The problem with Sykes-Picot wasn’t the map, it was the mapmakers
Don’t send two men to map what they don’t know
By Asher Kohn
It was 100 years ago that two men rewrote history. Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot lent their names to an agreement that carved the Middle East into two sectors of influence — English and French.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement is not remembered fondly. Indeed, maybe the only thing that Kurdish politicians and ISIS militants agree on is that Sykes-Picot must be undone.
Today’s Syrians are in good company. People a century ago didn’t like the agreement either.
From the August 5, 1919 copy of The New York Times:
And if the countries that signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement weren’t in accord, imagine how locals felt.
We do not recognize to the French Government any right to any part of Syria, and we reject all proposals that France should give us any assistance…
That is from the General Syrian Congress, who met in July 1919 to decry Sykes-Picot. They also demanded that Palestine and Lebanon not be separated from the rest of Syria. That’s the opposite of what ended up happening.
Sykes-Picot came into being in 1916, but the agreement hardly turned the Middle East into its final form. The map didn’t even last a decade. To give an idea, here’s how it looked officially signed by the duo:
That’s not what ended up happening. If you zoom in, you’ll notice that cities like Mosul switched from blue (Syria) to red (Iraq). Almost none of the filled-in blue part made its way to Syria — revolutionary Turkish armies under the command of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk took it over. Cities like Mardin, Urfa, and Adana are now in Turkey. They’re known, locally, not for those few years under French control but rather for their delicious kebabs.
Other bits became Lebanon and Palestine (later Israel). In 1939, Syria’s French rulers gave another little chunk to Turkey. The current map of Syria and Iraq looks very little like the Sykes-Picot one.
There are two reasons these borders weren’t permanent. The first is that the British and French had less at stake than the people who lived there. The second is that this region between Syria, Iraq, and Turkey is incredibly flat.
There isn’t much keeping an army or even sheep from crossing that.
Borders change all the time and it isn’t too surprising that the Sykes-Picot map didn’t last. Three years later, an American duo tried their hand at carving up the Ottoman Empire. Charles Crane and Henry King went on a two-month trip through “all of Turkey” — essentially a summer vacation — to come up with an American alternative to Sykes-Picot.
The gist of it was that America was the best and should take control. Turks agreed, at least to the faces of Messrs. Crane and King. They even looked to an example of American amity:
The Crane-King proposal was rejected and quickly shunted off into the archives. Even a century later, America has yet to obtain control of the Whole Empire. Few people, investigators or otherwise, would even recommend such a thing.
These cartographers were presumptuous, no matter where they drew the borders. No matter if they were American, British, or French. The anger at Sykes-Picot isn’t that the map they drew was bad, but that they were the ones drawing the map in the first place.
