I come from the working class and I know that working people need to gain political consciousness more than ever. Because we live in a fire pit like the Middle East. Knowing your past is an integral part of this consciousness.
One of the first images that comes to mind when we think of the Middle East is the lines on the maps. Those straight, calculated ruler lines that ignore natural borders... Whatever is in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia today is the result of those lines.
And how did those lines appear?
The answer is the Sykes-Picot Agreement, secretly signed in 1916. This document, written by the British Mark Sykes and the French François Georges-Picot, divided the Ottoman geography between two colonial empires before the end of World War I. However, this agreement did not only reflect the Anglo-French appetite. The Russian Tsardom was also at the same table. With the Sazanov Agreement, Russia laid claim to Istanbul, the Straits and Eastern Anatolia.
The revelation of this tripartite division to the world was only possible with the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks, who took power in 1917, published all the secret treaties of the Tsarist regime one by one. The documents published in Pravda and Izvestiya revealed how the imperialists had turned the war into a war of division under the name of ’civilization“. The name of Sykes-Picot-Sazanov was engraved on international public opinion that day.
The fate of the Middle East was drawn at that very moment, on the table, on the map, on paper.
There was no Kurdish state, no Arab union. Neither sects nor tribes were asked. Only the roads to oil, ports, corridors to the seas were decisive. And today, that original sin still lies at the root of the bloodshed in the Middle East, the disintegrating states, and the borders that never settle.
But Sykes-Picot-Sazanov was only the beginning of the division.
World War I is over, World War II has come and gone. The colonial empires were replaced by the Western bloc led by the United States of America. The geography of distribution has changed, the methods have changed, but the logic has never changed.
The order established in the Middle East after World War II was an updated version of Sykes-Picot. Oil companies, military bases, allied regimes... Everything was built on a new map. And today, America has gone so far that it even covets the territory of its own partners. The Kurdistan project in southeastern Turkey is one of the clearest examples of this. The same logic is at work in demanding Greenland from Denmark. Its strategic location, new sea routes opened by melting glaciers and rare earth elements... It's the same story: when there is an interest, the ruler is reworked.
But America has a problem in the Middle East: Iran.
Iran is the biggest actor refusing to play the role assigned to it by the Sykes-Picot order. Moreover, it is not only within its own borders; it is weaving a line of influence through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. The US has been bogged down in its policy of repression against Iran for years. It can neither engage in a full-scale war nor withdraw from the region. The Iran war is keeping the US too preoccupied with the rest of the world.
This picture reveals the following reality:
The war of partition is not over. It has only changed form.
Borders that were once drawn with a ruler with Sykes-Picot-Sazanov are now being redrawn with economic weapons, proxy wars, energy corridors and even on distant islands like Greenland.
And the world is still asking the same question:
The balance of oil, money and power has become more apparent than anything else. But what about the people living inside those borders?
They were never at the table.
This is why working people need to be politically conscious, to know their past, to refuse to stay outside this table. Because whenever the ruler touches a map, it passes over us first.