THE DIVISIVE LINE: THE BIRTH AND LONG LIFE OF THE SYKES–PICOT AGREEMENT

James Barr

THE SYKES–PICOT AGREEMENT came crashing back into the headlines in the summer of 2014 after a propaganda video shot by the Islamic State showed a bulldozer carving a passage through the sandbank that delineates the Syria–Iraq border. It was certainly a graphic illustration of how the jihadi group had become a transnational phenomenon that controlled the vacuum left by the failing Syrian and Iraqi states. But the Islamic State propagandists tried to vest it with greater symbolism. It was the ‘end of Sykes–Picot,’ they claimed, in a reference to the wartime deal whereby Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them.

Cue many articles about the 98-year-old Sykes–Picot Agreement, and fierce debate about whether, as Osama bin Laden liked to claim, it can be blamed for Arab woes, or not. Some, pointing to the colonial legacy, said it was responsible; others retorted that the difference between the Sykes–Picot partition and the current political map, or the more recent failings of the states themselves, meant that it wasn’t. The truth lies somewhere in between.

The map of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Middle East with a diagonal line that ran from the Mediterranean to the Persian frontier. France would rule Zone A and the adjacent northern area; Britain Zone B and the adjacent southern area. The two men signed the bottom right corner. (British National Archives)

The idea that the deal would still be so controversial would surely have surprised one of the two men involved in its creation, eighteen months into the First World War. Sir Mark Sykes was thirty-six years old when he hurried into Downing Street on the morning of 16 December 1915, clutching a handful of notes, a square War Office map and an expedient proposal that was designed to address French fears about the awkward Eastern Question: what would happen to the Middle East if Britain and France emerged as victors?

It was ironic that Sykes’s idea would change the Middle East for ever, because the discussion that followed was only superficially about the region. Fundamentally – and this is what made dealing with the issue so urgent – it was about addressing a disagreement that looked as if it might tear Britain’s alliance with France apart.

By December 1915, eighteen months into a war that some had predicted would be over by the previous Christmas, the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale was under severe strain. There had always had been disagreement over strategy. The French were adamant that a great offensive on the western front was urgently required to drive the Germans from their soil. The British argued for delay while they recruited a vast army of volunteers and reorganised their war effort, for, too often, their troops went into battle without enough ammunition. The consequence, in the short run, was that in the first year of the war the French did most of the fighting and took most of the casualties. Disagreement became distrust. A fortnight before Sykes’s meeting in Downing Street the British ambassador in Paris had been forced to admit (after months of denials) that he was beginning to hear the view among his contacts that ‘we are making use of France against Germany for our own sole benefit and that much greater sacrifices are being made by France’.¹

Events in the Middle East during 1915 had strengthened these misgivings. When the early French offensives failed, a faction within the British government, led by Kitchener and Churchill, proposed a rethink. Looking east, they argued that the defeat of Germany’s decrepit Ottoman allies would break the deadlock by opening a new front in south-east Europe to which the Germans would have to send troops.

There was another reason why the British wished to deal swiftly with the Ottomans. This was to end the threat of a jihad. After the Ottoman Empire joined the war on the Germans’ side, its Sultan had declared a holy war against his enemies. Jumpy British officials had watched ever since for signs that the British Empire’s 100 million Muslim subjects might rise up in answer to his call. They knew that the war could only be won in Europe, but feared it might be lost if British troops had to be diverted to fight rebellions in Egypt and India.

The French never shared the British neurosis about the jihad. Their scepticism about the British war plan turned into suspicion when they saw its details. Originally, the British had intended to grab the Ottoman Empire by its throat and kick it in the guts simultaneously through landings both on the Gallipoli peninsula and at the port of Alexandretta – modern Iskanderun – in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean where Syria and Turkey meet and the railway that formed the backbone of Ottoman communications ran near the coast. The French had long entertained hopes of establishing a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, and suspected that the Alexandretta landings were as much a British effort to thwart this dream as they were about winning the war. They were right to do so, because as Lawrence of Arabia, then working as an intelligence officer in Cairo, admitted at the time, ‘The only place from which a fleet can operate against Egypt is Alexandretta.’² After the French vetoed this part of the plan, only the Gallipoli landings went ahead.

The wrangling over Alexandretta revealed old tensions that are worth explaining, because their recurrence added to the sense of malaise afflicting the Entente and triggered the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Britain and France had been rivals in the Middle East since the Napoleonic era. They were battling at this point not for its oil wealth – that would come later – but in the belief that control of Egypt in particular was a prerequisite for domination of the real prize: India.

The Anglo-French struggle had intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century following the completion of the Suez Canal and as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble. In 1875, when bankruptcy beckoned for the Egyptian ruler, Ismail (who was an Ottoman client), the British bought his stake in the canal to prevent the French (the other shareholder) from establishing a monopoly. When the Ottoman government’s default the following year left British investors badly burned, the French rushed in to replace them, becoming the largest holders of Ottoman government bonds.

The Ottoman default prompted the British to think the unthinkable and abandon their previous policy of propping up the Ottomans. That led them to take over Cyprus in 1878 and Egypt in 1882. When the British then lost control of the Sudan after the murder of General Gordon, the French tried to exploit the vacuum. In 1895 they launched an expedition to claim, and dam, the headwaters of the Nile in an attempt to render Egypt, downstream, uninhabitable. Churchill, then a journalist, dismissed it as an attempt by ‘eight French adventurers’ to claim a territory that was ‘twice the size of France’. But outlandish as it seemed, the threat was plausible enough to precipitate Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan and the subsequent confrontation between his forces and the French in 1898 at Fashoda – the flyblown spot where France had raised the tricolore and was then forced to lower it in defeat. Today, the Fashoda Incident’s nineteenth-century date makes it seem desperately remote, but to gain a sense of how recent it felt in 1915, you only have to imagine that Britain had almost gone to war with France in 1998.

Old habits died hard. As the plans to invade the Gallipoli peninsula were finalised, the British government anticipated victory and an argument with its allies over the division of the spoils. It set up a committee – what else? – to ensure that Britain’s overriding priority, the security of India, was not simply preserved but reinforced. Sykes, a new Member of Parliament who was Kitchener’s assistant, was the most junior member of this body.

Sykes possessed an engaging sense of humour and a flyaway imagination but he was not what we would call a ‘details man’. He came from a landed Yorkshire family, an only child who had inherited the baronetcy from his late father, Sir Tatton, an odd man whose chief passions were church architecture, milk pudding and the maintenance of his body at a constant temperature. It was presumably in pursuit of the first of these that Sir Tatton had taken him on holiday to the Middle East in 1890.

Sykes was neither the first person nor the last to be entranced by the sense of going back in time, and he returned to the region repeatedly. When he joined the committee considering the future of the Ottoman Empire in early 1915 he had just published an entertainingly jaundiced history-cum-travel memoir that showed a visceral dislike of creeping modernity, yet sealed his reputation in political circles as an expert on the region. As one reviewer remarked, ‘The facts which he has collected will be of the highest value when the settlement of the Eastern question comes to be undertaken.’³

In the committee’s early discussions Sykes advocated splitting the region with the French, but his colleagues disagreed. In their view the best way to keep other powers away from India was to turn the existing Ottoman provinces into semi-independent states which Britain would seek to influence but not directly govern. Sykes was sent on a trip to Cairo and Delhi in the summer to canvass support for this idea. But it was vetoed by the military and, like many drafts, the committee’s ended up exactly where it started, with Sykes’s idea of a partition that would give Britain control of territory from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf.

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 same 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.