He drew impromptu racial caricatures on scraps of paper, Jews and Arabs with large noses, fat Turks and shifty merchants in the bazaars. Sykes’s self-gathered erudition, though, sat oddly with another trait of the class he grew up with-a casual prejudice toward “Orientals” themselves.
Like other travelers with deep pockets he shipped home artifacts from the Orient and had an architect create a Turkish Room at Sledmere, featuring Armenian ceramics. In England Sykes had a grand country house and estate, Sledmere, in Yorkshire. He was of a group and class called the Orientalists because they so admired and soaked up the cultures of antiquity – the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Arabs, and of later influences like the Turks and the Armenians. Sykes had a vast family fortune that, as a young man, he had tapped for extensive travel in the Middle East. The British gathered a strange assembly of talents in Cairo in 1916, mixing career military officers, stolid colonial administrators, ambitious diplomats with little local sympathy or understanding, academics renowned for their archaeological discoveries in the region, intelligence agents from India and the Sudan and several civil servants locked into turf fights between rival departments directed from London.Įven in this confusion, Sykes seemed an improbable choice to handle such a potentially explosive issue, the covert cartography that would draw arbitrary new national borders from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, from the Levant to the Sudan, from the Nile to the Tigris and Euphrates. Sir Mark Sykes was a gifted amateur to whom life in the diplomatic corps would have been intolerable.
#Thirteen bled promises the black legend professional
Picot was a professional diplomat who never stepped outside the protocols of his office. The Sykes-Picot negotiations went on for many months and were handled in a way that defined two contrasting national approaches to foreign policy, embodied in the men themselves. But-fatefully-the rest of the deal was carried out. The Bolshevik Revolution rendered void the Russian slice of the cake-Ottoman Turkey was replaced by a secular Turkish state. And Russia would have control of Turkey, including of Constantinople and the Dardanelles-the channel from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean that Russia had sought since the days of Peter the Great to give it “warm water” naval power. In this arrangement Britain was to have control of Egypt, Palestine, parts of Arabia and a new nation that became Iraq. The deal was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, made between Britain, France and Czarist Russia, and named for its principal authors, Sir Mark Sykes for Britain and M. It was there that critical parts of a secret deal were put in place that carved up control of the Middle East – a land grab that could be completed only by having no regard for promises made and by betraying people who had shed much blood in expectation of those promises being met.
But the blood-saturated disintegration of today’s Syria and much of the surrounding carnage and anomie have their origins 100 years ago, in the summer of 1916, and in British-ruled Cairo.
Rarely can one moment and one place be fixed as a trigger for events that unravel a whole part of the world for more than a century. When did it begin? That, at least, we can explain. When, for heaven’s sake, can it end? No one can answer. Hell, it seems, has a special purchase on Syria. Certain images will indelibly mark memories of this year and one will be the gut-wrenching video of a five-year-old pulled from rubble in Aleppo with the frozen stare of trauma, his face streaked with soot and blood.
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