This is a claim that I've seen more than once, typically from very left-leaning political opinion sources. The claim is that certain countries in Africa and the Middle East were granted independence from their former colonizer states (Britain, France, etc), but the new nations' borders purposely included the territory of warring tribal or ethnic factions. Supposedly, this was done to "keep the new country down" in order to preserve colonial superiority and ease of re-intervention
Do any primary sources support this?
There are three political documents that helped shape the modern Middle East that we know today; The Hussein–McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Treaty of Sevres were each instrumental in it's own way in creating the modern Middle East. These three, along with The Balfour Declaration formed the basis of the political and geographical restructuring of the Middle East.
In subsequent letters and public responses to the publicization of European plans for the Middle East there has been no evidence of a desire to create a long lasting destabilization of the region. In fact, just the opposite is true; with letters such as Hogarth's Message, it is clear that the European nations saw no benefit to ethnic warfare. France and England had a vested interest in a stable region to extract the oil and other natural resources.
The European powers even offered a potential independent Kurdistan in the Sykes-Picot agreement, which disintegrated under the hyper nationalist movement led by Attaturk in the 1920's.
Europe's interest in the Middle East lay mainly in the economic powerhouse of oil and crop production. The more stable the region, the more stable in the income.
In short, there is no relevant primary source that reveals Europe to want anything else than to keep a stable region in effort to suck the natural resources out of the region.