Der Spiegel, Germany
Jan 31 2014
What World War I Did to the Middle East
World War I may have ended in 1918, but the violence it triggered in
the Middle East still hasn’t come to an end. Arbitrary borders drawn
by self-interested imperial powers have left a legacy that the region
has not been able to overcome.
Damascus, year three of the civil war: The 4th Division of the Syrian
army has entrenched itself on Kassioun Mountain, the place where Cain
is said to have slain his brother Abel. United Nations ballistics
experts say the poison gas projectiles that landed in the Damascus
suburbs of Muadamiya and Ain Tarma in the morning hours of Aug. 21,
2013 were fired from somewhere up on the mountain. Some 1,400 people
died in the attack — 1,400 of the more than 100,000 people who have
lost their lives since the beginning of the conflict.
Baghdad, in the former palace quarter behind the Assassin’s Gate: Two
years after the American withdrawal, Iraqis are once again in full
control of the so-called Green Zone, located on a sharp bend in the
Tigris River. It is the quarter of Baghdad where the Americans found
refuge when the country they occupied devolved into murderous chaos.
Currently, the situation is hardly any better. On the other side of
the wall, in the red zone, death has once again become commonplace.
There were over 8,200 fatalities last year.
Beirut, the capital of Lebanon that is so loved by all Arabs: The city
has long been a focal point both of Arab life and of Arab strife. The
devout versus the secular, the Muslims versus the Christians, the
Shiites versus the Sunnis. With fighting underway in Libya and Syria,
with unrest ongoing in Egypt and Iraq, the old question must once
again be posed: Has Beirut managed to leave the last eruption of
violence behind or is the next one just around the corner?
Two years after the revolts of 2011, the situation in the Middle East
is as bleak as it has ever been. There is hardly a country in the
region that has not experienced war or civil strife in recent decades.
And none of them look immune to a possible outbreak of violence in the
near future. The movement that came to be known as the Arab Spring
threatens to sink into a morass of overthrows and counter-revolts.
That, though, is likely only to surprise those who saw the rebellions
in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria as part of an historical turn of
events for the Middle East. To be sure, the unrest was a bloody new
beginning, but it was also the most recent chapter in an almost
uninterrupted regional conflict that began 100 years ago and has never
really come to an end.
‘The Children of England and France’
In no other theater of World War I are the results of that epochal
conflict still as current as they are in the Middle East. Nowhere else
does the early 20th century orgy of violence still determine political
conditions to the same degree. The so-called European Civil War, a
term used to describe the period of bloody violence that racked Europe
from 1914 onwards, came to an end in 1945. The Cold War ceased in
1990. But the tensions unleashed on the Arab world by World War I
remain as acute as ever. Essentially, the Middle East finds itself in
the same situation now as Europe did following the 1919 Treaty of
Versailles: standing before a map that disregards the region’s ethnic
and confessional realities.
In Africa, Latin America and — following the bloodletting of World
War II — Europe, most peoples have largely come to accept the borders
that history has forced upon them. But not in the Middle East. The
states that were founded in the region after 1914, and the borders
that were drawn then, are still seen as illegitimate by many of their
own citizens and by their neighbors. The legitimacy of states in the
region, writes US historian David Fromkin in “A Peace to End All
Peace” — the definitive work on the emergence of the modern Middle
East — comes either from tradition, from the power and roots of its
founder or it doesn’t come at all.
Only two countries in the broader region — Egypt and Iran — possess
such a long and uninterrupted history that their state integrity can
hardly be shaken, even by a difficult crisis. Two others continue to
stand on the foundation erected by their founders: The Turkish
Republic of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,
finally united by Abd al-Asis Ibn Saud in 1932.
These four countries surround the core of the Middle East, which is
made up of five countries and one seemingly eternal non-state. Fromkin
calls them the “children of England and France:” Lebanon, Syria,
Jordan, Iraq, Israel and Palestine.
No group of countries, particularly given their small sizes, has seen
so many wars, civil wars, overthrows and terrorist attacks in recent
decades. To understand how this historical anomaly came to pass,
several factors must be considered: the region’s depressing history
prior to World War I, the failure of the Arab elite and the continual
intervention by the superpowers thereafter, the role of political
Islam, the discovery of oil, the founding of Israel and the Cold War.
A Peace to End All Peace
Perhaps most important, however, was the wanton resolution made by two
European colonial powers, Britain and France, that ordered this part
of the world in accordance with their own needs and literally drew “A
Line in the Sand,” as the British historian James Barr titled his 2011
book about this episode.
