BALTIMORE: When the gaunt, bearded face of Osama bin Laden appeared on American television screens only minutes after the bombardment of Afghanistan began, he justified the Sept 11 terrorist attacks against America with a reference to the history of his region.

“What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted,” he said. “Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years of humiliation and disgrace its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.”

It was 84 years ago almost to the day that Alfred Balfour, then British foreign secretary, declared a policy in which the most powerful empire of the day supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The declaration became a modern pillar of Zionism’s claim to Palestine.

And precisely 80 years ago, the British and French victors of World War I were redrawing the map of the Middle East. Balfour’s declaration was only one of the many wartime agreements that had to be considered, but it was still a steadfast part of British foreign policy, even though Balfour’s successor despised it.

The Jewish issue was just one many issues before the European powers completing their conquest of the world. The Middle East was the first piece of geography that Europe tried to colonize with the Crusades, but the last inhabited part of the world to come under its rule.

For the most part, the Europeans divided it up as they did Africa - to suit themselves, not the indigenous inhabitants. If anyone was in charge of the process, it was Winston Churchill. At his side was T. E. Lawrence, a media star decades before David Lean’s 1962 film ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’

Ultimately, England and France sliced up the Ottoman Empire that before the war stretched from its capital in Istanbul to the tip of the Red Sea, taking in what is now Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Yemen and much of Iraq and Iran - then known as Mesopotamia and Persia.

It was the still-huge remnant of Muslim rule that once went from Spain across the south of central Europe and North Africa through the Middle East and all the way to India.

The Ottomans entered the war on the German side and lost. The victors took away their empire, creating political and geographical tensions that resonate to this day. Many now see the Ottoman days as part of a glorious past of Islamic domination.

Ottoman power was opposed by Arabs who resented Turkish domination and allied with the British in World War I, some hoping to expand their own influence and territory. Arab nationalists who emerged after the war taught their subjects that the Ottomans were oppressive conquerors.

Yet Madeline Zilfi of the University of Maryland, College Park, says it is no mistake that Ottoman days are looked back on as the last time Muslims were in charge of their own destiny in a large part of the world.

When Churchill, then in charge of British colonies, called together members of his government in Cairo, Egypt, in 1921, the rules of empire building had changed. No longer was the talk of bringing civilization to the uncivilized.

By this time the US had withdrawn from the negotiations as President Wilson’s idealistic schemes for a League of Nations that would respect the sovereignty of indigenous peoples was rejected by his own government. Russia was also out of the picture, struggling with its own revolution.

The spoils were left for Britain, which had done the most fighting in the region, and France, which had a presence in the Arab world through its colonies in North Africa. The deal essentially went down like this: Britain strengthened its hold on Egypt, got Palestine and control over Iraq, the various Persian Gulf states and what would become Jordan. France got Lebanon and Syria.

The Arabs made a stab at self-government, meeting in Damascus in 1920 and electing Feisal, who had fought with Lawrence, as head of a pan-Arab state. The French drove him out and asserted their own authority over Syria.

France then proclaimed part of Syria the colony of Great Lebanon, grouping together Maronite Christians - the proteges of the French - with their Muslim Druze rivals and a huge variety of Sunnis and Shias in the Bekaa Valley and elsewhere, an ethnic cauldron that continues to boil over to this day.

Meanwhile, Britain lived up to its wartime commitments by making Feisal the king of Iraq and giving his brother Abdullah dominion over an area called Transjordan. Fromkin says this was to have been a temporary measure.

Bandits from Transjordan - essentially an unsettled region - were raiding Syria, and the British were worried the French would use this a pretext to move into Palestine. Abdullah was supposed to bring some order to the territory and then find another position. But he decided he liked ruling it and declared himself king. His Hashemite great-grandson is now on the throne of Jordan.

Kuwait and the other states along the Persian Gulf were formed as a result of relationships with the British that dated back to the 19th century when they were ports for ships of the British East India trading company. The Kurds were originally supposed to get a homeland, but they managed to make everyone mad at them and ended up as part of Iraq and Turkey.

Western powers would probably steer clear of the Saudis if their country did not contain 20 per cent of the world’s known oil reserves, a fact that has made the ruling family among the richest people in the world. With its troops in the region, the United States is seen as the inheritor of the mantle of colonial governance of the British and French.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Baltimore Sun.