Unmarked anniversaries cast shadow over China and Middle East

There were two significant anniversaries this week, one in the Middle East, the other in China, which passed if not quite unnoticed, certainly not commemorated or celebrated. Yet both left a legacy that still resonates in our time and still continues to shape our present.

For many historians and protagonists in the Middle East the signing 100 years ago last Monday by France and Britain of a secret deal – the Sykes-Picot agreement – that carved up much of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire into respective spheres of influence, became as one writer put it a byword for imperialist skulduggery. Its existence became known only a year later after the Russian Revolution when its leader Leon Trotsky leaked it in the name of a new open diplomacy.

For secular nationalists, democrats, autocrats, jihadis, Kurds, Sunni and Shia across the region, Sykes-Picot, with its artificial lines drawn randomly on a map, is still largely to blame for condemning the region to a century of chaos.

Above all it was seen as a betrayal of the Arabs who had risen against the Turks and it would lay the basis, among other things, for the partition of Palestine at the expense of its indigenous people. The promise that Kurds and Armenians would be able to determine their own fate soon evaporated.

Others would say that at this remove the deal is a convenient scapegoat, but the arguments over the "territorial integrity" of Syria and Iraq – in effect of those very lines on the map – remain a central challenge of the peace talks.

Cultural Revolution

In marking the anniversary, Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has argued that Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, which it captured in the 1967 war, should be recognised internationally.

Masrour Barzani, chancellor of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region Security Council, tweeted: “Some say now isn’t the right time for an independent Kurdistan. I believe it’s time for our people to finally determine their own future.” Obsequies for Sykes-Picot on its anniversary . . .

Monday was also the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Cultural Revolution, which was initially surreptitious as well. China's inability to mark the occasion as either a moment of revolutionary triumph or a great stain on its and the Communist Party's history reflects its rulers deep ambivalence these days about Mao Zedong and his legacy.

Neo-Maoist currents flourish on the left of the party and Chinese president Xi Jinping has flirted with restoring some of the cult of the revolution’s iconic figure whose role he is happy to see likened to his own.

Most papers ignored the anniversary of the1966-1976 period when Mao decided to cleanse and reinvigorate communism by attacking his own colleagues and unleashing the Red Guards, fervent student militants recruited to enforce his cause. It plunged China into chaos and violence that claimed more than one million lives and led to some 10 million being persecuted.

Repeat performance

The

People’s Daily

was among the few to comment, warning that: “We cannot and will not allow a repeat performance of an error like the ‘Cultural Revolution’.”

Neo-Maoists are adamant, however, that, as Zhang Hongliang put it: "Any . . . denunciation of the Cultural Revolution is entirely making public opinion preparations for the United States and other western nations in [plotting the] extinction of the Chinese nation." Better, the party has clearly decided, to say nothing.

But memories linger and will not be eradicated by the neglect of the issue. Many individual horror stories of the period have been told publicly in recent months. More than 16 million young people were sent for re-education through labour in the countryside, including Xi, his sister believed to have been driven to suicide.

There were mass killings of “class enemies” by the uncontrollable Red Guards. Children informed on the ideological mistakes of their parents, many of whom were then humiliated and tortured to death publicly. Intellectuals, professionals and ordinary workers suspected of deviation lost their jobs. The pogroms even included cannibalisation of victims in the southern region of Guangxi.

The hold that the past still has on the present poses huge questions, not least in China, where people ask the inevitable “is this the same party, and could it happen again?” But trying to shake off the past by ignoring such anniversaries will do little to bridge the yawning gap between ruling elites and their people whose memories are long.

Civic commemoration involves to some degree an assertion of ownership either of the suffering or of the leadership of a great event. Whether it's the 1916 Rising or the Somme, we know where we stand. The same cannot be said of China's rulers and the Cultural Revolution, not to mention the challenge next year for Russia on the anniversary of its revolution.