Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– How did Ottoman Damascus descend into violence and looting in July 1860? Why did the Damascene masses fall upon the Christians, leaving around 5,000 of them dead? These are some of the questions that Eugene Rogan seeks to answer in his book “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” Rogan, a Professor at the University of Oxford, has written some of the go-to books for students and scholars of the Middle East, such as “The Arabs: A History.”

His latest book is motivated by a finding he made more than three decades ago when researching for another project in the National Archives, in Washington, DC. While exploring the archives, Rogan discovered the consular dispatches of Mikhayil Mishaka, the US consul in Damascus when the 1860 Massacre shocked the Ottoman Empire.

In “The Damascus Events”, Rogan contextualizes Mishaka’s first-hand account, as well as other contemporary sources, in the broader historical setting. The result is a gripping and vivid portrait of one of the worst episodes of intercommunal violence in the Ottoman Empire.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was severely weakened. The empire had initially granted, from a position of strength, extraterritorial rights to foreigners to facilitate trade with Europe. This set of rights, detailed in what was known as the Capitulations, allowed protected foreigners to enjoy preferential terms of trade and taxation and the right to be judged by their consuls.

As the balance of power between the Ottoman Empire and Europe shifted to the latter’s benefit, and Europe gained a stronger economic presence in Ottoman lands, the Capitulations became increasingly problematic. Foreign diplomats and merchants in the Ottoman Empire enrolled in their service a growing number of local Christians and Jews, who in turn profited from the same extraterritorial benefits. Mishaka’s case represented a step further. He was not a foreigner, but an Ottoman Christian born in Lebanon. Even so, he worked as a diplomat for a foreign country, the US.

The Damascus Events have their roots in the destabilization of Greater Syria (which roughly included present-day Palestine, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1831, the armies of Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali rolled into Greater Syria. The Ottomans could not repel the occupation forces by themselves, and it was thanks to the European powers’ military help that Egypt’s presence in Greater Syria came to an end in 1840. This display of weakness opened new avenues for European powers to intervene economically and politically in the Ottoman Empire.

In 1843, the Ottoman Empire and the European powers established a new system of rule in Mount Lebanon that undermined the privileges of the local elites by giving more power to local councils. Commoners in Mount Lebanon all suffered under the quasi-feudal rule of the region’s notables but were divided along religious lines, mainly between Christian Maronites and Druzes. The Druzes profess a faith that originated as a schism of Shia Islam but became a distinct religious tradition.

The local elites in Mount Lebanon, intent on stopping their loss of power, succeeded in thwarting inter-religious cooperation. Resentments were largely articulated along sectarian lines instead of class. Intercommunal tensions grew increasingly violent, with both Maronites and Druzes establishing armed groups.

The Druzes, being numerically inferior and lacking the kind of foreign patron the Maronites had in France, went on the offensive in May 1860. They burnt down Christian villages and killed the men who crossed their path, before moving to mixed towns and villages. It is estimated that eleven thousand Christians died and around one hundred thousand became homeless.

After the Mount Lebanon massacres, large flows of Christian refugees moved to Damascus and the areas surrounding the city. Tensions were high in the Syrian capital. Local Christians feared they would be killed like their Mount Lebanon co-religionists. Meanwhile, Damascene Muslims were worried that the local Christians, together with the newly arrived Christian refugees, would seek revenge for the massacres they had suffered at the hands of the Druzes. It was tragically unfortunate that Damascus happened to have a deeply incompetent Ottoman governor, Ahmad Pasha, at a time of major crisis. In front of the governor’s erratic behavior, writes Rogan, “Muslims and Christians, notables and commoners alike, were left perplexed.”[1]

Around the Feast of the Sacrifice, when Muslims traditionally assemble in the mosques, there were unfounded rumors that Christians would use the festive opportunity to attack Muslims. The governor sent soldiers to protect the mosques but the faithful, afraid of the Christians, did not turn up – neither did the governor himself. Later on, young Muslim men went through the Christian quarters of Damascus drawing crosses on the floor and upsetting the neighbors, who did not want to step on the symbol of their faith.

Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024). Click here to Buy .

Ahmad Pasha overreacted once again. He arrested young Muslim men suspected of having drawn the crosses and put them in chains. He then forced the men to sweep the streets for everyone to see them. Muslims perceived the governor’s measure as a great humiliation and relatives of the young men shattered their chains.

Soon, false news of Christians having killed a group of Muslims spread. A perfect storm had gathered. Damascene Muslims had long resented the Christians’ growing economic prosperity, facilitated by Europe’s interference in the Ottoman Empire. The massacres in Mount Lebanon had put everyone on edge, and the Ottoman governor had increased the fears of both Christians and Muslims.

When the storm broke, it did so with unprecedented violence and went on for a week. Groups of armed Muslims attacked the Christian neighborhoods, killing and looting. Men were forced to convert, although this did not necessarily save their lives, or directly killed. Women were generally not murdered, but there were many cases of rape.

When US consul Mishaqa realized what was happening, he understood his life, as well as his family’s, were on the line. He decided to abandon his house, located in a Muslim quarter. According to his account, Mishaqa twice had to throw coins at marauders to escape before and he and his family came across a heavily armed mob. The mob spared the rest of the family but severely injured Mishaqa. Only by paying the mob a fortune did he save his life.

Mishaqa and his family would eventually find refuge in the house of Emir Abd al-Qadir, a former Algerian revolutionary. Al-Qadir, who had fought against France’s occupation of Algeria, was forced into exile after being captured by the French in 1847. He had finally settled in Damascus with fellow Algerian veterans, making up more than one thousand armed men. During the Damascus Events, Al-Qadir and his men saved the lives of many Christians. They looked for those who were hiding from the mob and rescued them. Once Al-Qadir’s house was full, they accompanied the Christians to the Damascus Citadel, where they suffered hunger and deprivation but were safe from the attacks.

The Damascus governor, and the small contingent of soldiers he commanded, did not intervene. The pleas of the British consul, the only diplomat who continued to enjoy freedom of movement during the massacre, were in vain. According to Mishaqa’s estimates, around 5,000 Christians had been killed during a week of uncontrolled violence in Damascus.

Rogan notes that “the Damascus massacre was a genocidal moment, but it was not a genocide.”[2] He substantiates this claim by noting that outside the Damascus city walls, Christians had been protected by their Muslim neighbors and no violent events had occurred. Within the walls, not only Al-Qadir and his men but also a small group of influential Muslim notables had prevented even larger carnage.

