100 years after WW1 |
AS FIRST WORLD WAR ENDED, YOUNG STATES SPROUTED THROUGHOUT THE ARAB WORLD
One hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent in the First World War. Germany had surrendered and the three big empires collapsed — Ottoman, Austrian and Tsarist Russia — leaving behind three big holes throughout Europe and the Middle East.
Nine new states emerged in Europe, such as Finland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, while young ones sprouted throughout the Arab world, such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and the Kingdom of the Hejaz. A handful of states also emerged in the Arab Gulf region — all former colonies of the Ottoman Empire, which became British protectorates.
The United States jumped into the world scene during the First World War, asserting itself as a super power, having entered the European battlefield earlier that year, ending years of deliberate “isolationism” from the traumas of the “old world”.
When Woodrow Wilson showed up at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, he was the first American president to travel overseas while in office, and the first to take part in such an international convention, aimed at drawing up maps of the new world. The language of world diplomacy was — until then — exclusively French. However, with Wilson’s emergence on the scene, English was quickly inserted, making it the language of international affairs for the remainder of the 20th century and beyond.
Syrian historian Fadi Esber, editor of Dimashq Journal, told Gulf News: “The First World War and the resulting Ottoman defeat put an end to 14 centuries of institutionalised Islamic Caliphate — an event that still occupies many in the World of Islam, who saw in this watershed a cause for the decline of Islamic civilisation, with some fringe groups today, such as the so-called Islamic State [Daesh], exploiting it to radicalise the youth.”
After the First World War, Britain and France subsequently tore up the remains of the Ottoman Empire, as Syria and Lebanon came under French rule, while Palestine and Iraq went to the British, in accordance with the ill-fated Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. The short-lived Kingdom of the Hejaz was overthrown by the Sultan of Nejd, Abdul Aziz Al Saud, who created the modern state of Saudi Arabia.
Briefly, between 1918 and 1920, the Arabs got their own independent state in Damascus, ruled by the Hashemite Emir, Faisal Ibn Al Hussain, commander of the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. His small army was quickly crushed by invading French troops in the summer of 1920, and he was exiled to Europe, where he begged the British for a throne. Faisal was subsequently rewarded with a hereditary throne in Baghdad, ruled by his family until the military takeover of 1958. They in turn remained in control of Iraq until the US invasion of 2003.
Sectarianism and anguish
As world leaders assemble in France to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the armistice, few in the Arab world have anything good to say about what was then termed “The Great War”. Despite modernity in the skylines of several Arab capitals, much of the tribalism, sectarianism and anguish of the First World War still plagues entire communities in the Arab world. One hundred years later, Middle Easterners are still burying their dead, struggling to maintain the artificial borders they were left with at the end of the First World War.
The artificial borders that Arab states were left with as a result of Sykes-Picot and the First World War have always been a topic of high concern for Arab nationalists. They have spent the past 100 years cursing
the Europeans for dissecting the Arab world, claiming that had they remained a united country, Israel would never have emerged in their midst in 1948.
But seemingly, even those artificial borders are now in doubt.
Sudan was slit in two in 2011. That same year, Libya fell into a gripping civil war; so did Syria, diluting its borders and wiping out entire cities and towns. An assortment of Turkish, Russian, American, Iranian, Lebanese and Israeli troops now dot the Syrian landscape. Iraq is still a shambles, Yemen is still at war, and Palestine continues to suffer under brutal Israeli occupation.
Arab nationalist ideals were a key factor in shaping the post-colonial Middle East, and their current decline is a source of further political and social problems. Esber says: “The decades of colonial practises and machinations that followed sowed the seeds of many local and regional problems, such as the establishment of Israel, the drawing of arbitrary boundaries irrespective of social and economic ramifications and many other issues that current generations still suffer from, and which future generations will have to resolve. Any appreciation of the impact of the First World War remains, therefore, a momentary one, as future generations will most likely locate the root causes of the problems that they will be grappling with in the fateful years of the war and its immediate aftermath.”
Today, one hundred years ago, the guns fell silent on the battlefields of the First World War. The killing stopped, the machine guns were muzzled, the barbed wire could rust, and all sides forged a peace that sowed the seeds of another even greater war just two decades later. It’s hard to fathom the hell that soldiers endured in the trenches of the eastern and western fronts, mired in mud, soaked in blood, shaken to the core by the tumultuous thunder of artillery ripping soil to shreds and vaporising those beneath a shell’s trajectory.
Some ten million soldiers lost their lives in what now seems a fruitless campaign for yards gained or lost in an imperial quest brought about by a terrorist assassination and treaties of alignment. And it brought death to another seven million or so civilians in a conflict that was supposed to be a war to end all wars. Alas, if that were only to be true. It was a war too that set in motion the political divides today brought by lines secretly drawn in 1916 on the maps of British and French imperial generals, who carved up the Middle East and former Ottoman Empire lands as they were cake for the counts and countesses, not the countless who still suffer decades later.
The First World War showed us the capabilities of technology, advancing our boundaries not in cause of good but harnessed to bring death to as many as effectively as possible. It showed us that man can endure horrors for so long, that warfare of a global magnitude can happen, and that finding peace is fragile and fraught with long-term and unintended consequences.
It was a conflict that brought us the institutions, if flawed, of a League of Nations coming together to talk and negotiate in efforts to avoid such bloodletting. It was peace that warned us that while the victors take the spoils, the vanquished must be treated with respect and their grievances addressed.
As world leaders gather at the Menin Gate and a Last Post is sounded by a bugler to solemnly mark the Armistice a century ago, we remember those who served, who fell, and who are beholden now to ensure that a peace must endure between nations.
That peace must be built not on the flawed grandeur of empires and imperialism, nor on the ideologies of fascism and communism, overt capitalism, populism nor racism, but on the respect that we are all the same, made of blood and bone regardless of uniform, colour or creed. If we are genuinely concerned about the legacy of the millions who died in the first great war, the second, and all of the other conflicts that so divide us now, that is a reality we must wholly embrace.