For some time now, there has been a lot of clamoring in Damascus and Beirut about an alleged new Sykes-Picot – in reference to the two Westerners accused of ‘partitioning the region' through Sykes-Picot agreement. This idea, which is being perpetuated generation after generation, and which is treated as an indubitable axiom, is essentially a Baathist idea. Today, abysmal Baathist ideas as such are being resurrected vigorously in order to save the abysmal Baathist regime itself. Indeed, to the regime, the ‘conspiracy' which the majority of the Syrian people are carrying out against the infallible regime is the result of Sykes-Picot, and is no doubt conducive to a second Sykes-Picot! Well to begin with, the region was never united so it couldn't be divided by Sykes-Picot. There was an Ottoman empire that controlled various states and provinces with borders that changed frequently. The empire's collapse was expedited by the First World War, after which the French and British mandates reconfigured its dominions into new states and peoples. Secondly, despite their alleged fondness for division, the colonial powers did not partition Egypt for example, because it was one political and administrative unit. The colonial powers only “divided" a region already torn by its religions, sects, and ethnicities. Thirdly, the ‘partitioning' does not take place as a result of conspiracies, but often as a result of the disintegration of imperial configurations: We saw this with the Ottoman Empire, and the empire of Austria-Hungary under the House of Habsburg, and then with the partitioning of India and the emergence of Pakistan in 1947 (after, and not before, independence from Britain). We saw it again in a broader way in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the smaller Yugoslav empire. Indeed, if colonial powers are able to manufacture all these events and developments, then all is left for us is to kneel before them in awe. Fourthly, do the detractors of Sykes-Picot not see that the collapse of the countries created by that agreement will engender, in their place, smaller states and not bigger ones that overcome the alleged ‘partition'? This is mainly because many of those countries “created by colonialism" united more components than their various groups demanded or could tolerate: Is this not true about joining Kurds and Arabs together in what became Iraq, joining south Sudan to the Arabs in the north, or joining Muslims and Christians together in the entity called Lebanon? Fifthly, the Baathist ideology, when it comes to Sykes-Picot, avoids answering two questions: A- What role do we ourselves have in Sykes-Picot, with our divisions, conflicting prejudices, and the extent of our integration – or the lack thereof – in the long Ottoman era? Or what about the aspirations of our disparate communities, and their conflicting interests? B- What happened to those countries created by Sykes-Picot, and how were they managed until the day came for proposals to emerge (pursuant to the current narrative) for a Sykes-Picot II? Here lies the crux of the matter: The issue is not Sykes-Picot at all, but the rise of a regime like the one ruling Syria since 1963, and the crimes and injustice it has visited on its people. Evoking the myth of Sykes-Picot, time and again, is therefore only meant to bolster that regime, and save the reputation of fifty years of Baathist rule whose first raison d'être was supposed to be undoing Sykes-Picot!