As the violence subsided and the Sultan was informed of the events in Damascus, the Ottoman ruler knew that he had to act decisively. The priority was to recover the trust of his Christian population and avoid a military intervention of the European powers in Syria under the guise of protecting the Christians. Fuad Pasha, a former foreign minister, was chosen by the Sultan to restore order. The contrast between Fuad Pasha and Ahmad Pasha, whose incompetence as a governor had proven deadly during the Damascus Events, was striking.

Fuad Pasha first traveled to Beirut, where he negotiated a truce between the Maronite Christians and the Druzes and consulted with European diplomats. He promised them that those responsible for the Damascus Massacre would be severely punished. He marched into Damascus with a strong military detachment and visited the survivors of the massacre. A group of fifty-seven Muslim notables who had stood by during the killing, or even incited it, were hung after a rushed trial. More than one hundred irregular soldiers and policemen, negligent at best and complicit at worst, were killed by a firing squad. Former governor Ahmad Pasha was also executed.

Fuad Pasha had to balance competing interests. On the one hand, he had to reassure the Damascene Christians that they were safe and convince the European powers that the Ottomans had the situation under control. On the other hand, Fuad Pasha could not alienate the majority Muslim population to the point that they would rise against him or return to violence against Christians. The situation was further complicated by the need to provide temporal accommodation to the Christians who had lost their homes while beginning the construction of new houses and providing compensation for the lost goods.

The budgetary crisis of the Ottoman Empire hardly allowed this. Fuad Pasha forced some Muslims to vacate their houses to make room for Christians and imposed a new tax to collect money for reparations. Only a fraction of what was owed to the Christians was finally paid, but Christians with fewer possessions were prioritized. Mishaqa complained for years that he had not been properly compensated, but this had much to do with his wealth, far above the average.

Fuad Pasha’s reaction would be alien to any current notion of the rule of law or human rights. Still, it was overall effective. Re-construction is always far more complicated than destruction, but Damascus progressively recovered both socially and economically from the 1860 massacre.

The Damascus Events are far removed from our times, but they have more modern echoes. Some of these are found in Syria, where the civil war that started in 2011 has left many episodes of killing along religious lines (most clearly, but not only, by the so-called Islamic State). Still, the potential for false rumors to circulate and de-generate in violence that we observe in the Damascus Events is universal.

After three young girls were mortally stabbed in the English town of Southport, online misinformation spread that the attacker was a Muslim migrant who had recently arrived in England. This resulted in thousands of right-wing extremists flooding the streets of different towns and cities across the United Kingdom, attacking those they perceived to be foreign and engaging in looting.

In the English town of Rotherham, for instance, a hotel hosting asylum seekers was surrounded by 400 people and set on fire before the flames could be put down. “The Damascus Events” is a story of how a society breaks apart and the long and complicated way to societal recovery. In this sense, it is also a story about our present day.

[1] Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2024), p. 129.

[2] Ibid., p. 163.

Review of Tylor Brand, Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in Lebanon’s Great War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023).

Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – Suez, Gallipoli, Kut al-Amara, and Jerusalem saw some of the major battles of the First World War in the Middle East. The countries that are nowadays Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine were the scene of considerable fighting between the Ottomans and the British during the conflict that would bring about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, the territories that currently belong to the modern state of Lebanon saw no fighting during the war. The global conflagration, however, also brought death to Lebanon, if only more slowly and indirectly.

It was hunger, and the vulnerability to disease that came with it, that decimated Lebanon. We learn about this in the book Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in Lebanon’s Great War. The author, Tylor Brand, is an Assistant Professor in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin. In Famine Worlds, he brilliantly studies how the population of Lebanon experienced a famine that brought massive death, changed society, and left an often unspoken but indelible mark on the country’s historical consciousness.

Brand writes that historically, there have been two main narratives to explain the causes of the famine in Lebanon. One ascribes responsibility to the Ottoman administration and blames it for having intentionally starved Lebanon. The other points at the blockade of Lebanese ports by the Entente powers, which abruptly stopped grain imports, of vital importance for a region that was not food self-sufficient. Neither of these explanations fully convinces Brand, who presents a more nuanced view. The Ottoman administration was certainly responsible for the shortage of labor in the agricultural sector that followed the conscription of peasants to fight in the war, as well as for the army’s mismanagement of grain reserves in Syria. Even so, there was no deliberate Ottoman policy that led to Lebanon’s suffering.

Meanwhile, the Entente blockade severely restricted Lebanon’s options to secure its food supply. Moreover, the blockade was accompanied by the halt of remittances from Lebanese migrants in Europe to their home country, with the ensuing decline in the purchasing power of many Lebanese. But the Ottoman Empire entered the war with considerable grain reserves and the famine in Lebanon cannot simply be explained by a lack of food. Equally important was the food speculation of Lebanese businessmen who, after trade routes were closed by the blockade, decided to make a profit in the local grain markets. And, although the famine was largely man-made, a plague of locusts that decimated local crops made matters worse.

Brand is deeply skeptical about the possibility of establishing with some certainty how many people succumbed to the famine in Lebanon during the First World War. He points out that “the available statistics are little more than pointed guesses or ways to denote severity” and notes that, although death tolls are important, “suffering in famine does not necessarily correlate with death.”[1] It is this suffering, and the Lebanese population’s resistance to it, that is the focus of Famine Worlds. The book is not a political history of the Ottoman authorities’ response to the food crisis. Sometimes, the reader might actually feel that the political and historical contextualization of the famine is too vague. Instead, Brand’s attention is focused on how the Lebanese society experienced this period of widespread hunger and disease.

This is no simple task. The newspapers of the period are of little use due to the strong censorship imposed by the Ottoman authorities during the war. Brand’s research importantly relies on memoirs, letters, and reports written during the war period or shortly afterwards. Many of these were authored by Americans employed in education or missionary institution in Lebanon. While British and French citizens had to abandon the country when the First World War began, American nationals could stay as the United States never declared war against the Ottoman Empire.

Tylor Brand, Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in Lebanon’s Great War. Click here.

The Americans were relatively privileged as they had sufficient resources to avoid hunger, even if they could not always escape the diseases that proliferated during the period. In this sense, the contemporary accounts of Americans living in Lebanon need to be understood as the writings of first-hand witnesses to hunger, not of people whose bodies and minds deteriorated as food became increasingly scarce. It is difficult to know how the poor, and the former members of the middle class who were impoverished by the exorbitant prices of food, would have told their own stories. Even so, when we consider all the limitations, Brand succeeds in presenting a portrait of how the famine shaped the lives of ordinary people.

