In Defence of Marxism

Today, 16 May 2006, is the ninetieth anniversary of the signing of the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement between British and French imperialism. The artificial and arbitrary borders of today's Middle East are largely based on this secret treaty which outlined the partition of the Ottoman Empire in the event of its defeat. This carve up was marked out in such a way that the Arabs were divided into several zones, the Kurds were denied a homeland, and the fate of what became known as Palestine was left to the final outcome of the war.

Signed in the middle of the First Imperialist World War, at a time when Europe's imperialists were throwing millions of workers into battle in the biggest conflict the world had seen, the agreement clearly shows that this was a conflict fought over colonies, resources and slaves. Of course, the belligerent countries of the Entente (the British Empire, France and Tsarist Russia) and the Central Powers (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Bulgaria) maintained that the war was fought in the name of the "defence of fatherland" and other 'noble' principles!

The victors' mouth-watering choices

1- Outright partition, leaving only a small Ottoman state in Anatolia;
2- Preservation of the Ottoman Empire, subject to Great Power control zones of political and commercial influence;
3- Preservation of the Ottoman Empire as an independent state in Asia;
4- Creation of a decentralised and federal Ottoman state in Asia.
The committee finally published British Desiderata in Turkey and Asia on 30 June 1915 and recommended the fourth option as the best solution for meeting the British Empire's defence needs.

Following the assault of the Entente Powers on the Dardanelles, however, the Italian imperialists pressed them for a share of the Ottoman lands. In April 1915 they signed the Treaty of London which promised Italy an "equitable share of the Mediterranean region adjoining the province of Antalya".

Negotiations between representatives of British and French imperialism began on 23 November 1915.[1] François Georges-Picot, a first secretary at the French embassy in London, met a seven-man interdepartmental committee, including representatives from the British Foreign, War, and India offices. These talks progressed slowly until 21 December, when Sir Mark Sykes, a member of the British war cabinet, who had previously been part of the de Bunsen committee, became one of the representatives of the War Office. After this meeting Sykes proposed to Georges-Picot that they should hold a series of authorised private talks which would come to a set of 'territorial compromises'. These would then be put to the interdepartmental committee.

In these almost daily meetings Sykes and Georges-Picot made considerable progress. The main outstanding issue was Mosul province (in present day Iraq): the British wanted the French to take it into their own zone so that there would be a 'buffer state' between the British and the Russians, but the French had reservations about this. Then on 4 January 1916 Sykes and Georges-Picot drew up a draft memorandum of agreement, together with a map illustrating the border delimitations. Once the British and French governments had accepted the terms of the memorandum, in early March Sykes and Georges-Picot travelled to Petrograd where the memorandum was presented to the Tsarist government. After some minor modifications the Russian government accepted the accord as it stood.

On 9 May Paul Cambon, the French ambassador in London, sent Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, a complete restatement of the January memorandum which had subsequently been approved in Petrograd. His covering letter also provided assurances about British business concessions and so on that would fall into the French zone. In reply the British asked for an explicit French pledge that "any existing British concessions, rights of navigation or development … will be maintained" in those areas.

The main provisions of Sykes-Picot Agreement

Not only did this agreement conflict with Britain's promises to Sherif Hussein, it also made the Italians demand more of the spoils. It therefore had to be supplemented with the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, which promised southern and south-western Anatolia to Italy.

But then the unthinkable happened …

The content of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration which promised the British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, sowed the seeds of Arab distrust and suspicion towards the imperialists to this day.

The imperialist division of the Middle East is the root cause of the region's domination and destitution. The only way to remove the barbed-wire fences and border posts imposed by imperialism on the region - these artificial barriers which prevent the unity of the Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and Jewish workers and maintain bourgeois rule - is to break the chains of domination and to overthrow capitalism. This is a task that no force other than the united working class of the region can achieve.

Morad Shirin
16 May 2006

[1] In parallel with this, the British were interested in soliciting the help of the Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire in bringing about its downfall. In July 1915 Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, began secret communications, known in the literature as the McMahon Correspondence, with Sherif Hussein, the emir of Mecca. By March 1916 they had agreed on the foundations of the so-called Arab Revolt, which, it was hoped, would almost certainly seal the fate of the Ottomans. The Arabs, of course, did not get their promised 'national homeland' on the Syrian territory after the end of the war.