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Whatsapp A map of the Sykes-Picot Agreement showing areas of the Middle East divided between British and French control.

One hundred years ago this week, a secret deal was signed between the British and French that has defined Middle East politics ever since. Annabelle Quince explains the history of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

On May 16, 1916—100 years ago this week—the British and the French signed a secret deal to redraw the borders of the Middle East. The Sykes-Picot Agreement ignored the political aspirations of Arabs and divided the Middle East between Britain and France, defining Middle Eastern politics to this day.

No sooner than Sykes and Georges-Picot had cooked up this deal the British started thinking about how they might get around it.

The agreement was named after the two men who crafted it—Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes was a British Conservative MP, and assistant to the secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener.

Georges-Picot had ambitions to become a lawyer, but in 1898 joined the French foreign office, the Quai d'Orsay, as a junior diplomat.

Colonial aspirations drive the agreement

While the agreement between these two men was signed at the height of WWI, its substance can be traced to the colonial aspirations of Britain and France, says Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University.

'In Palestine and in Iraq [Britain] claimed a variety of interests, but one of the most important interests was to control the shortest route between the Mediterranean and the Gulf,' Khalidi says.

'In addition they had a strategic interest in seeing that the area on the other side of the Egyptian frontier, what is today Israel-Palestine, was an area in which there would be no railway building, such that the Ottomans could not bring troops right up to the frontier.'

On the other hand, the French claimed their relationship with the Middle East went back to the Crusades. They also had major economic interests in Syria.

By the end of 1914, WWI was deadlocked in the east and the west, and people in Britain started trying to think of ways to break the deadlock and win the war. A group called the Easterners argued that an attack on the Ottoman Empire could work.

Their thinking was that if you knocked the Ottomans out of the war, you could open a new front in south-east Europe and the Germans would be forced to divert resources there. This would weaken them and enable Britain and France to defeat Germany on the Western Front, while the Russians could do the same on the Eastern Front.

The assumption at the time was that the Ottoman Empire, portrayed by the likes of Sykes as crumbling and decrepit, would cave in quickly.

That of course opened the hypothetical question of what would happen to the Ottoman Empire after the war.

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Whatsapp The authors of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot.

Britain's promises to the Arabs

In the meantime, the British were negotiating with Sharif Hussein of Mecca behind the scenes.

The sharif, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, had agreed to launch an uprising against the Turks. In exchange, the British offered him a large empire after the war, which encompassed much of the area that we now know as Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Iraq.

'Sharif Hussein told the British that he wasn't simply negotiating on his own behalf, he was speaking on the behalf of Arab nationalist societies all over the Arab provinces,' Khalidi says.

'The Arabs understood this as independence in almost all of the Arab provinces, with the exception of a couple of regions where either Britain or its ally friends had interests—how that was to be squared with Arab independence was never clarified.

'The British understood it somewhat differently, because at the same time ... Sir Mark Sykes, was negotiating with the French and with the Russians for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, and for a set of arrangements that differed quite markedly from ... what the Arabs understood the British had promised them.'

When Georges-Picot heard about the proposed agreement between the British and the Arabs he played his ace: the horrendous extent of French losses on the Western Front.

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Whatsapp The British had been negotiating with the Sharif of Mecca behind the scenes, promising him a large empire after World War One.

Palestine the sticking point

Sykes and Picot met for the first time in December 1915, and they agreed to a carve-up along the lines of what Sykes had proposed to the council a few weeks earlier.

What they couldn't agree on was the future of Palestine. From the British point of view, Palestine needed to be part of a strategic cordon across the Middle East that would protect India.

In the end, Sykes and Georges-Picot agreed that Palestine would have an international administration.

Learn more: Annabelle Quince and Keri Phillips sift through 10 years of Rear Vision documentaries in the Middle East brief

The French and British produced a map that grouped the area that is now called Syria and Lebanon into the French sphere of influence; while much of the area that is now Jordan, southern Palestine and Iraq was part of the British sphere of influence.

Most of the area which became Palestine was called the 'brown area' in the agreement, which was not to be under the control of any particular power, for the ostensibly high-minded reason that the holy places were there.

'No sooner than Sykes and Georges-Picot had cooked up this deal the British started thinking about how they might get around it,' says James Barr, author of 'A Line in the Sand'.

'The British had been wondering about how they might use Zionism—the political campaign to get a Jewish state in Palestine—in their own interest.'

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Whatsapp Palestine was originally to be run by an international administration

Britain promises a Jewish state, undermining the agreement

In 1916, not long after Sykes and Picot had made their deal, the British started talks with the Zionists, culminating at the end of 1917 in the Balfour Declaration, in which the British promised the Zionists a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Rashid Khalidi argues that the Balfour Declaration had a strategic objective—to establish exclusive British control over Palestine.

That goal was achieved in 1919 when the British and French prime ministers met in London and agreed that instead of being internationalised, Palestine would come under British control.

But the imposition of colonial rule in the Middle East was not easy.

On November 21, 1919, Georges-Picot and the French General Gouraud arrived in Beirut, beginning the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon.

Sharif Faisal, who had been the governor of Damascus for 16 months, had been consolidating his position. When he was proclaimed king by the Syrian National Congress, the French were incensed and General Gouraud sent in his troops. Faisal was deposed and had to flee to Palestine

Things were no easier for the British. They faced a revolt in Mesopotamia in 1920, and the French had to fight their way into Damascus that same year. Then there was a huge revolt in Syria and parts of Lebanon in 1925-26.

'[Colonial rule] was not well received by the peoples of this region, and where they were able to rise up they did. The British managed to master the Iraqi revolt using the Royal Air Force and some of the first recorded bombings of civilians take place in that region,' says Khalidi.

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Whatsapp French soldiers enter Beyrouth, Lebanon. In the Sykes-Picot agreement, Lebanon was placed under French control.

The legacy of the agreement

So can the boarders that were created by that fateful agreement 100 years ago have any relevance today?

Khalidi says we really don't know.

'There are all kinds of pressures that seem to be operating against the existing nation states and the existing borders: whether from repressed Kurdish nationalism; whether from the Islamic State, which claims that it's going to destroy these borders; whether from the creation ... of failed states in Iraq and Syria.'

'The other thing is that there are very powerful international pressures against changing frontiers. There are major players in the Middle East, notably Iran and Turkey, who have very strong views about changing the borders and have the strength to assert themselves in defence of those views.

'I'm not sure that these borders are going to necessarily disappear overnight.'

Listen to the full program A hundred years ago Britain and France signed a secret deal carving up the Middle East.

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