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The Great Famine in Lebanon (1915-1918):

The Forgotten Tragedy

Introduction:

To understand the Great Famine that devastated the Lebanese society during the 1st world war, and to know what was the reason behind it, we have to read carefully the following quotation by Ismail Enver Pasha: “The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation.” (May 19th, 1916)[1]

He said it in reply to U.S. Ambassador Morgenthau, who was deploring the massacres against Armenians, and attributing them to irresponsible subalterns and underlings in the distant provinces.

Enver Pasha further replied: “You are greatly mistaken. We have this country absolutely under our control. I have no desire to shift the blame onto our underlings, and I am entirely willing to accept the responsibility myself for everything that has taken place”.

İsmail Enver Pasha (November 221881 – August 41922), was a Turkish military officer and a leader of the Young Turk revolution. He was the main leader of the Ottoman Empire in both Balkan Wars and World War I. He was held highly responsible for the Armenian Genocide.

His quotation states clearly that the Great Famine in Lebanon was not a coincidence. It was intentional.

Historical overview:

The battle of Marj Dabiq (August 24, 1516) marked a new era in the Middle East region. The Ottomans conquered the Mamluks in that final battle near by the city of Aleppo in Syria, marking the end of the Mamluk Sultanate, that governed Egypt and the Middle East for more than 250 years.

Lebanon was among the regions dominated by the Ottoman Empire. One of the main characteristics of the 400 hundred years of The Ottoman rule was oppression, killing, and neglect.

During the last 4 years of its long life (1914-1918), the Ottoman army joined Germany in the 1st world war against the Allies (mainly Great Britain, France, and Russian Empire). In a strategic retaliation to that, the Allies enforced a blockade of the entire Eastern Mediterranean, in an effort to cut the supplies to the Ottomans. In return, a blockade was introduced by General Jamal Pasha, where cereals and wheat were prevented from entering Lebanon from neighboring Syria.

General Jamal Pasha (1872-1922) was in charge of the Levant since 1915. He was a bloodthirsty type of army commander. He was adequately nicknamed As-Saffah (the butcher). He orchestrated the mass murder that would decimate half the Lebanese population.

What led to the Great Famine?

Multiple factors coincided together, leading into the most tragic part of the Lebanese history. It was even more tragic than the civil war that shook the pillars of the modern Lebanon for 15 years (1975-1990).

During the Great Famine (1915-1918), almost third to half of the population of Lebanon starved to death. Thus, proportionally, Lebanon had the highest rates of victims of the 1st world war, among other nations.

The Great Famine was the devastating result of both political and environmental factors, the combination of a severe drought and locusts and a suffocating blockade.

With the political and man-made causes already plenty, Mother Nature sent a swarm of locusts in Spring of 1915, which over the course of 3 months, annihilated everything edible that was still left behind by the Ottoman authorities, who had prioritized food and grain reserves to feed their soldiers as part of the imperial war effort.

Thus, Lebanon was facing huge blockades: by the Allies from the west (The Mediterranean), by the Ottoman forces from the east and north (Great Syria), by the locusts from the sky, and by Cholera and Typhoid epidemics that spread, emptying out entire villages.

As a result of all this, around 220,000 Lebanese civilians had no choice but to surrender to an agonizing, humiliating death, and a quarter of the surviving population sought exile abroad. There were reports of people eating cats, dogs, and rats, even cannibalism. One account is by a priest who tells of a father who came to confess that he had eaten his own children. Other reports talk about how women sold their bodies for a piece of bread, and how men sold their land for an orange.

How do we know what we know now?

The Great Famine was, to a big extent, concealed from history books. It was almost forgotten. Not because it was not a massive massacre, but because all these atrocities against Lebanese civilians took place during a major event, the 1st world war, and the devastating outcome that resulted out of it. The agonizing voices of the people dying of hunger and fear were swept aside, because the only voices that should be were those of the victorious. Who would care if more than 200 thousand innocent civilians died in Lebanon, and what a trivial reason, hunger?!!

