'There is no Middle East, there are just tribes & villages': Trump's Turkey envoy

Tom Barrack, the US Ambassador to Turkey, has rejected the notion of Middle East as a legitimate sociopolitical region. Instead, he said that it is a cluster of tribes and villages that were artificially carved into nation-states by Europeans.

In an interview published by Saudi outlet Asharq News, Barrack said it would not be realistic to expect the region’s more than 100 ethnic groups to have a political alignment among themselves. He blamed the Sykes-Picot pact (1916) for issues plaguing the region today.

The statement from Barrack, who is also the US Special Envoy to Syria, has come at a time when President Donald Trump is brokering a peace deal between Israel and Syria and is trying to broker an end to the war in the Gaza Strip. He has also said he would want to preside over an expansion of Abraham Accords, a series of agreements signed in his first time that normalised relations between Israel and West Asian and African nations.

‘There is no Middle East’

In the interview with Asharq News, Barrack said nation-states in the region were carved out by British and French diplomats artificially in 1916 and there is no real region called the Middle East.

“There is no Middle East. You know that. There are tribes and villages. The nation-state were created by the British and the French in 1916. The Sykes-Picot said, ‘Okay, we’re going to take what was the Ottoman Empire and we’re going to draw straight lines around it, and we’re going to call these nation states.’ But the Middle East doesn’t work that way,” said Barack.

Instead of nation-states as in Europe, Barack said that the life in the region that is dubbed Middle East revolves around an individual, then family, then village, then tribe, then community, then religion, and then lastly comes what this nation is.

That’s why it would be in illusion that you could 27 different nations in the region that have over 100 ethnic groups to have a political alignment, said Barak.

What was the Sykes-Picot pact?

The Sykes-Picot pact was a secret agreement struck by the United Kingdom and France in 1916. It was named after its principal negotiators, British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot.

Under the agreement reached during the World War I, the UK and France, with the assent of Russia and Italy, carved out the Ottoman Empire among themselves. They carved out direct zones, spheres of influence, and some internationally-managed zones in the erstwhile Ottoman territories.

Several scholars have blamed the Sykes-Picot pact for subsequent disturbances, ethnic violence, wars, and ongoing instability and tensions in the region. They have said that Sykes and Picot drew artificial lines on paper and drew artificial states irrespective of ethnic incoherence, ensuring decades of violence and tensions.

For example, Kurdish territories were divided among the states of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, leading to multiple insurgencies and waves of state violence. Over the decades, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein waged one of the worst genocidal campaigns against Kurds in the post-World War II era, carrying out massacres and chemical weapon attacks, killing several tens of thousands of Kurds — some estimates say he killed more than 100,000 Kurds.

In other examples, critics of state formation in the region have said that borders and ethnic make-up of Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan instilled instability.

However, critics of such thinking have said that blaming tensions in the region entirely on the Sykes-Picot pact oversimplify historical and contemporary processes, and give a clean-chit to modern leaders of these countries who could not tolerate ethnic diversity and waged genocidal campaigns like Hussein or were brutal towards even minor dissent, such as the erstwhile Assad dynasty of Syria. They have said that while Sykes-Picot pact was flawed, blaming everything on it oversimplifies and ignores the complexity of political failures of the region’s rulers over the decades and intolerance they harboured for other ethnicities.