The problems in the Middle East are not because of colonial
border-drawing: How oversimplified, media-created memes become accepted facts.
This is one of my societal pet peeves. It is a practical reality that most of us get
our knowledge of the world from the media. We were not all history majors in
college. We don’t read the original
scholarly analyses that research world history.
And we have enough going on in our lives to become experts in various
problems around the world, even the important ones. So when a variety of news media all say the
same thing, we tend to believe it. This
makes total sense and is a good thing as long as the media are responsible in wielding
this great power.
But they are not.
For my entire life, I have heard over and over again that
one of the leading causes of sectarian violence in the Middle East is because
the colonial powers drew these nice straight lines that cut through ethnic
regions, putting some Kurds in Turkey, some in Syria, and some in Iraq. Iraq was part Kurd, part Sunni, and part
Shia. If they had just drawn the borders
to put each group into its own country, much of the violence over the past
half-century could have been avoided.
But it turns out, this is such as oversimplification as to
be virtually false. Why are the Alawites
(of Bashar al Assad) in power in Syria despite being from the minority? It was a very smart way for the French
colonialists to maintain power during the time they wanted to remain
colonialists. If the group you prop up
is the smallest, they have a great motivation to keep you as colonial
overlords. If not, they lose all of that
great power. But because they are small,
they need to use some harsh and often violent methods to keep order. This sets the stage for sectarian violence
once the colonialists leave. France
leaves the Alawites in power and the majority Sunnis are ready to take back
power and in many cases exact revenge for genuine atrocities. It is not because of the borders. The same thing happened in Lebanon and
elsewhere. The Soviet Union did this
when creating their Central Asian republics.
Africa too.
Second, the borders that the colonial powers drew were not completely
arbitrary after all. Many of them
followed borders that had existed for centuries – through the Ottoman Empire
and in some cases centuries early. They didn’t
just draw straight lines because they wanted to save ink on the maps. Another argument is that they should have let
the people who lived there set their own borders. That is what they tried in the Balkans and we
know how that turned out.
Recently, the Atlantic had a good article on this. I heard a story on NPR recently that made
some of the same points. These are what
opened my eyes. But since most of us get
our news from Jon Stewart (who got it wrong), and the broadcast nightly news
(who frequently get it wrong), most of us have it wrong too.
Posts