Famine Worlds describes a society in which ownership of land and animals, as well as the social capital of family, community, and patronage networks, could be the difference between life and death. It was also a society where the ubiquity of death and suffering progressively anesthetized people’s consciences. Jirjis al-Maqdisi, who published in 1919 a historical account of the effects of the war on Lebanon, describes this change in detail. Al-Maqdisi writes: “In 1915, the sight of a starving man falling would cause people to surround him and give him some water, some food, and some dirhams. By 1916 we would walk in the streets with men, women and children lying in the mud on both sides, whimpering for mercy or for a crust of bread. (…) Most frequently, on passing, people turned their face and blocked their ears so they could not see or hear.”[2]

With the spread of a typhus epidemic, the poor and their emaciated bodies were not only an uncomfortable sight to the relatively privileged. They were also seen as “potential carriers of deadly disease.”[3] Despite their vulnerability, Brand cautions against imagining the poor as devoid of agency. They had very limited options, but they exploited them to the fullest. They changed their diets and migrated in search of work or aid. As Brand notes, “not all survived, but no one lay down to die without a fight.”[4]

This rebellion against a looming death often implied a subversion of the traditional moral codes that governed social life until that moment. As Middle East historian Najwa al-Qattan succinctly puts it in an article discussing the famine, “the question of food during the war was about morality as well as mortality.”[5] Thievery and robbery saw a dramatic increase, and the same happened with prostitution. Very often, the desperation brought by hunger and disease on most of the population was not reason enough for the privileged to suspend their usual moral judgments. The American Red Cross and the American missionaries in Lebanon saved many lives but, as Brand documents, used moralistic criteria when deciding who deserved help.

Beggars, people with physical disabilities, or those who suffered from syphilis (a sexually transmitted disease likely to prey upon prostitutes), were to be denied aid after the American Relief Committee adopted a new set of guidelines in late 1917. Faced with an increase in aid demands and declining resources, the American humanitarian organizations adopted a policy that “instead of seeking to preserve the helpless, (…) deliberately excluded those whose physical or perceived moral characteristics rendered them unworthy.”[6]

Writing in 2014, on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, Najwa al-Qattan noted that “the famine does not occupy a prominent place in nationalist and other public narratives of the war, where it competes with more heroic public markers of the period, such as the Arab Revolt.”[7] In Famine Worlds, writing a decade after al-Qattan, Brand explains that the centennial of the Great War significantly contributed to more people learning about the famine in Lebanon during the conflict. Back in 2014, al-Qattan lamented that victims of the famine were not “publicly mourned or memorialized.”[8] This appears to be slowly changing. In 2018, for instance, a sculpture to remember the victims of the famine was unveiled in Beirut.

The expert on conflict and humanitarian crises Alex de Waal notes that most famines are caused by war and political repression, with the current situation of widespread hunger in Yemen being no exception. De Waal adds that the main driver of hunger in Yemen is not a lack of food but the fact that “a large section of the population simply doesn’t have money to buy it from the local markets.” Swarms of red desert locusts have also negatively affected domestic agricultural production. The famine that ravaged Lebanon during the First World War has strong echoes in our current times.

[1] Tylor Brand, Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in Lebanon’s Great War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), p. 41.

[2] Quoted in ibid., p. 98.

[3] Ibid., p. 145.

[4] Ibid., p. 82.

[5] Najwa Al-Qattan, “When Mothers Ate Their Children: Wartime Memory and the Language of Food in Syria and Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 4 (2014): 721.

[6] Brand, Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in Lebanon’s Great War, pp. 164-5.

[7] Najwa Al-Qattan, “When Mothers Ate Their Children”: 722

[8] Ibid.

Naima Morelli

naimamorelli

 

( Middle East Monitor ) – Duty and care are the words that would best describe the approach of Dr Adila Laidi-Hanieh towards the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. She is stepping down as director of the museum at the end of this month, and we took the opportunity for her to reflect on her years in charge, changing the institution from the inside out.

The museum is in a beautifully designed building which nestles in green terraces and overlooks the Mediterranean. It aims to represent the history and aspirations of the Palestinian people; explore their past and present; and reflect on their future.

The flagship project of private foundation Taawon Welfare Association, the museum opened in 2016 and held its first on-site exhibition in 2017. However, Laidi-Hanieh noted that when she took over in late 2018, “there was a lack of direction.” For example, there was only one department which handled everything programmatic. “I was aware of the need to develop first-rate programming while reinventing the museum’s image as a vibrant place for families and people from all income and education levels, by offering diverse opportunities for reflection, learning experiences, community ingathering and fun.”

A renowned scholar and curator who has worked tirelessly to promote Palestinian culture and heritage — and a recent recipient of the National Order of Merit from France — Laidi-Hanieh’s contribution was crucial to clarify and sharpen the museum’s mission. She started by developing its future exhibition programme on her first week on the job in September 2018; then its first five-year programme strategy in Spring 2019, with an accompanying departmental restructuring; then hiring young graduates to staff newly-created departments to handle exhibitions and collections, research and knowledge, including new units to manage and expand the museum’s crucial education tasks and publications. Looking back, she could see how the museum accomplished most of the goals, despite the stranglehold of the Israeli occupation and the interruption of the pandemic.

“I did come from a cultural management background, and also had an art historian’s scholarly perspective,” she told me. “Then little by little I learned to become a museum professional. When you work for an institution, you have a duty of care to its institutional identity and integrity.”

She explained that a museum is different from an art centre pursuing novelty, or a think tank or a university addressing scholars and academics. “A museum is first and foremost articulated around a collection, which it researches and documents, preserves and exhibits, for the benefit of the general public, in hopefully thoughtful and attractive exhibitions, and accompanying public programmes, on site and online.”

In the past, she said, some stakeholders expected the museum to be all things to all people, a community centre, cultural centre, a dynamo for research. “All these goals are urgent and important, especially in the Palestinian context, but a museum has the responsibility of caring first for tangible and intangible heritage, which in the Palestinian case is endangered, dispersed around the world, and not even well framed by a local Palestinian museology. Our museum is the only institution that can do a certain kind of large-scale exhibitions.”

Five years of exhibitions

When Laidi-Hanieh stepped in, she was involved initially with three major exhibitions. The first was in progress when she took up her duties. Intimate Terrains was the largest exhibition of contemporary and modern art ever held in Palestine. Its focus was Palestinian landscape, which had an obvious political underpinning, with themes such as the narrowing land, exile and diaspora, artistic return to the land, the separation wall, and dispossession.

“We had an excellent curator, Tina Sherwell, who chose the artists and set up the show, so my role was just supporting the team on the messaging. Here I thought of setting up a different space in the museum alongside the main gallery that would explore the underlying themes of resistance and human rights addressed elliptically in the exhibition space. This way we would separate the discursive-political from the reception of the art works, while giving visitors the opportunity to interact with both, especially when in our context, the general audiences’ interaction with modern and contemporary art is limited. At the same time, there is a still a general expectation for art to be directly representational and engaged.”

