Mideast Border Pact Comes Back to Haunt Europe

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/world/europe/04iht-letter04.html

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BERLIN — It has been almost a century since European powers sewed a patchwork of statehood in the Middle East, with Britain and France competing — then as now — to take the lead in establishing a new order. As Syria’s civil war spreads beyond its frontiers and draws in ever more outsiders, that post-Ottoman template is in jeopardy, with perilous implications for those in London and Paris seeking sway over its successor.

In May 1916, midway through World War I, French and British diplomats, with the assent of czarist Russia, struck a secret deal — known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement after the officials who negotiated it — establishing spheres of influence that became the framework of much of the region’s 20th-century history.

Last week, it was Britain and France again who, in a much different context, prodded their partners in the 27-nation European Union to let the organization’s embargo on arms supplies to Syria lapse, potentially enabling shipments of weapons to the rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

There was another parallel: After its 1917 revolution, Russia exposed the Sykes-Picot Agreement to international scrutiny, setting itself against Western policy makers as it has throughout the Syrian revolt, most recently in late May with the announcement that it would ship advanced ground-to-air missiles to its protégés in Damascus.

Of course, there are huge historical differences as the crisis moves toward possible talks at a conference in Geneva, where the United States and Russia will seek to act as the latest ringmasters of a region that generally confounds prediction.

For the Europeans, though, there is a hazard that Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot were not obliged to contemplate.

“The borders drawn by Britain and France in the Levant in 1916 are beginning to dissolve,” said the German columnist Rainer Hermann, and the distant conflict is no longer the exclusive preserve of conventional forces and national armies.

Indeed, said Navi Pillay, the United Nations’ top human rights monitor, “the increasing number of foreign fighters crossing Syria’s borders to support one side or another is further fueling the sectarian violence, and the situation is beginning to show worrying signs of destabilizing the region as a whole.”

Even as Lebanon’s battle-hardened Hezbollah militia joined the fray on Mr. Assad’s side, France acknowledged that at least 120 of its citizens were known to be fighting with rebel forces in Syria, some of them aligned with Al Qaeda. In Germany, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution put the number of Muslims joining the fray from Germany at 50. Britain said it was investigating the death of one of its citizens accused of fighting for the rebels.

Wars abroad, moreover, rebound back home.

Just last month, assailants struck members of the French and British militaries on the streets of Paris and London, killing an off-duty British soldier, and sounding alarms for security services unable to keep pace with the spread of militant sentiment.

One of the suspects in the London attack had been arrested in Kenya in 2010, accused of seeking to join extremists fighting in Somalia. But the British security service did not judge him to be a high-level threat in his own land.

Few European governments seem ready to acknowledge the argument that their far-flung interventions turn their own citizens against them. “In the vexed discussion about extremism and radicalization,” the journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in Britain’s weekly New Statesman magazine, “foreign policy is the issue that dare not speak its name.”

But modern terrorism draws its “recruits from the idea of a war between Islam and the West,” the columnist Jörg Lau wrote in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit. As the London attackers showed with their desire to be filmed and interviewed on witnesses’ cell-phones, “evil now wishes to appear on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, in real time.”

Inspired by the Internet and radical clerics, Mr. Lau said, these “neojihadists who recruit themselves are the security services’ worst nightmare.” The attack in London defined “the latest mutation of terrorism, and there is no cause to hope that it will be the last.”

Seen from Berlin — in a land whose government has set itself squarely against supplying weapons to the Syrian rebels — there is a perception that a region in flux is setting ever-shifting tripwires for those who dare to intervene.

Britain and France still pride themselves on the outcome of their air campaign in Libya in 2011. But, said the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel, London and Paris “must know” that arms supplies to the Syrian rebels “will increase the danger that their lands will be drawn into an unpredictable conflict.”

That seemed less of a risk a century ago, when expansionist Europeans stalked the global stage unchallenged.

By contrast, the columnist Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger wrote in The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, their postimperial successors “are not global actors with strategic heft. That would not be so bad if they did not always think they are.”