Sykes-Picot – The centennial of an imperial curse (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

For my generation of Arabs, the “Asia Minor Agreement”, better known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, came to symbolize imperial betrayal and treachery, a secret scheme signed in May 1916 by Mark Sykes, a British diplomat, and François Georges-Picot his French counterpart representing the two victorious European Empires in WWI to divide the imperial inheritance of the dying Ottoman Empire. In the collective mind of the peoples living in what used to be called Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent, Sykes and Picot became names that shall live in infamy, for they imposed an imperial construct by etching arbitrary lines and coloring zones of influence on a map, and establishing artificial entities over these regions that have been inhabited by a rich mosaic of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, and religions over millennia of successive civilizations

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/05/21/Sykes-Picot-The-centennial-of-an-imperial-curse-.html