Image by Ahmed Gomaa from Pixabay

The way that she made the show compelling to visitors was by displaying infographics, photos and poetry in the second space. This way they had visitors looking at the art and having a chance to explore further in a discursive space, without having this overt political framework placed around the art. This was an important approach since the museum’s vocation is to welcome visitors from all education and income levels, including students on school group visits and from nearby Birzeit University.

Another important show addressed Jerusalem as a centre for Palestinian modernity articulated around a selection from two of Jerusalem’s historic printing presses, tools and reprints of journalistic, commercial and educational ephemera. This allowed her to explore themes of censorship, press, the intifada and gender. “We opened it during Covid and managed to keep it open, even resorting to putting videos online for people to see it in 2020.” This came right after an exhibition opened right before the pandemic, a selection of Palestinian political posters from the museum’s collection, titled “Glimmer of a Grove Beyond” by the young curator Adele Jarrar.

People by the Sea

The exhibition of which Laidi-Hanieh is proudest is the ongoing landmark exhibition A People by the Sea: Narratives of the Palestinian Coast. This maps the rise and ruin of Palestine’s coastal cities and their rich surrounding countryside and maritime relations and trade. Curated by artist Inass Yassin, with the help of guidance from two historians, it highlights political, social and cultural dimensions of the history of Palestinians in regard to the sea, from the eighteenth century and the rise of local autonomous rule, through the British Mandate and gradual dispossession of Palestinians before and after 1948, and the ongoing Nakba.

The director developed the concept to focus on the coastal areas since they were ethnically cleansed in 1948. “This was for me based on a very moving experience of a walking guided tour I took in 2015 of the old city of Jaffa, with historian and politician Sami Abu Shehadeh,” she recalled. “He made the once thriving urban centre of Jaffa come alive to us, before it was erased and literally thrown into the sea and what remained of it was gentrified.” Laidi-Hanieh said that from the observation of the historical part of the city, she decided to develop an exhibition about the entire coast, with restitution of life, civilisation, culture, trade, unions, sports, entertainment, religious festivals and social life in Palestine.

Shows like this highlight particular aspects of the history of Palestine and its cultural heritage, and the achievements of Palestinian individuals and society, despite being ruled by indifferent and, more often than not, hostile foreign powers. Laidi-Hanieh remarked that the unique advantage of a museum with a state-of-the-art space and highly professional team is the chance to leverage elements of political, economic and social history dispersed in books, photo archives and private art collections, and gather them together in one place.

With an exhibition, a museum creates an object of inquiry and invites the public to experience it by moving through space physically. “This is the ’emancipatory learning experience’ that I defined back in 2019 as the new core mission of our museum,” she pointed out. “Our exhibitions are made up of ethnographic objects, commissioned artworks, paper, and audio-visual archives, interactive stations and so on. This concentration of information and visuals produces cognitive and emotional effects greater than the sum of its parts. We believe that you can definitely acquire knowledge and change your perceptions by an aesthetic experience, by an emotional experience.”

Labour of love: embroidering Palestinian history

Another significant exhibition was the third iteration that the museum developed, Labour of Love, held at a Qatar Museums Gallery in 2022. The exhibition showcased the rich history of Palestinian embroidery (Tatreez) and its significance. It attracted 8,000 visitors, including FIFA World Cup football fans and supermodel and advocate Bella Hadid, who posted about it on social media. The non-traditional exhibition originally developed by curator Rachel Dedman for the museum in 2016 as a political history of Palestinian embroidery was also a celebration of Palestinian rural women’s labour while destabilising received notions of gender roles and class.

“After unexpectedly receiving a generous donation of an important collection of Palestinian heritage dresses in 2021, we were able to rely on our own collection to develop long term projects that build knowledge on this important component of material heritage, such as collections, surveys and inventories, and building new professional preservation facilities. I am gratified that this donation came from a group of Arab American women based in Washington DC, who I got to know when I was studying in the area in the 1990s.”

In a first for Palestinian heritage textiles, the museum was able to open new cold storage and restoration facilities and train colleagues and people from the embroidery community to care for their own heritage dresses. “We were able to do so thanks to advice from Madrid’s Museo del Traje, and in a major technical partnership with London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.” That, she added, was where the role of a museum comes in. “UNESCO placed the art of Palestinian embroidery on its list of humanity’s intangible heritage in 2021, and in 2022 and 2023 it gave to those in the field the tools to guarantee its material integrity and develop local Palestinian knowledge about it.”

The director explained that while dresses might look very mundane, they were the only portable and wearable heritage that Palestinian refugees had after 1948. “This is why Palestinian embroidery is so important, and has a political value, representing Palestine’s lost way of life and a lost homeland. Much remains to be done in salvaging other parts of Palestinian cultural heritage, but Tatreez chose us first.”

New initiatives

Over the past two years the museum has launched a number of other initiatives to engage audiences. These include the redesign of the bilingual interactive encyclopaedia of the Palestine question, Palquest.org, in cooperation with the Institute for Palestine Studies, and the launch of the first Arab museum website for children, based on original museum content, programmes and collections: sanasel.org: “Play Together, Learn Together” is a resource for children, families and educators.

Finally, the museum announced a full master’s scholarship for curatorial and museum studies in the United Kingdom. This scholarship is a great opportunity for students who are interested in pursuing a career in the field of museum studies and is an overdue step to professionalise the operations of the Palestinian Museum.

“In these five years, we have been able to produce very high-level content, with a lot of attention to attracting audiences. This is quite incredible considering that we are living under occupation, which results in structural weaknesses in certain qualifications for museum staff, in available resources and in visitor access,” said Adila Laidi-Hanieh. “At the same time, I think living under occupation generates a certain dynamism in a society and a people struggling to live free. It creates a hunger to express and to re-invent new ways of living.”

Future exhibitions for the Palestinian Museum will include a permanent exhibition based on the history of Palestine, a new set of digital first programmes, a new original exhibition on music, and a new exhibition on Gaza. “Future stakes and challenges remain enormous,” concluded the museum’s outgoing director. “In these five years, though, we managed to become not only a centre of attraction for school groups and tourists, but also a living space that offers new perspectives and cognitive experiences on our heritage and society.”

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

( Middle East Monitor ) – On 30 August 2008, Italy and Libya signed their Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, ending their awkward past of feuding and diplomatic tensions over Italy’s colonisation of Libya from 1911 to 1943. Libya was seeking compensation, recognition of suffering of its people and, above all, an apology. Rome, as is the case with all former colonial powers, tried for years to close the matter without offering anything. The treaty, a success for Libya, might have ended the political and diplomatic struggle over the colonial past, but it will not wipe it out from history and people’s memories.

