping possible execution on charges of being pro-British. Nassar also published the combative al-Karmil newspaper in Haifa, a satirical newspaper that became known for its defence of peasants’ rights and attacks on Zionist land purchases. He published The Life of Mifleh al-Ghassani in serial form in al-Karmil and later as a book in the early days of the Mandate. Almost half of the book deals with his capture, interrogation, trial and eventual release from imprisonment in Damascus.
Nassar successfully defended himself against all charges and was acquitted by the Martial Court of Damascus. The fictional format allowed him to construct extensive dialogues with imaginary and real companions, soldiers, officers, prisoners, Bedouins and with his ultimate nemesis, Jamal Pasha, who nonetheless sincerely believed in his innocence and pressed for his release behind the scenes. All the events and characters in the story were built on real people and events that can be corroborated from external sources.
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