A LINE IN THE SAND - THE MAP THAT DEFINED THE MIDDLE EAST

Georgia Jackson Jessel (OHS)

Just as history is written by victors regardless of truth, maps are drawn by those in control, and as such are not a neutral representation of the world. Such maps are convenient at the time, but are capable of storing up centuries of strife. This is story of a map that changed the world just over 100 years ago, but whose consequences would lead to 9/11, ISIS, the Palestinian conflict, and even the current Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. The Sykes-Picot agreement was almost literally a line in the sand; while today’s borders don’t exactly resemble those of 1916, the Sykes-Picot map has been proven as the root cause of much that has happened since. Mark Sykes and Francois-George Picot were two diplomats representing Britain and France respectively, sent by their governments to agree to the postwar division of much of the Middle East. The Sykes-Picot agreement in 1915-16 was a secret treaty primarily between the British and the French to carve up the remains of the Ottoman Empire, which the Great Powers assumed would finally collapse with an Allied victory. The Empire sprawled over much of the Arab world – modern day Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Turkey. The indigenous Arabs had been encouraged by the Great Powers to rise up against the Ottomans, with the reassurance that as a reward they would get their own Arab state out of the ruins of Ottoman power. The line was written in chinagraph, and was almost entirely straight; the agreement gave Britain control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, while France was to control southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The new map of the Middle East was itself based on a map, one sprawled out on a table at 10 Downing Street. Sykes looked at it and said “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk”. Thus, the way a cartographer’s printer had arranged some place names on a map shaped the destiny of millions of people in the decades to come. Map-makers like to make the world tidy. But, as so often, this desire for orderliness utterly disregarded the realities on the ground which it was dividing. Two diplomats randomly split the map of one of the most fraught regions in the world into states that completely divided ethnic and religious communities. The Middle East was divided by artificial borders, ones with no regard for ethnic or sectarian characteristics, and have caused endless conflict. The division into zones of influence did not take into account the local peoples; demographic, socio-cultural and religious aspects were deemed irrelevant. Several Arab tribes, though nomadic, found themselves separated and dispersed into different states. Diplomats seemed ignorant of the competing traditions in the Islamic world – for instance, by a stroke of a pencil they reduced the Sunni majority in Syria, and gave the Sunni minority power over the Shiite majority in Iraq. Ever since, this region has been shaken by revolts, coups, and uprisings that have continued to this day. No account was taken of the Kurds, who found themselves abandoned on both sides of the line. The promise of an Arab state in Greater Syria was broken. Later agreements, like the Balfour Declaration promising a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, also rode roughshod over Arab sensitivities. History has a way of unpicking the work of mapmakers; all of these simmering resentments erupted into conflicts which shook the region. Authority has collapsed across the region to this day, as its inhabitants are reaching for their older identities of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd. Sectarian groups (often Islamist), have spilled over the boarders and spread violence. Arab states like Iran and Iraq became assertively nationalist and militarist – none of them functioning democracies. They needed to control their divided populations, and they had the money and international support to do so, with the discovery of massive amounts of oil, and the world’s new dependence on it. Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Palestine – this catalogue of war and disaster is the legacy of that convenient line in the sand. Even today, ISIS justifies its atrocities with reference to Sykes-Picot. In June 2014, ISIL removed border posts between Syria and Iraq, as part of the group’s plan to restore the Islamic Caliphate on the ruins of the SykesPicot border. In July 2014, ISIL’s former leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made a speech at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, vowing that “this blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes–Picot conspiracy”. Maps were created to give order to the world. This becomes clear when the abundance of suspiciously straight lines appear in man-made states. Whilst Europe’s borders are extremely convoluted, often following contours designated by geography, language, ethnicity, culture or religion, Africa is full of artificially straight divides – the colonialists splitting up the spoils between themselves along arbitrary parallels, regardless of local loyalties and tribal traditions. The frontier between Papua and Papua New Guinea, home to the most varied and historic tribal societies in the world, follows the 141st meridian east in a straight line, cutting across the Oenake Range, the Kohari Hills, the Bewani and Border Mountains, and the Central Highlands. The Dutch, German, and British colonists were utterly apathetic of habitat and culture. In the United States, Wyoming and Colorado are perfect squares – perfect for administrative convenience, less than perfect for the native American tribes who suddenly had to live

in a map-maker’s box. Maps have even added a new dimension to wars - was there really any good reason in Korea for the UN to fight on until they reached the 38th parallel? How much extra blood was shed in order to reach that arbitrary line? Maps provide the blueprints of exclusion, a vital part of a world designed to make 80 million refugees homeless - for the crime of living on the wrong side of a line. They legitimise the caging of children, separated from their families, on the Mexico border; from maps grow fences of barbed wire, and unforgiving concrete walls. Those who build them can claim, with reason, that their cruelty has legal authority based on the thin black line on a piece of paper. Maps do not make the world simpler. Disguised as an innocent traveller’s aid, they are instead one of the most ancient geopolitical forms of power, a tool to (unjustly) claim sovereignty and to ‘legitimise’ power; cartographers give authority, definition, and permanence to acts of conquest or colonialism. In a simpler world, we’d look out of the aeroplane window to see where we were, looking at the Rhine or the Limpopo, the Andes or the Alps to give us our sense of place. But we do not live in a simple world, and some of that has got a lot to do with maps. Maps? Maybe it’s time to wonder if we really would be lost without them. Bibliography Photograph: Awan, A. (2016). Architects of Failure: 100 years of Sykes-Picot | History Today. https://www. historytoday.com/architects-failure-100-y ears-sykespicot Yapp, E.M. and Shaw, S.J. (2018). Ottoman Empire | Facts, History, & Map. In: Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/place/Ottoman-Empire Mason, P. (2016). www.newstatesman.com. Paul Mason on Sykes-Picot: how an arbitrary set of borders created the modern Middle East. https://www.newstatesman. com/world/middle-east/201 6/05/paul-mason-sykespicot-how-arbitrary-set-border s-created-modernmiddle

Wright, R. (2017). How the Curse of Sykes-Picot Still Haunts the Middle East. The New Yorker. https:// www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-the-curseof-sykes-picot-still-haunts-the-middle-east El Bakri, A. (2018). Revolutions and Rebellions: Arab Revolt (Ottoman Empire/Middle East) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1) . https:// encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/revol utions_and_rebellions_arab_revolt_ottoman_empiremi ddle_east Ibrahim, S.E. Islam and prospects for democracy in the Middle East. Center for Strategic and International Studies. Al Jazeera. A century on: Why Arabs resent SykesPicot. https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/s ykes-picot-100-years-middle-east-map/index.html Encyclopedia Britannica. New Guinea | History & Facts. https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Guinea Long, C. (2019). Human Rights Watch. Written Testimony: “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border” July 11, 2019. Written Testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.