Sur Muftah, article pas inintéressant sur l’intérêt renouvelé et parfois problématique de certains médias pour les accords de Sykes-Picot. Pour l’auteur, révélateur d’un #orientalisme et d’une obsession #ethno-politique, si @nidal m’autorise à parler ainsi (car cela m’a rappelé un vieil article sur Loubnan ya Loubnan).
The Debates on Sykes-Picot Reveal How Racism about People in the Middle East Is Alive and Well
▻http://muftah.org/the-debates-on-sykes-picot-reveal-how-racism-about-people-in-the-middle-east
Since 2011, Western media has taken a sudden interest in the Sykes-Picot Agreement in a flurry of commentary about the fragility of arbitrarily imposed colonial borders in the Middle East. Everyone from Noam Chomsky to Glenn Beck has presented their take on the issue, but the basic message has been the same: Sykes-Picot, which lives on in the Middle East, is now “failing,” “disintegrating,” “coming undone,” and “unravelling.”
These criticisms are not simply reflections of the past; they also tell us much about the present. This mythologizing of Sykes-Picot reveals a worldview in which the incompatibility of certain ethnic and religious groups is blamed for the region’s current instability, while Western interventions in the Middle East over the last few decades are conveniently ignored. In this way, they reveal that cultural essentialism about the Middle East region is still alive and well in the West.
[...]
Why Sykes-Picot Matters
Today, many narratives about Sykes-Picot leave a distinct aftertaste of primordialism and essentialism. As the argument often goes, regional conflict arises because the Sykes-Picot borders do not correspond to the sectarian, ethnic, or tribal divisions on the ground. The underlying assumption in this argument is that a set of “real” borders actually exists somewhere, but are contradicted by those on our maps. The implication of this argument is that non-Western peoples, whether because of religion, ethnicity, tribal practices, or other markers of identity, are simply incapable of building a lasting nation-state which can transcend more primordial loyalties.
[...]
Few have bothered to ask what people who live within a supposedly “Sykes-Picot Order” think about all this. If we consider mainstream Arab media to be the voice of popular opinion, it seems general sentiment is in favor of keeping the current borders. The Kurds, of course, have long struggled to achieve a state of their own, but there is no comparably overwhelming support among Sunnis of the Middle East for a Sunnistan, or among the Shi’a for a Shiastan.
