Sunday, September 27, 2015

Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism - UC Press 2015 - NER, Marash, Kerr, AUB, AUH

My friend and colleague Josh Landis suggested that the people on this list might like to learn more about my recent book on the role of NER, AUB, the Beirut-based American Red Cross, Kerrs, Ray Travis, Antoura, Dodges in the formation of Modern humanitarianism, relief and development.

Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015) follows the international NGO movement in the Eastern Mediterranean during and after WWI to address the suffering caused by the Great Syrian Famine; and post-war efforts to help the Armenians after the genocide resettle in So. Anatolia and then move again back to Syria and Lebanon.

The first chapter is online at my Academia.edu page.  This is its opening paragraph:

Marash, Anatolia, February 9, 1920. As the Armenians of Marash fled their city in the face of civil war and the certainty of massacre, a twenty-three-year-old American Near East Relief (NER) official, Stanley E. Kerr, made the decision to stay behind in the organization’s headquarters to care for the hundreds of children and elderly who could not travel. He was one of a tiny handful of Americans who remained in the war-torn city as other relief workers evacuated with the able-bodied and the retreating French army. “Tonight,” Kerr wrote to his parents back home in Philadelphia, “the most bitter cold of all this winter….Our orphans, old women and men will remain in our compounds….Perhaps by remaining here we can protect the remaining Armenians from  massacre….We are in great danger, but not without hope….No matter what happens remember that I am ready to make any sacrifice even death.” For the young American, this was his first real encounter with the full measure of the horrors facing the civilian population of the Eastern Mediterranean in the wake of the “war to end war.” For the Armenians of Marash, the massacres, dispossession, and exile they faced that night came only at the end of a generation of war, communal violence, genocide, famine, and disease that had left a quarter of the Ottoman state’s subjects dead and millions displaced: in the Balkans and the Caucasus Muslim refugees fled advancing European armies; Ottoman Armenians who had survived state-sponsored efforts to destroy them as a people filled camps and shantytowns scattered along the outskirts of the major cities of the Levant; and Greeks and Turks on the “wrong” sides of new international borders would be “exchanged”—a euphemism for internationally sanctioned dispossession and forced migration—as nation-states emerged from the ashes of empire.

This was at times a very hard book to write, especially as I see so much of what is happening now as a reflection of what happened then; as well as the same international indifference to suffering.

Something I wrote in my preface that I'm sure many of you also feel:

I wrote this book as the contemporary “Middle East” [has] descended into a humanitarian disaster that, in its degree of suffering and international indifference, resembles the one that occurred during and following World War I. Historians must not draw too many parallels between the past and the present, but as I have looked out across the region over the last few years, I see in the immense refugee flows, human trafficking, sexual violence, and genocide of the current wars in Syria and Iraq echoes of a hundred years ago. Those echoes resound across the same territories of inhumanity and humanitarian response, especially now in the city of Aleppo, which has been subjected to the kinds of unceasing urban violence reminiscent of Madrid in the 1930s or Sarajevo in the 1990s; at the time of this writing the city seems poised to fall into the hands of the most violent of Islamist extremists, whose pitiless and cruel modern ideology has already led to the destruction through genocide of ancient non-Muslim communities in northern Iraq and caused utter misery for countless Muslims throughout the region.


Arda and Aram say: Buy my Baba's book!

I would also encourage you to take a look at a book I helped edit: Karnig Panian's Goodbye Antoura: A Genocide Orphan's Memoir (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015).  It chronicles Panian's life during the genocide and then his placement at an Ottoman orphanage at Antoura where he faced forced Turkification - think American Indian boarding schools.  It also tells of his liberation by AUB faculty and later care by NER.  Panian was among those orphans returned to Aintab in the company of NER's Ray Travis, who then had to flee again with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey.

It's a very moving book and tells the story from the other side of the American relief effort.

Please let me know if you have any questions about the work.  Below is my UC Davis contact information.

Keith David Watenpaugh
Associate Professor
Human Rights Studies
University of California, Davis

kwatenpaugh@ucdavis.edu
(530) 574-0815


President, Syrian Studies Association (2014-2016)

For more on my research go to my page Academia.edu



2 comments:

  1. Keith. Many thanks for this delightful taste of your book. I cannot wait to read it and plug it shamelessly. Best Joshua

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  2. I look forward to getting my hands on this book soon. Reading the description brought to mind a letter my grandfather (Archie Crawford) wrote to his uncle in 1917 outlining the rather severe conditions at the time for the populace, and the journey overland in the summer of 1917 escaping (with dozens of others coming from Beirut or elsewhere along the way) to Europe and eventually to the US. His uncle had it published in the ChristianNation (v.68, n.1729, p.9; 6 Feb 1918). There were a few other of Archie's letters published that were less sweeping, but still interesting. None of Archie's children had seen that letter previously, and it was a bit eye-opening to read these early writings of the then-18-year-old. -Dave Nicolson

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