Dominant narratives of the Eastern Mediterranean's 20th century exclude the study of Western humanitarianism and refugee survivors of the 1915 genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. Reasons for this exclusion abound. At the forefront is the abject nature of the human beings who populate that history, something which often induces revulsion on the part of historians in the present: these were people who left little of the appealing and elegant traces left by a Beiruti journalist, a Damascene urban notable, or an elite Constantinopolitan feminist. They appear as an undifferentiated mass of survivors of intense violence, disease, and starvation who are bereft of any agency; slaves, and serially raped and pregnant teenagers in bureaucratic documents stored at the League of Nations archiveFootnote ² or packs of feral emaciated street children roving the narrow alleyways of Aleppo's old city in the paternalistic memoirs of Western relief workers—usually American or Scandinavian female healthcare professionals.Footnote ³ Their own voices are obscured, showing up in the occasional self-published autobiography written by an elderly genocide survivor for his grandchildren, or in handwritten accounts and letters in lost dialects inherited by descendants unable to read them.Footnote ⁴

Nonetheless, the history of those survivor refugees and the Western humanitarian relief workers who sought to help them is important and fascinating; moreover, it is critical to understanding the last one hundred years in the Eastern Mediterranean, no matter how discomfiting their presence in that history might be. The entire region has been shaped and reshaped by such flows of humanity and the humanitarian responses these engendered. Its cities—Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus, and Tel Aviv—all bear the remnants of that movement in neighborhoods such as Bourj Hamoud, Nor Giwr, Ramat Gan, Mukhayyam Yarmuk, and Burj al-Barajneh. Likewise, humanitarianism's role in higher education, development schemes, and neutrality in the face of rights-violating authoritarian regimes, as well as how humanitarians and their descendants have contributed to the way Americans in particular have viewed the “Middle East,” remain understudied.

From the perspective of world history, the Eastern Mediterranean was where much of modern humanitarianism first took shape. In the aftermath of World War I, waves of displaced persons and new political borders forced the international community, embodied in the League of Nations, to first define and then manage novel iterations of the “refugee” and the “minority.” Postwar efforts to interdict trafficking in women and children in the region mobilized humanitarian organizations and groups in Europe and the Americas to a degree not seen since the abolitionist movement of the 19th century. The sheer scale of interwar relief needs prompted the replacement of independent missionary-based charity with secular, professional, and bureaucratized intergovernmental forms of aid and development, in particular American Near East Relief, which continues its work today as the Near East Foundation. The Armenian Genocide and its aftermath was critical to the formation of international humanitarian and human rights law and laid the groundwork for the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Its official denial by a modern nation-state has been a catalyst for critical discussions about hate speech, contemporary forms of discrimination, and the complicity of the academy in promoting denial. Consequently, the history of genocide and humanitarian response is at the center of an emerging history of human rights and humanitarianism; it has the potential, at the same time, to decenter Europe from the global historical experience of war, genocide, and refugees, as well as from human rights history.

In this brief essay, which draws from my recent book, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2015), I ask three questions of the history of humanitarians and survivors: who is helped, who is not, and why? In addressing these questions, I demonstrate the historiographical potential of this field and how it can intersect with much larger issues in the genealogy of humanitarianism, development, and human rights that continue to echo across the region. Still, this field of inquiry is challenging for many reasons, one being that it requires the historian to read archives against the grain of the dominant narratives of nationalists, colonialists, and European and American bureaucrats who compiled, censored, and preserved them. But even more so, the emotional effects of witnessing the suffering and indifference visited upon survivors even at the remove of a century are real. Those effects are not counterbalanced even by the certain knowledge of the most caring and selfless acts of Western professionals—someone like Stanley E. Kerr (1894–1976), a Near East Relief humanitarian worker and the father of assassinated American University of Beirut president Malcolm Kerr (1931–84), who suffered right alongside the survivors.Footnote ⁵

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The Turkish state has created a public memory, despite evidence to the contrary, that the community of contemporary Western humanitarians, including Stanley E. Kerr, exhibited little concern for Muslim suffering during and after World War I. Instead, humanitarians exclusively focused on the suffering of Anatolian and Levantine non-Muslims, defining in the process who received help and who did not. Consequently, humanitarians and humanitarianism is often portrayed as inherently anti-Muslim, anti-Turkish, imbued with a Christian, Western chauvinism, and the leading edge of neocolonialism. Indeed, the suffering of Muslim refugees and internally displaced peoples or those driven from Russia and the Balkans during the half century preceding the end of Ottoman rule was little acknowledged in Western public opinion at the time, in contrast to the way Armenian, Balkan Christian, and Greek suffering resonated with Europeans and Americans. The assertion of Western indifference to Muslim suffering features in forms of Turkish nationalist discourse and in the corrosive modern practice of genocide denial, where it is a common trope in popular and pseudoacademic literature.Footnote ⁶

The question remains, however, why Western humanitarians focused on genocide refugees to the near exclusion of other groups. It is critical to remember that in the late Ottoman period the function of relief and resettlement at the level of the Ottoman state tended to follow sectarian and ethnic lines. The state accepted responsibility for its Muslim subjects while holding the unstated expectation that needy non-Muslims would be cared for by their own communal institutions. The segregation of state assistance also influenced which communities, generally Muslim citizens, received food and medical aid from it and which communities, generally Armenians and Assyrians, did not during the war.