The idea of invading Libya came during the colonial rush that saw major colonial powers like France, United Kingdom and others divide the dying Ottoman Empire possessions in North Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe itself. Libya was part of that empire, very close to Italy across the Mediterranean Sea and, above all, Libyans lacked effective means to fight back after the Ottoman military garrison left the country.

The rise to power of the Republican Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini in 1922, gave the occupation of Libya another nostalgic dimension as the fascists strongly believed in the deceptive idea that modern Italy was the rightful heir to the Roman Empire and, therefore, they were responsible for recovering the possessions of the bygone empire.  Another reason that made Libya more attractive to fascist Italy is the fact that Italy, united just 50 years earlier, became overcrowded and its farmers, particularly in the south, were eager to own land of which Libya has plenty. Mussolini used to call Libya the “fourth shore of Rome”.

Italians thought that the taking over of Libya would not be more than a few days’ sea trip and the entire country would be conquered. However, once the first amphibious forces tried to land on Tripoli shores in 1911, they were faced with stiff resistance from the locals, who rushed to defend their country with the little means they had.

As the invaders increased their numbers and widened their presence, the resistance shifted to new tactics, using the guerrilla tactics of hit-and-run. Outnumbered and out-gunned, the Libyans, mostly nomads and shepherds, figured out that direct confrontation with one of the most modern armies at the time was suicidal and destructive.

Instead of facing the Italian army directly, they waged rather small battles, mostly at night time. Benefitting from their detailed knowledge of the land and its geography, the Mujahidin, as they were called, managed to make life really difficult for the Italian army wherever it went. Facing a ghost enemy fighting on horseback, the Italian army started to use unheard of methods of war, scoring many firsts.

For instance, Italy was the first country to use air war and Libya became the first country to be bombed from the air. An Italian pilot named Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, in a letter to his father, described how he threw the first bomb at an Arab [Libyan] camp in November 1911, just a month into the invasion. The young pilot wrote “today I have decided to try to throw bombs from the aeroplane”, before pointing out that it was “the first time that we [Italian army] will try this and if I succeed, I will be really pleased to be the first person to do it.”

Pilot Gavotti, indeed, succeeded in throwing the first ever bomb from an aeroplane, ushering in the age of air war for the first time in the history of mankind.  He wrote “and after a little while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment” in Ain Zara, today a town, but at the time just an oasis south-east of Tripoli. Ain Zara became the first place on earth to be bombed from the air. The Italian pilot did not realise what he had just done and had no idea what his bomb had done to people, mostly civilians, below. He returned to base, overwhelmed by his success in hitting “the target” and went straight to report to General Caneva that he just registered his name in history as the first person to bomb a target from the air. Carlo Caneva was the first Italian commander to announce that “Tripoli will be Italian”, as his forces launched the first attacks on Libya. He led the earlier brutal stages of the invasion before being replaced later by another, crueler General Rodolfo Graziani in 1930.

In the same year, the Italian army scored another world first when Benito Mussolini authorised, for the first time, the use of sulphur mustard to subdue Libyans. Bombing formations of fighters and civilian villages suspected of supporting the Mujahidin from the air but, this time, using poisonous gas, besides explosives.

In the 1920s, Libyan resistance intensified, particularly in eastern Libya with the rise of Omar Al-Mukhtar, a septuagenarian who suffered old age and chronic back pain, who became the national leader of the Mujahidin against fascist Italian occupation.

This forced General Graziani to revert to using collective punishment against entire civilian communities by forcing them into concentration camps across Eastern Libya. At one point, there were some 16 different camps in the Sirte desert and further east in which thousands of civilians including women, children, the elderly and young men were forced to live with their animals in desert plots surrounded by barbed wire and guarded, around the clock, by armed soldiers.

Despite this brutality, Al-Mukhtar and his colleagues fought for 20 years, until he was captured on 11 September 1931, after suffering an injury in a village called Slonta, south of Al-Bayda town in Libya’s eastern Green Mountain region.

After a quick trial, he was sentenced to death by hanging on 16 September. Hundreds of civilians, including women and children were forced to watch as Al-Mukhtar was hanged in Suluq concentration camp, one of the most infamous, south-west of Benghazi. By staging such a gruesome show, the Italian authorities wanted to terrify Libyans who might think of following in his footsteps and fight them.

Modern Libya, before the NATO invasion of 2011, used to commemorate 16 of September as a national day of mourning to remember Al-Mukhtar and remind younger generations of what happened in Libya, decades before. New Libya, however, has forgotten the mourning day, while fascist concentrations camps are never really mentioned outside academic circles.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

(The Conversation) – Sudan’s Central Reserve Police (CRP) recently announced it would be deploying officers to the streets of Khartoum to “secure public and private property”. That may sound puzzling in the context of the current violence: what are the police doing in the middle of this?

The answer is simple. The CRP are not “police” in any civilian sense – they are one of several paramilitary groups in Sudan, and they are intervening on the side of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF).

This helps explain recent events in Sudan, where history has entangled military force and state power, and has produced multiple armed groups which are now vying for control of the state.

That history began with the Turco-Egyptian conquest by the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, in 1820. By consolidating territory over several decades, this created what became Sudan: a colony built by armed force.

At the end of the 19th century, it came under effective British control. While colonial states always tended to be violent, Sudan was particularly fierce in imposing central control on a large and diverse population. The state was always uniformed and armed.

And when Sudan – then the largest territory in Africa – became independent in 1956, the new country inherited that militarised and centralised nature. Soldiers have always seen themselves as the proper guarantors of its sovereignty. They played a central role in the attempts to impose central authority which led to protracted civil war, beginning in the south in the 1960s and spreading to the west and east from the 1980s.

Mostly ruled by soldiers

Sudan has been mostly ruled by soldiers since 1956: in 1958, 1969 and 1989, military coups overthrew shortlived civilian governments. When popular unrest threatened military rulers – as happened in 1964, 1985 and 2019 – their regimes were toppled only because some of the soldiers changed sides and turned on the incumbents. Every time, soldiers continued to wield much power. Even in revolution, Sudan has never tamed its army.

That process looks cyclical: soldiers kept defying the authority of civilian politicians. But there was a long-term trend of change. Soldiers who seized power by force learned from experience. The greatest threat to them lay among their own rank and file, who might turn against them. So, particularly under the long rule of Omar el-Bashir, who seized power in 1989, they fostered the emergence of alternative armed forces.

