This paper focuses on the role of Armenian physicians, nurses, and midwives in Ottoman Syria during World War I to explore the role of agency in the historical debate in general, and narratives of humanitarianism in particular. As soon as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) enacted empire-wide arrests, deportations, and massacres in the spring of 1915, Armenians organized various forms of resistance. Leaders and intellectuals in Istanbul who had evaded capture initiated a clandestine chain of communication between the Ottoman provinces and the outside world, smuggling reports of atrocities out of the country. Others created groups that procured, transferred, and distributed funds, food, and medication to exiles, saved them from sexual slavery, created safe houses and underground orphanages, and upheld deportee morale. These groups were loosely interlinked, operating out of cities where the population was only partially deported, and along railroad lines extending from Istanbul to Syria. By focusing on physicians, nurses, and midwives in Aleppo, Raqqa, and Der Zor, I argue for refining our conceptualization of resistance to include subtler, more common instances of organized opposition, and unshackling the study of the Armenian genocide from perpetrator-centric or western humanitarian-focused narratives.

In his 1934 speech on venereal diseases delivered to the Iraqi Children’s Welfare Society, Iraqi doctor Fa’iq Shaker asserted, “…unless each soul is accounted for in a proper population census, I am unable to provide an accurate assessment on syphilis in Iraq.” In that same year, the British Public Health Advisor in Iraq, Dr, T. Barret Heggs published a strikingly different report. While noting that syphilis represented only 7% of diseases in Iraq for the year 1934, Dr. Heggs claimed that the disease was the most menacing pestilence in the country. Dr. Heggs’ qualitative data did not reflect his quantitative assertions especially since 1934 hosted an outbreak of Malaria that saw close to a quarter-million Iraqis hospitalized. The discrepancies of reports on venereal diseases reflect the contradictions of medicine and the colonial body. While Britain used venereal disease as a means of undermining local medical communities and simultaneously controlling public health and medical labor production, the local medical community used their professional platform to compete with colonial medical officials but also as an opportunity to suggest policies that they deemed meaningful and eradicate ‘social sins’. Examining how venereal diseases were understood, studied, and eradicated in Iraq during the Mandate and early Monarchic allows us a better understanding of the articulation of health and sickness in the colonial and post-colonial context. These articulations were diverse and carried conflicting meanings and outcomes. This paper showcases how venereal diseases facilitated an arena of confrontation between colonial medical personnel and the Iraqi medical community. These confrontations were rooted in debates surrounding the articulation and surveillance of Iraqi bodies and the regulation of their conduct and mobilities. In using venereal diseases as a marker to distinguish Iraqi bodies along with cultural, racial, and biological features, colonial medical personnel attempted to gain full control over Iraq’s health apparatus while simultaneously working to coopt its local medical community and regulate their professional mobilities. This paper uses medical discourse on venereal diseases to explore kaleidoscopic perspectives on the way in which venereal disease diagnosis, containment, eradication, and prevention policies underscore the confrontations that inevitably arose from colonial medicine and the bodies it aims to subjugate.

The post-Ottoman period witnessed the division of much of the Middle East into new states, and various institutions worked to cement the imagination of Iraqi, Syrian, or Turkish identities to match this new map. But the division of the region occurred on another level, one less well-studied. Even figures as minor as locusts fell into the dragnet of identity, and their mobility made fitting them into the region’s new borders both imperative and particularly challenging. Especially in the Jazira—the borderlands region stretching across Iraq, Syria, and Turkey—the provenance of the insects became a major topic of debate between government officials during the 1920s and 1930s. Because of the insects’ mobility, they instigated these questions of origins. In the process, officials used language much like that applied to humans to describe the creatures, with Turkish officials wondering, for example, whether locusts invading their territories had been born in Syria. British officials in Iraq even went so far as to suggest that the species of locust in their domains was unique, and seeing as the range of the “Iraq locust” only stretched some 40 miles, it could hardly be blamed for depredations in Turkey. In other words, the impetus to separate the region’s connected geography was so great that British officials invented their own species of locust, as if an insect would respect any borders, let alone northwestern Iraq’s famously jagged ones. The interwar period may have witnessed the birth of new institutions devoted to international cooperation, but little collaboration took place with regard to locusts. Locusts thus foreground questions of scale in an ecology stretching across borders. Ultimately, officials responded to the shared dilemma through the technological innovation of sodium arsenate, which increasingly covered the Jazira, no matter the country, and no matter the disputes between the countries. Relying on materials in Arabic, English, French, and Turkish, this paper builds on Cyrus Schayegh’s work, which suggests how the division of the post-Ottoman Middle East also in many ways brought these countries together. Locust management offers one glimpse of these dynamics, but it also signals the way that connection occurred simultaneously with disavowal of that same connection. The paper thus raises questions about mobility, technology, and state authority in the post-Ottoman period from an environmental perspective to trace the territorial dimensions of post-Ottoman regimes in the region.

Even though ‘Syria’ is associated today with large number of refugees and internally displaced, the contemporary flight of Syrian refugees comes well a century after the region had witnessed massive displacement and upheaval in the aftermath of the First World War. Back then, however, Syria was a refugee hosting country instead of one that generated them, as it became home for thousands of Ottoman Armenians, Assyrians and Kurds. Crucially, the settlement of these refugees and migrants across the Levant took place at a critical historical juncture when a Syrian state was formed under the French tutelage in the midst of the frustrated attempts to create an independent Arab state as promised by the Allied Powers during the war. Inevitably, the incoming refugees and the policies that regulated their resettlement contributed either directly or indirectly to the formation of the Syrian state. That being the case, refugees have largely been studied from a state-centred perspective, often reduced to mere historical outcomes or victims with no agency on their own. Drawing from primary source material from the French archives, as well as Arabic and Armenian newspapers, this paper will examine Armenian refugees amidst the Syrian struggles to define statehood under the French tutelage. The paper will examine how the French sought to settle the refugees along the Syrian-Turkish border, which raised concerns among Syrian nationalists of a French-Armenian conspiracy to establish an Armenian ‘national home’ in northern Syria. In response, a considerable portion of these refugees expressed belonging to another homeland - the newly established Soviet Armenia, waiting for an opportunity to be ‘repatriated’. In reality, however, none of them had any previous ties with the claimed homeland. Soviet Armenia itself was quick to make claims over these refugees for its own purposes; namely enhancing Soviet reputation abroad, using their labor and spreading communist propaganda. This paper examines how the increased mobility across the Turkish-Syrian border and the settlement of Armenian refugees along the border contributed to the state formation processes in Syria, delimitation of new boundaries and imagining of new territorialities.