Sykes-Picot still vilified 100 years on
the region, and that is humiliation... Decades later they have different problems but they all have their root, in some way or another, in the Sykes-Picot Agreement.”
Laurens disagrees, saying those countries should “stop having a feeling of victimhood”. Even if Arab nationalists denounced these arbitrary borders, “they were never seriously questioned because they actually suited everyone”, he argued.
He said the current instability in the region “is mainly linked to a perverse political system which keeps the region’s political life locked in a game of interference and involvement from regional and international powers” that has ancient roots.
Who were the big losers in Sykes-Picot?
Mainly the Palestinians and the Kurds, says Jean- Paul Chagnollaud. “Two arbitrary territorial divisions were imposed on populations, but the people and their identities were forgotten,” he said. That led to “states without a nation,” such as Jordan, or “nations without states.”
“The Kurds almost got a state. They obtained one in the Treaty of Sevres in August 1920, but the balance of power on the ground changed all that,” he said.
For the Palestinians, it was not Sykes- Picot but Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour’s letter on November 2, 1917, expressing the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, that sounded the death knell at that time for their ambitions.
Is it still possible to redraw the borders?
“Sykes- Picot imposed borders on peoples and things need to be put right -- now it’s up to peoples to impose their will to create a state,” said JeanPaul Chagnollaud.
He defends the Palestinians’ right to have their own state, and that of the Iraqi Kurds to exercise their right to self- determination “even if the conditions have not yet been met for the creation of a Kurdish state.”
When the Islamic State group unilaterally proclaimed a caliphate in 2014 spanning Syria and Iraq in 2014, it showed the jihadists were destroying a wall between the two countries and they talked about “breaking down the Sykes-Picot border.”
But as far as Henry Laurens is concerned, “IS did not abolish Sykes- Picot, on the contrary, it reinforced it” because the territory held by the extremist group now corresponds to the former zone under French in-