But facts do not die. Never. Recently unearthed archives and revealed documents about what was happening during the Great Famine, offer chilling testimonies of a time when men, women, and children fed themselves on tree bark or died by the side of the road.

The Lebanese started back again to read books and articles and see even photographs about that horrible experience of their ancestors who were the forgotten victims of the Great Famine, an experience was usually taught is schoolbooks in less than 2 paragraphs.

One of the sources of the hidden information was the French chronicles of Jesuit priests during the famine, that was not published before. A book titled "The Lebanese people in the turmoil of the Great War of 1914-1918"[2], written by historian Christian Taoutel and Father Pierre Wittouck, compiled saddening stories from those chronicles, about people who sank to the ground, vomiting blood, and about the bodies of children thrown among piles of rubbish. In one of the diaries that was recounted by the book, a priest describes how in 1917 he came across the bodies of a widow and her 10-year-old son who had been dead for three days. The priest wrote: "The rats had gnawed at their ears and cheeks, and the little one's belly was open”.

Other sources of information, include the archives of the American University of Beirut (AUB)[3]; the archives of the Syrian Protestant College, later became AUB[4]; Archive of Maronite Patriarch, Bkerke[5]; Archives of various Newspapers and Journals published in Beirut and Cairo between 1914 and 1920[6], as well as archives from other educational and religious entities in Lebanon, and from political archives of Foreign Affairs, Berlin; Archives of Houghton Library, Harvard University[7]; Archives of Hoover Institute, Stanford University[8].

All the previous resources and archives were thoroughly and beautifully studied in depth by Melanie Tanielian in her dissertation “The War of Famine: Everyday Life in Wartime Beirut and Mount Lebanon (1914-1918)”, presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History[9].

The Lebanese population started to re-discover the dark side of that obscure history, through various other books and articles, and even poetry:

·          Father Antoine Yammine’s book “Lebanon after the war, 1914-1919”[10]. He illustrated heart-tearing stories about caravans of dead everywhere, and how poor vulnerable people are falling like tree dead leaves in Autumn.

·       The Turkish feminist author Halide Edib Ardivar (1882-1964) in her book “Memoirs of Halidé Edib”[11]. She wrote in her memoire that the nights in Beirut were atrocious, where you hear the whining and screaming of starved people: (hungry, hungry).

·          The Lebanese writer and diplomat Toufic Youssef Awwad (1911-1989) in his novel “The Loaf”[12]. He portrayed horrifying images of people perishing in the streets from hunger. He wrote: “There was a woman lying on her back, covered with lice. A newborn with enormous eyes was at her breast. The child kept pressing the breast with his hands and lips and would then give up and cry and cry.”

·          The renowned Lebanese writer, Khalil Gibran (1883-1931) in his poem “Dead Are My People”[13]. He wrote: “What can be done for those who are dying? Our lamentations will not satisfy their hunger, and our tears will not quench their thirst; what can we do to save them between the iron paws of hunger?”. And in a letter to his beloved, Mary Haskell[14], Khalil Gibran wrote: “The famine in Mount Lebanon has been planned and instigated by the Turkish government. Already 80,000 have succumbed to starvation and thousands are dying every single day”. 

·          Edward Nickoley, the then acting president of AUB in the 1920s, in his diary “Edward Nickoley Diary,”[15]. He wrote: “Starving people lying about everywhere; at any time, children moaning and weeping, women and children clawing over rubbish piles and ravenous­ly eating anything that they can find. When the agonized cry of famishing people in the street becomes too bitter to bear, people get up and close the windows tight in the hope of shutting out the sound. Mere babies amuse themselves by imitating the cries that they hear in the streets or at the doors.”

·          History professor Aaron Tylor Brand, in his dissertation on the famine entitled: “Lives Darkened by Calamity: Enduring the Famine of WWI in Lebanon and Western Syria”[16]: He said that the full story is a far more complicated, while his research explores how it was to live during the famine and how the aberrant conditions of the period fed back into the crisis to determine both how it developed and how individuals responded to it to survive. 

