EXODUS PHOENICUS:
The 20th Century
There were 2 major emigration exoduses from the Land of the Cedars in the 20th century:
1. The Great Mount Lebanon Famine of 1915–1918.
2. The Civil War of 1975–1990.
Needless to say, since the dawn of history, the Lebanese have constantly emigrated from the Land of the Cedars, and they have spread throughout the remotest corners of the world, loyally integrating into every local society.
However, the unfortunate tragedies of the 20th and 21st centuries were well beyond their control, and suddenly obliged them to leave in droves. At times as stowaways with only the clothes on their backs, and sometimes so desperately, with no shoes on their feet. They are known for their endurance, tenacity, and resilience.
The first such tragedy was the Great Famine that ravaged Mount Lebanon, the subject of this article. The setting is clearly elaborated to better understand the circumstances of the time, which were a powerful provocation for a prompt and mass exodus. The majority of these emigrants were Christian Lebanese.
This Famine was compounded by natural and political events. The political landscape was an oppressive Ottoman rule in the Region, the selective elimination of Christians, the imposed emigration, the German-Ottoman pact, and the outbreak of the 1st World War.
At that time, most landowners in the Mount Lebanon region were subsistence farmers. Their harvests were taken through forceful coercion by the occupying Ottomans as food rations for their army. Furthermore, heavier taxes were levied on the Christian peasant population.
The circumstances were further compounded by an unprecedented drought. Whatever was left of their crops on the fields was suddenly ravaged by endless advancing swarms of locusts. Somehow reminding the Lebanese of the plagues that struck Egypt when Pharoh rejected the Exodus of the Jews from his country. Except that this was the other way around.
I remember as a child my great-grandmother’s narration:
“The locusts were like a thick fog that covered the fields, we could not even see the sun in the sky. They kept advancing. We were constantly locked indoors with all our windows sealed shut. They left nothing green or dry. It was terrifying to see and to hear them.”
The oppression of imposing and corrupt Turkish soldiers on the masses throughout this Christian region permitted them to extort not only the local harvests but also to extort whatever else they desired.
The European Allies were nonetheless as ruthless as the Ottoman Turks in their quest to dominate this part of the world and eliminate their foes. Their forces blockaded the entire Eastern Mediterranean by sea and land, just as they had done with the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe. As soon as the Germans signed a treaty with the Ottoman Empire, their principal purpose was to block supplies in the war effort and strangle the Ottoman Turks, resulting in the decimation of the Christian populations throughout the Region.
Within the same period, there was the Armenian Christian Genocide of 1915–1916 at the hands of the Turks and the Assyrian and Greek Christian Genocides of 1919–1922. The Armenians lost 1.5 million, the Assyrians 250,000, and the Greeks 500,000. These are apart from the thousands of women, children, and elderly who were displaced from villages and cities with only the clothes on their backs; the barbarous rapes that occurred, and the kidnapping of young male children from the civilian population. At the time, the Turks were a far cry from the refined lot they portray themselves to be today. They were not so distant from the barbarous warlords of the Asian steppes. There was relief from nowhere for these populations.
In return, a targeted blockade was introduced by General Jamal Pasha, commander in chief of the Turkish forces in Greater Syria (including Lebanon and Syria), preventing cereals and wheat from entering Mount Lebanon.
One would think that the Lebanese were instrumental in the Allies’ hostility, who were predominantly Christian at the time. Perhaps because the Lebanese Christians of Mount Lebanon sought the assistance of the French (the supposed ‘daughter’ of the Catholic Church), through the Maronite Patriarchate in order to arrest the Christian genocide carried out against them in Deyr El-Kamar (in the Chouf Province). It is important to note that the French intentionally arrived after the massacre was over!
Beginning in the spring of 1913, the Ottomans implemented an overt program of expulsions and forcible migrations from all their occupied territories in the Region, particularly the Greeks of Aegean and eastern Thrace, whom they considered a threat to their sovereignty and national security. Lebanon received the diversity of these populations who eventually integrated into the local society.
Within this period, 200,000 people starved to death in Mount Lebanon. At a time when their population was estimated to be only 400,000 — that is half of the population. Half of those who survived emigrated leaving the elderly and infants behind to seek the hope of greener pastures abroad. The Mount Lebanon Famine caused one of the highest fatality rates per capita of any population during the 1st World War. Although the American Red Cross estimated an even higher death toll of 250,000.
I hasten to add through testimonies of that period the deception of the Christian Lebanese emigrants towards the French. Most of them were on shoestring resources heading to the US, they had to take French ships that stopped over in Marseilles. At that time, the French and the British were attempting to consolidate their positions in their new colonies of West Africa. In addition to Turkish extortions at departure, the French pitilessly extorted whatever little was left of them. Charging them for their US voyage, while diverting them on their military supply ships headed to their colonies. Confident that these destitute emigrants will have no choice but to integrate into the local society, since their citizens were totally adamant about abandoning their comfort and security to live with “cannibals” or “savages” as they referred to the Africans at the time. My grandmother was amongst those who described to me first-hand, the shock they confronted upon approaching the shores of Africa.
The emigrants who overstayed longer in Marseilles caught a whiff of the French underhanded scheme, and imposed themselves on foreign ships leaving for the “Americas”. Like chattel, they were rather diverted to Central and South America.
“The nights in Beirut were horrible: You heard the crying and screaming of starving people: ‘Ju’an, Ju’an’ (I am hungry, I am hungry),”
Wrote the Turkish feminist author Halide Edib (1882–1964) in her memoirs.
“There was a woman lying on her back, covered with lice. A newborn with bulging 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 endlessly.”