It is still unclear where the Arab Spring will take us and what will
ultimately become of the Middle East. Apocalyptic scenarios are just
as speculative as the hope that that the region will find its way to
new and more stable borders and improved political structures. But
where does this lack of legitimacy and absence of trust which poisons
the Middle East come from? How did we arrive at this “Peace to End All
Peace,” as Fromkin’s book is called?
Istanbul, the summer of 1914: The capital of the Ottoman Empire seems
half a world away from the sunny parlor in the Imperial Villa in Ischl
where Emperor Franz Joseph I signed his manifesto “To My People” on
July 28 and unleashed the world war by declaring war on Serbia. For
centuries, the Ottoman Empire had controlled the southern and eastern
Mediterranean, from Alexandretta to Arish, from the Maghreb to Suez.
But Algeria and Tunisia fell to the French while the British nabbed
Egypt; in 1911, the Italians established a bridgehead in Libya. By the
eve of the Great War, the empire had shrunk to include, aside from
today’s Turkey, only the Middle East, present-day Iraq and a strip of
land on the Arabian Peninsula stretching down to Yemen.
It is these regions, south of present-day Turkey, that became the
focus of the Middle Eastern battles in World War I. For 400 years, the
area had wallowed deep in history’s shadow. But in the early 20th
century, it rapidly transformed into the arc of crisis we know today
— a place whose cities have become shorthand for generations of
suffering: Basra, Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Gaza and Suez.
The protagonists of World War I were not fully aware yet that the
Ottoman Empire’s backyard was sitting atop the largest oil reserves in
the world. Had they known, the fighting in the Middle East would
likely have been even more violent and brutal than it was. At the
time, however, the war aims of the two sides were determined by a
world order that would dissolve within the next four years: Great
Britain wanted to open a shipping route to its ally Russia and to
secure its connection to India via the Suez Canal and the Persian
Gulf. The German Empire wanted to prevent exactly that.
Shifting to the Periphery
It remained unclear for a few days following Franz Joseph’s
declaration of war whether the Ottoman Empire would enter the war and,
if it did, on which side. But shortly after the conflict began,
Istanbul joined Berlin and Vienna. On August 2, the Germans and the
Ottomans signed a secret pact; a short time later, two German warships
— the SMS Goeben and the SMS Breslau — began steaming from the
western Mediterranean toward Constantinople. Once they arrived, they
were handed over to the — officially still neutral — Ottoman navy
and renamed Yavuz and Midilli; the German crews remained, but donned
the fez.
With the arrival of the two battleships in the Golden Horn and the
subsequent mining of the Dardanelles, the casus belli had been
established: The Ottomans and the Germans had blocked the connection
between Russia and its allies, the French and the British. Shortly
thereafter, the Goeben, flying the Ottoman flag, bombarded Russian
ports on the Black Sea. At the beginning of November, Russia, Great
Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire.
In London, strategists began considering an attempt to break the
Dardanelles blockade and take Constantinople. The result was the
arrival of a British-French fleet at the southern tip of the Gallipoli
Peninsula three months later. The attack, which began with a naval
bombardment but soon included an all-out ground-troop invasion, failed
dramatically. The Ottoman victory led to the resignation of Britain’s
First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and provided the
foundation for the rise of the man who would later found modern
Turkey: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The bloody battle also became a
national trauma for Australia and New Zealand, thousands of whose
soldiers lost their lives at Gallipoli.
The Allies’ defeat at Gallipoli marked a strategic turning point in
the war in the Middle East. Because their plan to strike at the heart
of the Ottoman Empire failed, the Allies began focusing on its
periphery — targeting the comparatively weakly defended Arab
provinces. It was a plan which corresponded with the Arab desire to
throw off the yoke of Ottoman rule. In July 1915, Sir Henry McMahon,
the High Commissioner of Egypt, began secret correspondence with
Hussein Bin Ali, the Sharif of Hejaz and of the holy city of Mecca. He
and his sons, Ali, Faisal and Abdullah — together with the Damascus
elite — dreamed of founding an Arab nation state stretching from the
Taurus Mountains in southeastern Turkey to the Red Sea and from the
Mediterranean to the Iranian border.
In October 1915, McMahon wrote Hussein a letter in which he declared
Great Britain’s willingness — bar a few vague reservations — “to
recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the
territories in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of
Mecca.”