Alongside the SAF, new paramilitaries were created like the CRP. The long-running wars with rebels encouraged that process – Sudan’s rulers recruited militia who would fight insurgents on the cheap, but who could also support them against insubordinate soldiers. Those militias came from the peripheries of Sudan – in some ways, they had much in common with the rebel armed groups against whom they fought, some of whom occasionally switched sides.

Even after the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Sudan had multiple armed forces. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – the SAF’s main antagonist in the current violence – grew out of a local militia in Darfur to become the largest, most dangerous product of that process.

All these armed groups shared the belief that control of the state was rightfully theirs, and the ultimate prize. It was not simply that the state paid, armed and fed soldiers – though that was always important, and especially so when a brief boom from oil revenues swelled state resources in the first decade of the 21st century.

Money talks – so do guns

Control of the state allowed soldiers to establish themselves as entrepreneurs – in anything from manufacturing and banking to gold mining – and to reward their friends and supporters. Much of Sudan’s economy came under the control of soldiers not as a single, coherent group, but as actual or potential rivals, each anxiously watching the others.

In the end, this increasingly messy and splintered array of armed groups could not save Bashir. When popular anger against his rule seemed unstoppable in 2019, both the SAF and RSF turned against him and Bashir was pushed out of office. The effective leaders of the SAF and RSF, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (aka Hemedti) established themselves as the faces of military power.

But by that time, there were too many armed groups for any stable transition to be agreed. The SAF and RSF circled around each other for months, each hoping the move to civilian rule could be manipulated to preserve their own position while disadvantaging the other. The two briefly cooperated in removing the civilian parts of the transitional government in the coup of October 2021, but their rivalry only grew more intense.

Across Sudan, armed militias and rebel groups (some large, some not) staked their claims to inclusion in a new government, and threatened violence if they were denied. The SAF and RSF both treated these local pretenders as potential allies in their rivalry. In the end, it was (ironically) pressure to agree the terms of a new transition to civilian rule that finally precipitated open conflict between the SAF and RSF. Both knew that civilian rule was a threat, and each tried to deflect its impact on to the other.

That history – which has left soldiers at the centre of power while dividing them into opposing factions – explains why the current violence is so messy and intractable. There are multiple actors beyond the SAF and RSF, from paramilitary police in Khartoum to rival militias in Darfur. For the leaders of these armed factions, control of the state is an existential matter: they need it to keep their followers loyal.

Yet the resources of the state are not sufficient to support them all – and any civilian government would want to turn those resources to other uses. So, even if Sudan’s untamed soldiers could be reconciled, it is hard to see how they would be brought under civilian control.

Justin Willis, Professor of History, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The legacy of the medieval Swahili civilization is a source of extraordinary pride in East Africa, as reflected in its language being the official tongue of Kenya, Tanzania and even inland countries like Uganda and Rwanda, far from the Indian Ocean shore where the culture developed nearly two millennia ago.

Its ornate stone and coral towns hugged 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of the coast, and its merchants played a linchpin role in the lucrative trade between Africa and lands across the ocean: Arabia, Persia, India, Southeast Asia and China.

By the turn of the second millennium, Swahili people embraced Islam, and some of their grand mosques still stand at the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Lamu in Kenya and Kilwa in Tanzania.

Self-governance ended following Portuguese colonization in the 1500s, with control later shifting to the Omanis (1730-1964), Germans in Tanganyika (1884-1918) and British in Kenya and Uganda (1884-1963). Following independence, coastal peoples were absorbed into the modern nation-states of Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar.

So who were the Swahili people, and where did their ancestors originally come from?

Ironically, the story of Swahili origins has been molded almost entirely by non-Swahili people, a challenge shared with many other marginalized and colonized peoples who are the modern descendants of cultures of the past with extraordinary achievements.

Working with a team of 42 colleagues, including 17 African scholars and multiple members of the Swahili community, we’ve now published the first ancient DNA sequences from peoples of the Swahili civilization. Our results do not provide simple validation for the narratives previously advanced in archaeological, historical or political circles. Instead, they contradict and complicate all of them.

Colonization affected how the story was told

Western archaeologists in the mid-20th century emphasized the connections of the medieval Swahili to Persia and Arabia, sometimes suggesting that their impressive achievements could not have been attained by Africans.

Post-colonial scholars, including one of us (Kusimba), pushed back against that view. Earlier researchers had inflated the importance of non-African influences by focusing on imported objects at Swahili sites. They minimized the vast majority of locally made materials and what they revealed about African industry and innovation.

But viewing Swahili heritage as primarily African or non-African is too simplistic; In fact, both perspectives are byproducts of colonialist biases.

The truth is that colonization of the East African coast did not end with the departure of the British in the middle of the 20th century. Many colonial institutions were inherited and perpetuated by Africans. As modern nation-states formed, with governments controlled by inland peoples, Swahili people continued to be undermined politically and economically, in some cases as much as they had been under foreign rule.

Decades of archaeological research in consultation with local people aimed to address the marginalization of communities of Swahili descent. Our team consulted oral traditions and used ethnoarchaeology and systematic surveys, along with targeted excavations of residential, industrial and cemetery locations. Working with local scholars and elders, we unearthed materials such as pottery, metal and beads; food, house and industrial remains; and imported objects such as porcelain, glass, glass beads and more. Together they revealed the complexity of Swahili everyday life and the peoples’ cosmopolitan Indian Ocean heritage.

Ancient DNA analysis was always one of the most exciting prospects. It offered the hope of using scientific methods to obtain answers to the question of how medieval people are related to earlier groups and to people today, providing a counterweight to narratives imposed from outside. Until a few years ago, this kind of analysis was a dream. But because of a technological revolution in 2010, the number of ancient humans with published genome-scale data has risen from nothing to more than 10,000 today.

Surprises in the ancient DNA

We worked with local communities to determine the best practices for treating human remains in line with traditional Muslim religious sensitivities. Cemetery excavations, sampling and reburial of human remains were carried out in one season, rather than dragging on indefinitely.

Our team generated data from more than 80 people, mostly elite individuals buried in the rich centers of the stone towns. We will need to wait for future work to understand whether their genetic inheritance differed from people without their high status.

Contradicting what we had expected, the ancestry of the people we analyzed was not largely African or Asian. Instead, these backgrounds were intertwined, each contributing about half of the DNA of the people we analyzed.

We found that Asian ancestry in the medieval individuals came largely from Persia (modern-day Iran), and that Asians and African ancestors began mixing at least 1,000 years ago. This picture is almost a perfect match to the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest narrative told by the Swahili people themselves, and one almost all earlier scholars had dismissed as a kind of fairy tale.

