MJ Akbar
AS the world gets pregnant once more with war, there is inevitable speculation about parentage. Genes do not die. The gathering storm is a direct descendant of epochal events between 1914 and 1918: the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the decision of the victors Britain and France to replace empire with neo-colonisation in the 1920s, Britain’s promise to create a home for Jews persecuted in Europe in Biblical land, and the Soviet Union’s determination to retain its Tsarist expanse under the bogus excuse of communist ideology. The battlefields have been myriad over the past century, with consequences shaped by shifting factors.
The current contagion is concentrated in the lands adjoining four seas: Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, and Red. But their shores encompass a far larger world. The Mediterranean laps Europe and Africa, and the Red Sea floats into the Indian Ocean. Ukraine’s Crimea is the principal port of the Black Sea, now in the hands of Russia; its waters touch, apart from direct belligerents, Turkey, Georgia, Bulgaria, and Romania. The Caspian supplies caviar and shipping routes to Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan.
Linkages between wars
The linkage between the First and Second World Wars of the 20th century is a staple of school textbooks, but the onward impact is still hazy in public perception.
World War I, triggered by a terrorist bomb in Sarajevo, began in 1914 and merely paused in 1918, with the defenestration of three empires, Tsarist-Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman-Caliphate, that had for centuries ruled swathes of Eurasia. Ottoman decline began with its defeat in the Crimean War of 1854, but it was protected from further disintegration by the differing objectives of the victorious allies, Russia, Britain, and France.
This became irrelevant when the Ottomans joined Germany in the Great War of 1914-18, which they described as a jihad. One of the intentions of their jihad was to keep Indian Muslims out of British mobilisation but employment in the British forces proved a stronger lure for the Punjab and Frontier peasantry than religion. Ironically, Indian Muslims discovered a passion for this jihad only after Ottoman defeat, but that is not the only irony on record.
Victors as colonials The principal victors of 1918, Britain and France, were also the major colonial powers in Asia and Africa. It was not in their interest to set a self-destructive precedent by offering true independence to the Arab regions now released from Turkish rule. Having lost the first phase of the 1914 war in West Asia, Britain and France lured Arab tribal chiefs with a promise of independence which they never intended to keep. The deceit was recorded in a secret document, the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” intoned Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Minister of Britain, on the eve of August 3, 1914, when the Great Powers of Europe began their Great War of the World. The lights went out for more than one lifetime because deceit is almost guaranteed to breed instability. It is still dark in Eurasia, and the darkness is lit with drones and missiles.
The secret Anglo-French pact would make war endemic in what the West calls the Middle East and a rational map defines as West Asia. The pact, negotiated by two diplomats, Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France, divided the Arab regions into ‘zones of influence’ controlled by Britain, France, Italy, and Tsarist Russia.
Britain got the hinterland including Iraq and Arabia; France the ‘blue zone’ along the eastern Mediterranean, principally Syria, Lebanon and a chunk of southern Turkey. Russia was given Armenia. Palestine was left to an undefined international administration but became British territory. Sir Edward signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement on May 16, 1916, just before he lost his job as Foreign Secretary.
Home for the Jews
In 1917 Grey’s successor Arthur James Balfour announced support for a ‘home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. In the same year an upheaval brought the Red Flag to power in Moscow and Leon Trotsky became Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union. He revealed the details of Sykes-Picot but the Arab leaders chose to believe what they heard from London and Paris. They retreated into frustration as Britain and France exposed their impotence and implemented their neo-colonial plan. They were interested in colonial exploitation, not an architecture of stability.