The Arabs fulfilled their part of the agreement. In June 1916, they
began their insurgency against the Ottomans — a decisive aid to the
British advance from Sinai to Damascus via Jerusalem. Their revolt was
energized by the British archeologist and secret agent Thomas Edward
Lawrence, who would go down in history as “Lawrence of Arabia.”
Britain, though, did not fully live up to its part of the deal. In a
dispatch sent in early 1916, Lawrence wrote that the Arab revolt would
be useful to the British Empire because, “it marches with our
immediate aims, the break-up of the Islamic ‘bloc’ and the defeat and
disruption of the Ottoman Empire.” But in no way were the British
thinking of the kind of united Arab state that Hussein and his sons
dreamed of. “The states the Sharifs would set up to succeed the Turks
would be … harmless to ourselves…. The Arabs are even less
stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a
state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities
incapable of cohesion.”
Far more important to the British than their Arab comrades in arms
were the French, with whom their troops were fighting and dying in
untold numbers on the Western Front. “The friendship with France,”
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George later told his French
counterpart Georges Clemenceau, “is worth ten Syrias.” France was a
colonial power that had long laid claim to the Christian provinces of
the Ottoman Empire. Great Britain would have preferred to control the
region alone, but with their common enemy Germany bearing down, London
was prepared to divide the expected spoils.
Even as McMahon was corresponding with Sharif Hussein, British
parliamentarian Sir Mark Sykes was negotiating a contradictory deal
with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot. It foresaw the
division of the Arab provinces which still belonged to the Ottomans in
such a way that France would get the areas to the north and the
British those to the south. “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’
in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk,” Sykes said as he briefed Downing
Street on the deal at the end of 1916.
The so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement was an unabashedly imperialistic
document. It took no account of the wishes of the peoples affected,
ignored the ethnic and confessional boundaries existing in the Arab
and Kurdish world and thus provoked the conflicts which continue to
plague the region 100 years later. “Even by the standards of the
time,” writes James Barr, “it was a shamelessly self-interested pact.”
The Balfour Redesign
The document initially remained secret. And by the time the Bolsheviks
completed their revolution in Moscow in 1917 and made the Sykes-Picot
Agreement public, the British had already signed another secret deal
— one which neither the Arabs nor the French knew about.
On Nov. 2, 1917, Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour promised the
Zionist Federation of Great Britain “the establishment in Palestine of
a national home for the Jewish people.” There were several factors
motivating the British to grant the oppressed Jews the right to
self-determination and to give them a piece of the Ottoman Empire for
that purpose. One of the most important was the accusations of
imperialism against London that had grown louder as the war
progressed. Not that the imperialists in the British cabinet shared
such concerns. But it bothered them, particularly because one of the
critics, Woodrow Wilson, had just been reelected as US president.
“Every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own
way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid,” Wilson
intoned in January of 1917 on the eve of America’s entry into the war.
At the time, Wilson was unaware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but the
British suspected that they would ultimately have to come clean with
their new ally. As such, the Balfour Declaration can be seen as an
effort to guard against the expected US reaction to Britain’s
arbitrary redesign of the Middle East.
In the meantime, the British — with the help of the Arabs — were
establishing military facts on the ground. Against stiff Ottoman and
German resistance, they advanced across the Sinai and Palestine to
Damascus. At the same time, they progressed up the Euphrates to
Baghdad and occupied Iraq. Between 1915 and 1918, there were more than
1.5 million soldiers fighting in the Middle East, with several hundred
thousand casualties — not including the around one million Armenians
who were killed or starved to death in the Ottoman Empire.
In October of 1918, World War I came to an end in the region with the
Armistice of Mudros. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated and, with
the exception of Anatolia, was divided among the victors and their
allies. The “peace to end all peace” was forced upon the Middle East
— for an entire century.
When US President Wilson arrived in Paris in early 1919 for peace
negotiations with British premier Lloyd George and French leader
Clemenceau, he became witness to what for him was an unexpected show.
The heads of the two victorious powers were deeply divided and engaged
in a biting oratorical duel. The French insisted that they be given
the mandate for present-day Lebanon and for the region stretching to
the Tigris, including what is now Syria. The Sykes-Picot Agreement,
after all, guaranteed them control over the area.
Asking the People
The British, who were mindful of their own mandate in Palestine and
who had just received more exact information regarding the immense oil
riches to be had in Mesopotamia, were opposed. Granting France the
mandate over Syria, after all, was in contradiction to the promises
they had made to the Arabs at the beginning of the war. Furthermore,
the British had fought the war in the Middle East essentially on their
own, with almost one million soldiers and 125,000 killed and injured.