Another surprise was that, mixed in with the Persians, Indians were a significant proportion of the earliest migrants. Patterns in the DNA also suggest that, after the transition to Omani control in the 18th century, Asian immigrants became increasingly Arabian. Later, there was intermarriage with people whose DNA was similar to others in Africa. As a result, some modern people who identify as Swahili have inherited relatively little DNA from medieval peoples like those we analyzed, while others have more.

One of the most revealing patterns our genetic analysis identified was that the overwhelming majority of male-line ancestors came from Asia, while female-line ancestors came from Africa. This finding must reflect a history of Persian males traveling to the coast and having children with local women.

One of us (Reich) initially hypothesized that these patterns might reflect Asian men forcibly marrying African women because similar genetic signatures in other populations are known to reflect such violent histories. But this theory does not account for what is known about the culture, and there is a more likely explanation.

Traditional Swahili society is similar to many other East African Bantu cultures in being substantially matriarchal – it places much economic and social power in the hands of women. In traditional Swahili societies even today, ownership of stone houses often passes down the female line. And there is a long recorded history of female rulers, beginning with Mwana Mkisi, ruler of Mombasa, as recorded by the Portuguese as early as the 1500s, down to Sabani binti Ngumi, ruler of Mikindani in Tanzania as late as 1886.

Our best guess is that Persian men allied with and married into elite families and adopted local customs to enable them to be more successful traders. The fact that their children passed down the language of their mothers, and that encounters with traditionally patriarchal Persians and Arabians and conversion to Islam did not change the coast’s African matriarchal traditions, confirms that this was not a simple history of African women being exploited. African women retained critical aspects of their culture and passed it down for many generations.

How do these results gleaned from ancient DNA restore heritage for the Swahili? Objective knowledge about the past has great potential to help marginalized peoples. By making it possible to challenge and overturn narratives imposed from the outside for political or economic ends, scientific research provides a meaningful and underappreciated tool for righting colonial wrongs.

Chapurukha Kusimba, Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida and David Reich, Professor of Genetics and of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – For centuries empires were the dominant form of political organisation. In the west there is some degree of familiarity with the British, French and German empires, and the empires of Spain and Portugal. Not to mention the Romans or the Greeks. But one empire that sometimes gets forgotten, outside Turkey, is the Ottoman.

On the 100th anniversary of its end on November 1 1922, we look at five things you need to know about it.

1. What was its size and how long did it last?

The Ottoman empire lasted almost 600 years, from the early 1300s until the aftermath of the first world war. The word Ottoman derives from the Arabic version of Osman – the name of its first ruler. The empire had a humble beginning as a provincial principality in Anatolia (now part of Turkey).

Hagia Sophia Mosque, Istanbul. © Juan Cole. .

What transformed it into a rising and sizeable force in world politics was the gradual expansion into the lands of the declining Byzantine empire. This process came to a conclusion in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire.

Constantinople was renamed Istanbul and it became the seat of a new rising empire. In the 15th century the city became a vibrant centre of trade and architectural innovation. A period of steady expansion followed and the empire extended over parts of the Middle East along the Red Sea, northern Africa, the Balkans and eastern Europe and up to the walls of the city of Vienna.

2. How much power did it have?

The height of the empire’s power came in the 16th century with the rule of Süleyman the Magnificent, one of the empire’s longest-running sultans . A testament to the power of the empire is the fact that Süleyman acquired the nickname “magnificent” in the west. Within the Ottoman empire he was known as “the lawgiver”.

During his reign, the empire acquired a new legal code and underwent a period of cultural renaissance powered by a blend of Christian, Islamist and Arabic elements. The empire also offered safe passage to Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal).

By the early 16th century, the Ottoman empire had one of the largest Jewish communities in the word. Constantinople, the city wasn’t officially renamed Istanbul until 1930, became a real blend of cultures. And throughout the renaissance, the Ottomans became the biggest trade partner of western Europe.

3. What was its effect and relationship with Europe?

The walls of the city of Vienna marked the apex of the Ottoman’s empire power and the beginnings of its slow and gradual demise. The empire became a subject of admiration in the European courts. Its cultural life attracted the attention of western European thinkers and artists. Its military organisation and might captured the attention of theorists and politicians alike. The Ottomans became one of the key subjects of the 18th and 19th century aesthetic and scientific movement known as Orientalism.

Crucially, the Ottoman Empire was in part a European empire. Its reach extended over lands such as the Balkans and southeastern Europe that now firmly belong in Europe. And, despite its diminishing power in the 18th and 19th century, Christian and Muslim populations across the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean lived alongside one another in relatively tolerant societies.

. Blue Mosque seen from the Bosphorus, Istanbul. © Juan Cole.

This begins to change from the middle of the 19th century due the empire’s centralisation of power and administration, away from its diverse and far-flung parts. By the early 20th century, the European provinces of the empire become sites of violence and ethnoreligious conflict. The turning point is the Balkan wars (1912-3) which cut off from the empire some of its most diverse and richest provinces in southeastern Europe.

4. What was its relationship with the Arab world?

The Ottoman empire extended its reach across parts of what is now known as the Arab world from Cairo to Algiers. For a long time, the Ottoman grip in the Middle East was minimal. The key preoccupations were with the protection of key trade outposts and the holy cities of Islam. Having mutual trade links and economies led different regions to exist happily as one unit, and retain loyalty to the Ottoman empire.

With the outbreak of the first world war, however, this started to change. The rise of Arab nationalism and the dynamics of the war propaganda fomented movements across the Arab world that actively sought to break with the Ottoman state.

What is its influence on modern Turkey?

The defeat of the Greek army in Anatolia in 1922 by the forces of Turkish nationalism marked the de facto collapse of the Ottoman empire and the emergence of a new successor state, modern Turkey. The Greek-Turkish war became a rallying cry for anti-colonial pan-Islamist movements across the Middle East and India.

But Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder and first leader, wanted to make a radical break from the Ottoman heritage. He moved the capital of the new state from Constantinople to Ankara and initiated a series of rapid reforms such as the change of the alphabet and the abolition of the khalifate, the idea of an absolute monarchy over the Islamic world. Despite the radical break with the imperial past, a debate between tradition and modernisation continued to shape the evolution of Turkish political life.

In the past few decades Turkey has been witnessing the return of a political and cultural movement that pushes back against the western, secular orientation of the country and looks back selectively at the Ottoman past as a guide for the present. The decision by Erdogan’s government to convert the famous Byzantine temple Hagia Sophia back into a mosque in 2020, despite widespread international condemnation, offers a tangible example of a nod to the Ottoman past in modern Turkey.