·          Another striking resource is a collection of rare pictures of the tragedy that were taken by Ibrahim Naoum Kanaan (1887-1984), who led a charitable relief program in Mount Lebanon and who risked his life to document the horror. His shocking images, that were resurfaced in the year 2015 in Beirut show horrifying scenes of skeletal woman devouring a morsel of bread, emaciated corpses, children dying in the streets etc. This collection was considered as a historical treasure. He was described as an unwitting hero, as he provided evidence of this tragedy.

How did the society respond to the shock of the Great Famine?

It was a devastating shock to the Lebanese society. At that time, the world was busy on following the developments of the war, and later, on how to redraw the political map of Europe and the Middle East. Little was done to save the victims. Those in charge of the world have other important things to care for. Who would care for quarter of a million man a woman and child dying of starvation, when war was raging, and the shape of the globe was underway to be reshaped?! We can feel this in what Khalil Gibran wrote in the same poem: "They died silently, for humanity had closed its ears to their cry"[17].

But, out of the little that was done, it was only surfaced recently, which revealed how foreign philanthropists, most prominently the resident German and American communities in Lebanon made up of diplomats, missionaries, and educators, initiated international relief by organizing soup kitchens and workshops in Beirut, and later in the mountainous areas.

The German community for the most part aided the relief efforts by providing nurses, keeping its school and orphanage running, and setting up soup kitchens[18].

The Americans focused their relief effort towards Mount Lebanon. The Red Cross Executive Committee in Beirut elected a joint relief committee that included both employees from the American College and from the American Mission Press, as well as the representative for the Red Crescent.

While the Americans funded by private donations to the American Red Cross and the American Committee for Syrian and Armenian Relief (ACSAR) (later to become the Near East Relief (NER)) in New York, set up distribution centers, soup kitchens, workshops and orphanages beginning during the war and expanded their efforts to an unprecedented scale in the interwar period. The primary focus here will be American relief efforts, which is the best documented and arguably the most extensive and systematized aid effort[19].

American relief volunteers, many of whom had lived in Beirut and Mount Lebanon for years, some families like the Dodges and the Blisses even for generations, almost immediately sought to address what they perceived to be the structural deficits of their host society, anticipating a transformative social agenda. (Melanie Tanielian- The War of Famine: Everyday Life in Wartime Beirut and Mount Lebanon (1914-1918), p.137, University of California, Berkeley, 2012).

Hence, the main wartime goal of the American relief workers on the ground became teaching self-sustainability. In practical terms this meant the incremental elimination of distributive free charity in form of money or goods, and the subsequent systematization of philanthropy that demanded active involvement of the aid recipients and relied on methods of scientific giving[20].

Most important characteristic of American relief effort in Beirut and Mount Lebanon was that it was not only geared not toward relieving misery, but to end it permanently, as it almost immediately was directed toward making lasting change in society[21].

In addition to funds from abroad, Margret McGilvary mentioned in a letter to the American Red Cross that “numerous friends in Turkey are coming generously forward with their offers of assistance”[22].

And in late December 1914, the President of the AUB at that time, Bayard Dodge (1888-1972), and his colleagues organized a large fundraiser for “ the poor people near the college”[23].

The actual transfer of money was through diplomatic channels and the ARC, which furnished its Beirut chapter with ten thousand dollars to initiate humanitarian work in January of 1915. Beirut’s ARC volunteers rented a large office that would serve as its headquarters[24].

The archives show how the society interacted in the welfare and relief work. They talk about how male college students escorted female volunteers, serving as translators and chaperones, as they maneuvered urban public space that was almost exclusively male. And by mid-May 1915, about 560 men were working off and on for the American relief, and money was already being sent into various districts in the mountains[25].

Ittihad Al-Uthmani, one of the newspapers at that time, praises the American relief work, illustrating how citizens of Beirut of all social classes responded positively to the American’s efforts. The overall high number of aid applicants from among the poor of all religions, the approving response of Beirut intellectuals in the press and cooperative reaction of local notables and politicians, who without hesitation organized sweeping and cleaning battalions, confirm the positive response. The newspaper praised the committee’s work as “nothing but another proof offered by the Americans of the pains they are taking in the affairs of the country in which they are living and the effort to render sincere service, free from ulterior motive”[26].