“There would have been no question of Syria but for England,” Lloyd
George said.
Wilson proposed a solution. The only way to find out if the residents
of Syria would accept a French mandate and those of Palestine and
Mesopotamia would accept British rule, the US president said, was to
find out what people in those regions wanted. It was a simple and
self-evident idea. For two months, the Chicago businessman Charles
Crane and the American theologian Henry King travelled through the
Middle East and interviewed hundreds of Arab notables. Although the
British and the French did all they could to influence the outcome of
the mission, their findings were clear. Locals in Syria did not want
to be part of a French mandate and those in Palestine were
uninterested in being included in a British mandate. London had been
successful in preventing the Americans from conducting a survey in
Mesopotamia.
In August, King and Crane presented their report. They recommended a
single mandate covering a unified Syria and Palestine that was to be
granted to neutral America instead of to the European colonial powers.
Hussein’s son Faisal, who they describe as being “tolerant and wise,”
should become the head of this Arab state.
Today, only Middle East specialists know of the King-Crane Report, but
in hindsight it represents one of the biggest lost opportunities in
the recent history of the Middle East. Under pressure from the British
and the French, but also because of the serious illness which befell
Wilson in September of 1919, the report was hidden away in the
archives and only publicly released three years later. By then, Paris
and London had agreed on a new map for the Middle East, which
diametrically opposed the recommendations made by King and Crane.
France divided its mandate area into the states of Lebanon and Syria
while Great Britain took on the mandate for Mesopotamia, which it
later named Iraq — but not before swallowing up the oil-rich province
of Mosul. Between Syria, Iraq and their mandate area of Palestine,
they established a buffer state called Transjordan.
Instead of the Arab nation-state that the British had promised Sharif
Hussein, the victorious powers divided the Middle East into four
countries which, because of their geographical divisions and their
ethnic and confessional structures are still among the most difficult
countries in the world to govern today.
Fatal and Long-Term Consequences
And they knew what they were doing. Just before the treaties were
signed, the question arose as to where exactly the northern border of
Palestine — and thus, later, that of Israel — was to run. An advisor
in London wrote to the British Prime Minister Lloyd George: “The truth
is that any division of the Arab country between Aleppo and Mecca is
unnatural. Therefore, whatever division is made should be decided by
practical requirements. Strategy forms the best guide.” In the end,
the final decision was made by a British general assisted by a
director from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
The Arab world, of course, wasn’t the only place where borders were
drawn that local populations refused to accept. It happened in Europe
too. But three factors in the Middle East led to fatal and long-term
consequences.
First: Whereas many Europeans had begun to develop national identities
and political classes by the beginning of the 19th century at least,
World War I yanked Arabs out of their historical reverie. The Ottomans
took a relatively hands-off approach to governing their Middle Eastern
provinces, but they also did little to introduce any kind of political
structure to the region or to promote the development of an
intellectual or economic elite. On the contrary, at the first sign of
a progressing national identity, the Ottoman rulers would banish or
execute the movement’s leaders. This heritage weighed on the Middle
East at the dawn of the 20th century, and the region’s pre-modern
conflation of state and religion further hampered its political
growth.
Second: The capriciousness with which France and Great Britain redrew
the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire’s former Arab provinces left
behind the feeling that a conspiracy was afoot — a feeling which grew
into an obsession in the ensuing decades. Even today, the legend lives
on that the mysterious buckle in the desert border between Jordan and
Saudi Arabia is the result of someone bumping the elbow of Colonial
Secretary Winston Churchill as he was drawing the line. That, of
course, is absurd — but it isn’t too far removed from the manner in
which Sykes, Picot, Lloyd George and Clemenceau in fact carved up the
region.
Thirdly: In contrast to Europe, the tension left behind by the
untenable peace in the Arab world was not released in a single,
violent eruption. During World War II, the region was not a primary
theater of war.
But the unresolved conflicts left behind by World War I, combined with
the spill-over effects from the catastrophic World War II in Europe —
the founding of Israel, the Cold War and the race for Persian Gulf
resources — added up to a historical burden for the Middle East. And
they have resulted in an unending conflict — a conflict that has yet
to come to an end even today, almost 100 years after that fateful
summer in 1914.
Translated from the German by Charles Hawley
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/world-war-i-led-to-a-century-of-violence-in-the-middle-east-a-946052.html