More to the point, with the onset of the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman state made the equivalent of war on a subset of its own citizens, placing that subset in a “state of exception” and denying it the basic civil protections, human rights, and care that it extended to other communities. Armenians and other non-Muslim communities such as the Assyrians were placed beyond the circle of care that the Ottoman state drew around its own Muslim majorities—albeit imperfectly. That systematic and structural denial of care and violation of rights continued into the 1920s, most notably as the Ottoman Empire's successor state, Turkey, denationalized refugee Armenians outside its borders, prevented the return of others, and implemented fierce discriminatory policies toward the tiny minority that remained. Modern humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean took shape in that delineated regime of caring and exception, as well as in the face of the Ottoman state's largely effective campaign of mass extermination of the Armenians.

Doubtless, early 20th-century ideas about race and religious preference informed the choices international humanitarians made in the aftermath of World War I. However, their efforts were directed toward the Armenians rather than Turkish-speaking and other Muslim victims of the war because of the practical reality that Armenians faced genocide and dispossession, were living in refugee camps in Egypt, Syria, Greece, and the Soviet Union, and were prevented by the Republic of Turkey from returning home. They were stateless, had no legal standing under international law, and were wholly reliant on Western humanitarian institutions and organizations for their mere survival. They had become Homo sacer, in the sense used by philosopher Giorgio Agamben; the Ottoman state and its agents had stripped them of the attributes of humanity, including civic belonging, and those not killed outright became possessors of merely “bare life.”Footnote ⁷ Western observers at the time, such as the Rockefeller Foundation's Stoerer, quoted above, echoed the unprecedented quality of this form of displacement and mass violence.

The concept of Homo sacer describes the way that hegemonic and sovereign power reduces human beings to bare life and then exposes them to persisting structural violence. Hence, that violence was directed not just against the bodies of Armenians, by exposing them to starvation, disease, rape, and murder, but also against the political and social community those victims had inhabited—all of which was compounded by the act of displacement and concentration: the victims were put out of place and into exile in unfamiliar lands, where they were at the mercy of the very institutions and state agents responsible for dispossessing them. Beginning in the postgenocide period, Armenian intellectuals and relief workers—reversing the perspective—began to employ the Western Armenian word khleak, which originally meant “wreck,” as in shipwreck, to distinguish human beings in that distinct state of existence from victims of previous episodes of communal violence or other forms of internal displacement. The title of Dr. M. Salpi's 1919 description of the work of the Egyptian Armenian and British relief workers at the Armenian refugee camp in Port Said, Aleakner ew khleakner (Waves and Wrecks), is evocative of the notion of humans nearly drowned and washed up on shore with nothing remaining but their damaged and barely sensate being (Fig. 1). It defined a being whose survival was possible only with the help of others beyond her own community. The word khleak conveys further the meaning of the remnant of a thing uprooted, destroyed, and fragmented, and indeed by the 1970s had become the way Western Armenian speakers, including those living in exile in Lebanon and Syria, but also in the Americas, denoted the survivors of the genocide.

FIGURE 1.

Ottoman Armenian refugees from Musa Dagı at the Port Said refugee camp, ca. 1916. The men are being marched out of the camp by British military officials to a nearby work site. Note the ranks of mass-produced tents. Glen Russell Carrier, United States, photographer, Near East Relief. Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, NERC.484, AKP061.

As in all genocides, the political, social, and moral tendons that connected Ottoman Armenian victims to their own individual human being, human communities, human rights, and then broader humanity had been striped away. In this case, the genocide also prompted a specific and equally modern form of humanitarianism. That form of humanitarianism, seen in the work of groups such as Near East Relief, did not just address a response to bodily suffering, but embodied a bureaucratically organized and expert knowledge-driven effort to repair a human being, reconnect her to community, provide the foundations of a state, citizenship, and rights, and restore him to humanity—in other words a form of assistance that was not only about food, blankets, bandages, or saving souls.

Ottoman Muslims had suffered terribly in the war and its aftermath, but the political, cultural, and legal elements of that suffering were distinct; they had not faced massive and systematic governmental persecution, dispossession, displacement, and denationalization. The multiethnic communities in Anatolia and Istanbul that were recast as Turks as the project of modern Turkish nationalism unfolded would be their nation's definitive and preeminent ethnicity, would hold onto religious prerogatives as Sunni Muslims, and would enjoy a modicum of rights, including to property and nationality; they had a state and all that it entailed.

The very nature of Armenian suffering distinguishes it from the suffering of the late Ottoman state's preferred citizens; that difference does not deny the suffering of any, but rather helps explain the humanitarian reason for humanitarianism's imperfect universality. Again, like Agamben and others—particularly Zygmunt Bauman, who sees in the death camps of the Holocaust the synedochical nomos of modernity—my own sense is that the deportation caravans that delivered Armenian victims of organized state violence and extirpation to the deserts of Mesopotamia are equally definitive of the rules of that modernity rather than the exception to those rules.