A hundred years ago in May 1916 British and French imperialists with Russian acquiescence signed a secret agreement called the Sykes-Picot. British and French diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot were the authors of this covert sinister agreement. However, after the great Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky, one of the main leaders of the revolution and a close comrade of Joseph Lenin, in his capacity as the commissar on foreign affairs, on November 24, 1917, published a copy of the agreement, recovered from the ministry’s archives, in Izvestia, the party’s newspaper.
That exposed the imperialists’ plans to occupy and subjugate the peoples and territories of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Lenin called this covert treaty between the French and the British imperial states as the “agreement of the colonial thieves.” The agreement laid bare the naked imperialist war designs of carving up the Ottoman territories in the Hejaz, Levant and Palestine. That diplomatic exposure of imperialist conspiracy by the Bolshevik government proved that its foreign policy was based on the concerns of the oppressed classes on the basis of the Marxist principle “workers of the world unite” rather than the bourgeois nation states where vested interests of the ruling classes determine relations between countries.
After the war France received areas in the south and east parts of Turkey, northern Iraq, including Mosul, along with most of the present day Syria and Lebanon. The British imperialists acquired Jordan, southern Iraq, Haifa and Acre in Palestine, and the coastal strip between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan. The Czarist Russia was granted its much-craved Istanbul along with parts of Armenia and the strategic Turkish Straits. The prospect of horrific repercussions of conflicts and sectarian bloodshed including terrorism that is being faced by the masses of these lands due to those cruel cleavages were ignored. Some areas were assigned to be a territory for the “international administration,” the structures of which were to be decided through further consultations between Britain, France and Russia. These divided Arab entities converted into new colonial and artificial nation states without any distinctive national identity apart from them being Arabs.
The idea of ‘honest Western peace brokers’ is not new in the Middle East. British betrayal of Arab aspirations goes back decades. They used the Arabs as pawns in their Great Game against other colonial contenders, only to betray them later while still casting themselves as friends. Nowhere else was this hypocrisy on full display as was in the case of Palestine. Starting with the first wave of Jewish migration to Palestine in 1882, European countries helped to facilitate the movement of illegal settlers and resources, establishing many colonies, large and small, by grabbing land and subjugating local peoples.
So when Arthur James Balfour sent his letter to Walter Rothschild, the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was very much plausible. Theoretically, Palestine was granted to the Jewish Zionist movement when the British imperialist crown proclaimed the Balfour Declaration in 1918. This act was tantamount to sealing the fate of Palestine to live in perpetual occupation, colonialisation, war and turmoil. These dispossessed peoples are still suffering from the historical crime of the imperialist policy of divide and rule.
Still, many supercilious promises were being made to the Arabs during the Great War years, as self-imposed Arab leadership sided with the British in their war against the Ottoman Empire. Arabs were promised instant independence, including that of the Palestinians. The understanding among Arab leaders was that Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations was to apply to Arab provinces that were ruled by the Ottomans. Arabs were told that they were to be respected as “a sacred trust of civilisation,” and their communities were to be recognised as “independent nations.” Palestinians were made to believe that they were also included in the agreements and treaties that in fact were not worth the piece of paper they were signed on.
A hundred years later the Palestinians are still enslaved and suffering in their own lands. A fierce repression is being inflicted upon them by the atrocious Zionist state under the auspices of the US and European imperialists. Their own leaders have failed them. The Oslo Accord has led to nowhere, and Islamic fundamentalists originally nurtured by the Zionist state have risen exponentially to undermine and supress the left revolutionary traditions of the Palestinians. The plight of the Palestinians is perhaps worse off than their status at the time of the Balfour Declaration, and there is no end in sight within the present socioeconomic system. What the experience of the previous century has proved is that only on the basis of class unity can the stranglehold of the Zionist state and its western backers be decisively broken.
The states created by the imperialists through the Sykes-Picot Treaty are crumbling and societies are being torn apart with bloodshed and mass slaughter of the ordinary people of these states. Iraq, Yemen and Libya have collapsed, and are in a catastrophic phase of bloody fragmentation. The Syrian state is threatened by the fundamentalist proxies of all variants of sectarian trends supported by Arab monarchs and imperialist arm industry. This conflagration has devastated the once relatively prosperous and egalitarian Syrian society. These are crimes of the Sykes-Picot Treaty and other such imperialist policies. Their puppet rulers are filthily rich and tyrannous.
The Arab revolution of 2011 transcended these artificially carved borders and spread throughout the region. It proved beyond doubt that there is no salvation on a national basis for the region’s oppressed masses. However, what such a resurgence of the youth and the toilers would direly require is a policy of class struggle with a perspective of revolutionary insurrections to overthrow these reactionary despots, monstrous religious fundamentalism, imperialist stranglehold and capitalism that have caused this gory mayhem, deprivation, misery and terrible suffering of the oppressed peoples of the region. Such a victorious revolutionary movement leading to the formation of a socialist federation of the Middle East is the only way out from this lingering gloom of barbarism that represents the two sides of the same coin –imperialism and religious fundamentalism.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]