Address by Shri M. Hamid Ansari, Vice President of India, at the International Conference on "Emerging Security Concerns in West Asia" organised by the Observer Research Foundation on 21 November 2007 at 0900 hours.

Ambassador Rasgotra

Prof. Michael Brie

Gen. V.P. Malik

Members of the ORF fraternity

Distinguished guests

Ladies and gentlemen

It is a pleasure to be back on a familiar platform. Familiarity in this case, however, is a disadvantage since I may be in danger of repeating what I might have articulated on previous occasions!

Many years back the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle had drawn attention to the dangers of expressions that are 'couched in syntactical form improper to the facts recorded'. This observation is relevant to our subject today since the theme of the conference begs definition and delineation. Unanimity of perception, of course, would have been ideal; since that is lacking, the two operative terms - 'emerging' and 'security concerns' - need to be spelt out.

Centrality has been the curse of West Asia. It is hardly necessary to remind this audience that external security concerns pertaining to the region have been around for over a century. Writing in 1917, Marriott, a British Scholar, defined the Eastern Question as 'the problem of filling up the vacuum created by the gradual disappearance of the Turkish Empire from Europe'. In May 1917, Britain and France used the Sykes-Picot Agreement to acquire 'the right of priority in enterprises and local loans' in designated Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire and to deny any facilities to a third Power in the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea. In a parallel move, the secret Balfour Declaration of November 1917 carried the commitment for the 'establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. A decade earlier on August 31, 1907, the Anglo-Russian Entente was signed, dividing Iran into three zones only one of which was under Iranian control. 'The Iranians', in Professor Nikkie Keddie's words, 'were neither consulted on the agreement nor informed of the terms'. That exercise, of division and occupation, was repeated during World War II.

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