The agreement was based on the premise that the Triple Agreement took place during the First World War and aimed at other objectives in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and was part of a series of secret agreements that reflected on its partition. The first negotiations that led to the agreement took place between 23 November 1915 and 3 January 1916, during which British and French diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot signed an agreed memorandum. [3] The agreement was ratified by their respective governments on 9 and 16 May 1916. [4] In accordance with the agreement, France should exercise direct control over Cilicia, the coastal strip of Syria, Lebanon and most of Galilee, up to the line from the north of Acre to the northwest corner of Lake Galilee (“blue zone”). To the east, in the Syrian hinterland, an Arab state (“Area A”) should be created under the protection of France. Britain should exercise control of southern Mesopotamia (“red zone”) and the area around the acre-Haifa bay in the Mediterranean, with right rights to build a railway from there to Baghdad. The area east of the Jordan River and the Negev desert south of the road, which stretches from Gaza to the Dead Sea, has been attributed to an Arab state under the protection of the United Kingdom (“Area B”). France`s “blue zone” in the area that includes the Sanjak of Jerusalem and extends southward to the line from Gaza to the Dead Sea, should be under international administration (“brown zone”). The minutes, which took place at a meeting of the “Big Four” in Paris on 20 March 1919 and attended by Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, set out the British and French positions on the agreement. This was the first topic discussed in the discussion on Syria and Turkey and was then at the centre of all the discussions.
At the peace conference that officially opened on 18 January, the Big Four (first a “Council of Ten” made up of two delegates from the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Italy and Japan) agreed on 30 January on the outlines of a mandate system (including three mandate levels) to later become Article 22 of the League Alliance. The Big Four would later decide which municipalities, under what conditions and what are mandatory. The agreement thus helped to frame the contours of modern nation-states in a region where there were none before. Since it is essentially an agreement between two colonialist powers outside the region, it would have devastating effects. US President Woodrow Wilson rejected all secret agreements between allies and encouraged open diplomacy and ideas of self-determination. On November 22, 1917, Leon Trotsky sent a note to the petrograd ambassadors that “contained proposals for a ceasefire and democratic peace without annexation and without compensation based on the principle of nation independence and their right to determine the nature of their own development.” [68] Peace negotiations with the four-year Alliance – Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey – began a month later in Brest-Litovsk. On behalf of the Quadrennial Alliance, Count Czernin replied on 25 December that “the question of the nationality of national groups that do not have the independence of the state should be constitutionally resolved by any state and its peoples independently” and that “the right of minorities is an essential part of the constitutional right of peoples to self-determination”. [69] The Anglo-French statement was read in samonic, and Pichon commented that it showed the selfless position of the two governments towards the Arabs and Lloyd George that it was “more important than all the old agreements”. [91] Pichon mentioned an agreement proposed on 15 February on the basis of the private agreement between Clemenceau and Lloyd George last December. [91] (According to Lieshout, Clemenceau presented Lloyd George, just before Faisal met at the conference of 6, a proposal that seems to cover the same subject; Lieshout, which issued on British materials related to the 6, while the date is not specified in the minutes. [92] In April 1920, the San Remo Conference issued key