What about the division’s maps and their premises Sykes-Picot centenary -1-
Written by Nasser Kandil,
On the sixteenth of May 1916 the government of France represented by George Picot and the government of Britain represented by Marc Sykes have made an agreement that is known by Sykes Picot which drew the borders of the geographical entities of the countries which we know today. After hundred years there are a set of questions and a set of facts.
Sykes Picot Agreement was not only a framework for sharing the dominance between the British and the French people but it was a plan for the political and the demographic entities in a way that ensures the fragility of their cohesion and makes them subject to be affected; it weakens the unity of the geographical entity which the division and the fragmentation under that agreement have discussed it, and on that basis it tried to change the emerging entities into undeveloped feasible states that are driven by others, they have tribalism that can weakening them through their strictness, moreover they have common interest that lead them to interact, but they are possessed by interests which the abroad participates internally by preventing their interaction. So they are an expression of what is farthest and most dangerous than drawing the maps of the French and British colonial dominance borders that it loses its effect by the demise of that influence, furthermore it is an expression of what is beyond drawing the maps of the political entities by the oppression of the ruler and the pen, it is a thoughtful consideration of the ethnical, racial, and religious elements that ensure preventing turning the fragility into an advancement and a degree of coherence to prevent the fall.
The Sykes Picot Agreement is not as it is well-known a framework for dividing the Arab countries to prevent their unity, the agreement affects what is known as the Fertile Crescent or the Levant or the historic and the natural Syria. It is logical that the division of the Levant will ensure affecting any project of a national renaissance in depth either it was a Syrian project or any Arab one, but that agreement ensures the fact that the Levant or the historic and the natural Syria which has fixed elements of unity, if it is separated then all the initiatives of the renaissance in all the Arab countries will be disabled, because it is the heart of the Levant in its Asian and African extension, and its unity is a launching point and an advancement, while its division is a separating point and a fall.
It is not possible to separate between the Sykes Picot Agreement and Balfour Declaration which has translated and documented what was agreed before between the colonial powers France and Britain although the official declaration was after a year of Sykes Picot as a necessary completion of it, there is an existential relation between the division of the natural and the historic Syria which Palestine is in its center and between establishing an usurper Zionist entity on the Palestinian territories, one of the guarantees of the steadfastness of the Zionist entity and its ability to stay is the division of Syria into powerless entities so each one alone cannot fight it, because they are preoccupied with their concerns and interests. The emergence of this entity is a guarantee to protect this division and its survival and providing the conditions for its lifetime, and vice versa, there is not a project of unity for the Syrian entities without resisting the usurper Zionist project and there will not be resistance’s project without the anticipation of the unity of the Syrian entities, and regardless of the compound explanations of the positions and the sites, it would be easy to discover the relation between the owners of the hostile calls against the unity, the division calls and the Zionist entity , and it would be easy to discover as well the relation between the unitary aspiration of the resistance forces and the resisting anticipation of the unity forces. What is going on in the region today is the linkage between the movement of the resistance forces in Lebanon and its vital range in the west of Syria and Iraq, its permanent aspiration to Palestine and the fall of the Lebanese forces first, Jordan and its similarities in considering easy the normalization with the Zionist entity as well as the decline of Palestine status in its speech and its force to the extent of the readiness to ally with the Zionist entity.
With the centenary of Sykes Picot a new fragmented project has been born in the region, its basis is a separated-principles tripartite, its first side is an American geographical philosophy, pioneered by the historian Bernard Lewis, it occupies an important status in the studies and planning American centers under the title “the means of a prolonged stability of the Middle East” it based on replacing the lines of Sykes Picot of the Levant entities with lines that affect the demography between sects, creeds, and ethnics by subjecting the region for processes of joining and sorting that produce smaller, purer, and more homogeneous entities at the sectarian and ethnic level. The second side is an Israeli security thesis that is adopted by the supporters of Israel in the West, they promote it as a Western interest in providing best conditions to manage the conflicts in the region after the fall of the ability in managing the understandings, this will be through igniting civil wars and strives among the creeds and the sects, they will end with dividing the region for entities their title is the ethnic and religious identities that require a mutual ethnic cleansing which will last through bloody wars for long decades, so it will prevent the renaissance, the civilization, and the emergence of modern state, but in contrast it contributes in the regression of nations and communities for many centuries backward , thus it will grant Israel and the West the opportunities of stability and security. While the source of the third side is the call of the owners of the Wahhabi thought in its different variations to replace the civil formulas which are known by the entities of the region despite their deformities with a religious state as the Islamic emirate, and to purify their geographies from the components which are not in conformity with its ideological concept, but this will lead to transcend the borders of Sykes Picot in areas in favor of the unity of the identity, and the falling of a part of the geography of the existing entities in favor of new entities that are difficult to control by the emerging entities, but they are alike in terms of the ethnic, religious, or the sectarian composition, and in terms of the colors which the emirate is not accommodated for or it cannot stir them by the power of expulsion.
It is clear from the reality which the war of Syria shows, the existential and the political association between the three sources of the project of dividing the divided and fragmenting the fragmented, it is not difficult to find evidences which prove the relation between the forces which embody the project of the wehhabi thought, from its ruling capitals to its armed factions in the Zionist entity as two allied forces publicly, and it is not difficult as well to find the relation between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and America in the war in which these projects are tested, and which Syria constitutes its arena, theatre, and its complex at the same time, because the war of Syria is the war of Sykes Picot and testing the alternatives, so will this mean that Sykes Picot has failed as a framework to protect the division on one hand, and to ensure the security of Israel on the other hand? In order to search for alternatives? Are the alternatives seem to be immune to be born, and still minor, are the reasons of power in the body of the nation and the opposition more powerful than all the elements which were mobilized to undermine it, what about the Russian American understandings and the status of the division plans to inherit Sykes Picot? The lines of the division projects will be in tomorrow’s article.
Translated by Lina Shehadeh,
–