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The Drowned, the Saved, and the Forgotten: Genocide Survivors

and Modern Humanitarianism
KEITH DAVID WATENPAUGH
Human Rights Studies Program, University of California, Davis, Davis, Calif.;
e-mail: kwatenpaugh@ucdavis
doi:10.1017/S0020743816000106

The desert south of Aleppo was filled with the struggling mass who had seen the foundations of
all possible living destroyed in such a way that their initiative and resistance had disappeared.
Edward R. Stoerer, Rockefeller War Relief Board, Istanbul, May 19171

Dominant narratives of the Eastern Mediterraneans 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 archive2 or packs of feral emaciated street children roving the narrow alleyways
of Aleppos old city in the paternalistic memoirs of Western relief workersusually
American or Scandinavian female healthcare professionals.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.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 citiesAleppo, Beirut, Damascus, and Tel Avivall bear the remnants
of that movement in neighborhoods such as Bourj Hamoud, Nor Giwr, Ramat Gan,
Mukhayyam Yarmuk, and Burj al-Barajneh. Likewise, humanitarianisms 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

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sheer scale of interwar relief needs prompted the replacement of independent missionarybased 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 professionalssomeone like Stanley E.
Kerr (18941976), a Near East Relief humanitarian worker and the father of assassinated
American University of Beirut president Malcolm Kerr (193184), who suffered right
alongside the survivors.5

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.6

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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 majoritiesalbeit imperfectly. That systematic and structural denial
of care and violation of rights continued into the 1920s, most notably as the Ottoman
Empires 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 states 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.7
Western observers at the time, such as the Rockefeller Foundations 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 inhabitedall 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 workersreversing the perspectivebegan 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. Salpis

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FIGURE 1. (Color online) Ottoman Armenian refugees from Musa Dag 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.

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.
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

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as the project of modern Turkish nationalism unfolded would be their nations 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 states preferred citizens; that difference does not deny the suffering of
any, but rather helps explain the humanitarian reason for humanitarianisms imperfect
universality. Again, like Agamben and othersparticularly Zygmunt Bauman, who sees
in the death camps of the Holocaust the synedochical nomos of modernitymy 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.
N OT E S
1 Edward R. Stoerer, Report of Constantinople Office 1 June 1916May 1917, Rockefeller Archive
CenterRockefeller Foundation, International Projects 1:100. Box 76, folder 719, p. 4.
2 Archives of the League of Nations, United Nations Organization, Geneva, Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 19201947, Registers of Inmates of the Armenian Orphanage in Aleppo, 19221930,
4 vols.
3 Mabel E. Elliot, Beginning Again at Ararat (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1924).
4 Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2015).
5 Stanley E. Kerr, The Lions of Marash: Personal Experiences with American Near East Relief, 19191922
(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1973).
6 As an example of this style of denialist literature, see Justin McCarthy, The Turk in America: The Creation
of an Enduring Prejudice (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 2010).
7 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1998).