We learned that other agencies, such as the Beirut municipality, tried to do something, by implementing rationing programs and price controls, but were not successful due to persistent black marketeering and hoarding. We learned as well that local charitable societies and religious communities, distributed food and money to their community members, but has a very limited success, because the donations quickly dry up as prices for everyday commodities skyrocketed.

Is it over? What’s next?

More than a century passed by. The concealed tragedy is awake again. When you see the shocking pictures taken by Ibrahim Naoum Kanaan, you would feel as if the massacres were happening now.

Lebanon is trying to remember that hidden tragic history, and to coop with it. By the end, life will never stop. The first step taken to memorialize the victims of the famine was a Memorial erected in Beirut in 2018, marking the 100th year since the end of the famine. The site is called "The Great Famine Memorial", and is located in front of the Saint-Joseph University.

Ali Ajami

[1] (Quoted in The Evil 100, Page 35, by Martin Gilman Wolcott, Citadel; Illustrated edition, January 1, 2004).

[2] (Le peuple libanais dans la tourmente de la grande guerre 1914-1918 d'après les Pères Jésuites au Liban (in French). Presses de l'Université Saint-Joseph, Liban, 2015. ISBN9953455449),

[3] (especially the Bliss Collection (1902-1920), and Bayard Dodge Collection, and Edward F. Nickoley Collection)

[4] (Minutes of College Meetings, 1914-1918).

[5] (Collection Hoyek, Report 1916).

[6] (Al-Ahram, Al-Bashir, Al-Barq, Al-Muqattam, Al-Haqiqah etc).

[7] (Collections of American Board of Commissioners Foreign Missions, Syrian Mission).

[8] Collections of Red Cross Activities (1918-1919).

[9] The Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2012.

[10] (Literary Press, Lebanon, January 1, 1919).

[11] (Century Co. 1926, New York, London, then Gorgias Press,LLC, 2005 & 2019, ISBN:1593333056 &13:9781593333058)

[12] (First published 1939, newest edition Library of Lebanon Publishers 2018).

[13] (first published in Al-Fonoun Journal, 1917, New York, and was sung by the famous Lebanese singer Fairouz).

[14] (dated May 26, 1916).

[15] (AUB Libraries Online Exhibits 1917).

[16] (AUB, 1914).

[17] (Dead are my people, Al-Fonoun Journal, 1917, New York).

[18](Melanie Tanielian- The War of Famine: Everyday Life in Wartime Beirut and Mount Lebanon (1914-1918), p.136, University of California, Berkeley, 2012).

[19] (Melanie Tanielian- The War of Famine: Everyday Life in Wartime Beirut and Mount Lebanon (1914-1918), p.136, University of California, Berkeley, 2012).

[20] (Melanie Tanielian- The War of Famine: Everyday Life in Wartime Beirut and Mount Lebanon (1914-1918), p.137, University of California, Berkeley, 2012).

[21] . (Melanie Tanielian- The War of Famine: Everyday Life in Wartime Beirut and Mount Lebanon (1914-1918), p.136, University of California, Berkeley, 2012).

[22] (AUB Missionaries: AA 7.2.1: Letter from Margaret McGilvary to Headquarters of American Red Cross in NY, January 1, 1915).

[23] (AUB: Bayard Dodge Collection, AA 2.3.4.6.3. Letter from Bayard Dodge to his Mother, December 28, 1914).

[24] (AUB: Bliss Collection, AA 2.3.2.18.3. “Relief Work in Syria During the Period of the War (A Brief and Unofficial Account)” by Bayard Dodge).

[25] . (AUB: Bayard Dodge Collection, AA 2.3.4.6.4. Letter from Bayard Dodge May 15, 1915).

[26] .” (AUB: Ittiḥād al-‘Ūthmānī, January 8, 1915).



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Profile image for Rick Clemenzi

That is just horrible ... thank you for sharing. The value of democracy and a free press becomes clearer as it is probably all we have between us and this repeating again and again.

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