- From his book, Al Raghif (The Loaf of Bread) by the Lebanese writer and diplomat Tawfik Yousef Awad.
In 1917, Edward Nickoley an employee of the Syrian Protestant College, which later became the American University of Beirut, wrote in his diary:
“Starving people lying about everywhere; at any time, day or night children are moaning and weeping, women and children clawing through rubbish piles and ravenously eating anything they can find. When the agonized cry of famishing people in the street becomes too bitter to bear, people get up and close their windows tightly in the hope of shutting out the sound. Mere babies cried, echoing the cries they heard from the streets or at their doors.”
In a letter to Mary Haskell, dated May 26, 1916, Gibran Khalil Gibran wrote:
“The famine in Mount Lebanon has been planned and accentuated by the Turkish government. Already 80,000 have succumbed to starvation and thousands are still dying every single day. The same process they applied to the Christian Armenians; they are applying to the Christians in Mount Lebanon.”
There were reports of people eating cats, dogs, and rats …even certain cases of cannibalism. One account by a priest tells of a father who confessed to having eaten two of his own children!
The Ottoman authorities issued paper money, depreciating the purchasing power of the Greater Syria inhabitants. Diseases and illnesses soon followed, with rises in epidemics like malaria, dysentery, typhoid, and typhus.
“The conditions of the refugees from the Armenian Genocide and those fleeing to the cities in search of work or food increased the incidence of epidemic disease during the period. The increase in susceptible individuals and the wet springs of 1916–1918 meant there were more mosquitoes feeding on more people, allowing the spread of malaria to reach crisis levels by 1917. The anemia and diarrhea of malaria, combined with malnourishment, was a bad combination, probably subtly contributing to the death tolls,”
- According to history professor Aaron Tylor Brand, at the American University of Beirut, whose dissertation on the famine is entitled: Lives Darkened by Calamity: Enduring the Famine of WWI in Lebanon and Western Syria.
“All areas across Greater Syria suffered on some level or another, with the highest death tolls in Mount Lebanon, due to Ottoman predations by certain officials and soldiers, and poverty caused by the cessation of the silk trade (due to the Allies’ blockade).” Back then, the production of raw silk was woven by women in mills and then exported to Europe.
General Jemal Pasha rapidly acquired the title “Al-Jazzar” (the butcher) who accepted the starvation of his subjects “en masse”, and oversaw the public executions of Lebanese and Syrians for the flimsy excuse of “anti-Turkish activities” at Bourj Square in Beirut (later renamed Martyrs’ Square), and Marjeh Square in Damascus. Without food or resources, simple peasants could hardly feed their families, let alone organize subversive activities.
“My people and your people, my Syrian Brother, are dead!
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 from the iron paws of hunger?”
- From Dead Are My People by the Lebanese writer, poet, and philosopher, Joubran Khalil Joubran (1883–1931).
This marked the beginning of a period that is now often just a footnote in the history books: the Great Famine of 1915–18, which left an estimated 500,000 people dead across Lebanon. Which meant that half its people died.
In 1920, Lebanon became an independent nation, detached from Greater Syria, and with only half of its residual population left. The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon humbled and silenced an entire generation that witnessed its consequences. It remained etched in the next post-Independence generation of the late 1940s. But the sweetness of the economic post-war boom, provoked a greedy vindication against the remnant memories of that period, through explosive growth in the 1960s. Until the greed and devious political machinations of that generation clashed into the Civil War of 1975–1990. That will be the subject of another article for another day.
Almost 100 years later, around 2014, approval was obtained to build the first memorial to Lebanon’s worst-ever tragedy as the pivot story of a nascent nation. A monument in memory of that very sad period of Lebanon’s history. Not because of the emigration which is a facet of Lebanese, but because of the accumulation of several simultaneous sad at the time, triggering an abrupt mass emigration which tore families apart permanently.
The Memory Tree, as the monument is known, was installed on the former front line of the notorious Lebanese Civil War era. The Moslem west, and the Christian east, in Beirut. Supposedly “a point of the war — and connection”. Its copper leaves are inscribed with ornamental Arabic calligraphy extracted from poems by revered famine-era writers and poets such as Tawfik Yousef Awad and Joubran Khalil Joubran — both cultural giants of their times.
The Memory Tree was supposed to represent disparate groups who sacrificed their lives for the creation of a new nation. Sadly, it came at the dawn of a new mass emigration of the 21st century, with a young country in total socio-economic meltdown and political instability.
Barely 3 years after it was erected in a small green square, it is defiled with a dirty white tarpaulin ripped by the Tree’s copper leaves. In typical fashion, its inauguration became a political deadlock with endless political discussions, and rife with unnecessary disagreements over who, how, and when it should be subjected to public inauguration — in typical Lebanese fashion.
It appeared a wasted effort to maneuver and obtain approval after almost one decade. Intended as an ancestral homage for all the innocent victims who appeared thrown to the political dogs. Compounded by stiff-necked people who have severed unpleasant memories of the past for their current pleasures and debaucheries. They criticize their political rulers, mourning their victimhood to predatory political leaders, when they are not any better themselves. Merely a reflection of the same fractioned mentality and attitude.
Hardly out of the Civil War, the threat of war remains ever-present due to the lack of strong and non-partisan leadership, plus a cowardly population without a shred of honor or dignity. Only concerned with their pursuits of fun, wealth, and political treachery.
Instead of learning from other people, they are critical of them. But not introspective enough despite their rich Aramaic-Phoenician culture, education, and exposure. They should rather learn from others that those who do not honor their past, draw the lessons from it to improve their future, have lost their identity, self-worth, and culture.
Sammy RNAJ — sammy.rnaj.writer@gmail.com — WhatsApp +96170499352