Georgios Giannakopoulos, Visiting Research Fellow, King’s College London/ Lecturer in Modern History, City University of London, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As a result of the Napoleonic Wars, the major European powers decided that the “primary objective of their diplomacy must be the preservation of international peace and stability” Their collaboration became known as the “Concert of Europe” which supported peace efforts for the following four decades. But from October, 1853 to February, 1856 a war was fought by the British, French and Ottoman Turks against Russia. It was a blood drenched war that brought such luminaries as Florence Nightingale and Leo Tolstoy to the world’s attentions and made famous Tennyson’s poem: “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, adapted from Dublin born, William Howard Russell’s article about this disastrous charge that resulted in the death of 300 out of 600 men. Besides W.H. Russell another Irish war correspondent: J.C. Mc Coan, wrote articles about the “great confusion of purpose” and the “incompetent international butchery” that took place in the Crimea.

Sixty thousand British, French and Ottoman Turks died in the ensuing three-year conflict, while up to 500,000 Russians lost their lives, many due to cholera, typhus, dysentery and malaria. It was in this harsh medical climate that Florence Nightingale gained widespread attention for setting up a hospital while bringing a number of trained nurses, including a substantial contingent of “Sisters of Mercy” from Ireland. They were there to heal wounded soldiers by establishing strict rules for cleanliness at a time when germ theory had not been understood. Before the nurses arrived 16,000 British soldiers died and, after the establishment of the hospital, only 2000. Nightingale noted in her journals that there was an 80% reduction of mortality among wounded soldiers under the care of her nurses. Her efforts resulted in widespread recognition of the need for professionally trained nurses in caring for injured soldiers.

A young Russian officer, Leo Tolstoy, served in combat in Crimea and became embittered by the suffering and death of young men. Based on his experiences Tolstoy wrote: “Tales of Sebastopol” and later his famous book: “War and Peace” and still later numerous books and articles on ”Nonviolence” which inspired Mohandas Gandhi to found “Tolstoy Farm”, his first ashram in South Africa.

According to some historians, the cause of the 19^th century Crimean War was that France and Britain had become fearful of Russia’s attempt to expand its influence into the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Russia’s vast territories stretched across the continent to Siberia and Alaska and coastal North America. The Russian Tsar, Nicholas II believed the Ottoman Empire was in imminent danger of collapse and expressed his intention to protect the Orthodox Churches and the Holy Places of Jerusalem which were under the Sultan’s rule. The Tsar’s diplomatic mission to Constantinople in 1852, led by Prince Menshikov, had been told “to demand a formal Turkish Guarantee of existing rights and privileges of the Orthodox Church. The British Ambassador to the Ottoman Court, Stratford Canning, was a “mediator and mentor to the Ottoman Court” and advised against any accommodation with the Tsar. He was convinced that the Russian demands would allow the Russians to gain control of the Ottoman Empire.

Reinforcing this view was Lord John Russell who stated that: “He [the Tsar] must be resisted in any way possible”. Other aristocrats such as the Duke of Argyll wrote that “the seating of the Russian Empire on the throne of Constantinople would give Russia an overbearing weight in Europe”. Lord Palmerston, who became Prime Minister had a desire to enhance British prestige”, and, as a result, became a major factor in the drama that ignited the conflict with Russia.

The Ottoman government agreed with Britain and France that there was a need to mount a campaign against Russia. Attempts at brokering a peace were blocked several times by British leaders, while the Habsburg Empire with its base in Austria, supported peace efforts. Prince Metternich, a proponent of peace, warned against a “European war provoked by Oriental causes” and expressed the “need to maintain treaties” since “we are called to the task of restoring peace”. Yet there was a problem with the vacillating nature of Tsar Nicholas 1 and his “sudden hatreds [and] exaggerated sense of honor and pride”, mixed with “severe bouts of depression”.

In England the issues came to a head in December 1852, after Napoleon III established a new imperial government in a coup d’etat against the Second Republic. He sent an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire with instructions to assert France’s right to protect Christian sites in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The Ottoman Empire agreed to this condition. A Four Point Peace Agreement was put forward in 1854 to cease hostilities but they were repudiated by the Tsar unless guaranteed protection was given to the Holy Places and the Orthodox churches.

Although the Crimean war ended in the winter of 1856 peace efforts could have prevented this costly war. Instead, what took place resulted in the suffering and death of 560,000 young men on both sides of that war. Irish soldiers made up around 30–35 per cent of the British army in 1854, and it is estimated that over 30,000 Irish soldiers served in the Crimea, a number of them casualties of the war. Since each Irish regiment allowed a small number of wives to accompany their husbands to the Crimea, these women came to wash and cook, and following each battle, helped to care for the wounded.

The crippling of Russia’s power in the Near East was imperative to Britain and France. The British war party undermined peace proposals that could have ended the war much sooner due to their desire for more concessions from Russia, including the obliteration of Sebastopol and the reduction of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Tsar Nicholas I died in March,1855, worn out and remorseful after his failed efforts to avoid war. Nicholas believed he had tried to “honestly” negotiate with Britain on the partition of the Ottoman Empire, and indicated his willingness to make concessions. But all efforts in this regard, failed. Nicholas’ son, Alexander II, was willing to sue for peace, but such “a peace had to be on honorable terms”. The earlier Vienna Peace Conference had failed in June, 1855 with the chief negotiator for Austria being Sir Karl Von Buol, who noted that the “uncompromising attitude of the western powers wanted to force a decision on the battlefield.”

Lord Palmerston’s “grandiose plans” were to dismember the Russian Empire so that it would not “dominate trade from the Baltic to the Mediterranean”. After the capture of Sebastopol in September, 1855 and the withdrawal of all Russian forces from the city, Tsar Alexander II defiantly declared that “Sebastopol is not Moscow and the Crimea is not Russia”. Yet Lord Palmerston stated that the Treaty we propose would be “…to confine the future of Russia within her present circumference” and insisted that “Russia has not been beaten enough to make peace possible at the present moment

A Four Point Proposal by Austria was put forward by their representative, Karl Von Buol, as an “ultimatum to Russia” although he noted that “the terms must be moderate enough to be acceptable”. Austria was convinced that it needed to “end the war regardless of the political cost”. The proposal demanded that the Black Sea be open to all commerce and the River Danube be removed from Russia’s control. The Four Points were agreed to by all sides and the war ended. The great cost of lives lost and deep seated resentments continued to simmer in Russia against the European powers, although there were some positive results. The horrific loss of young men, as well as a loss of prestige, compelled Russia to re-structure and upgrade their judicial system and military and, most importantly, Tsar Alexander gave freedom to the serfs.

Just as the concern for Holy Places in the Ottoman Empire was a motive for the Crimean War, so too are religious motives mixed with political motives in Ukraine and Russia. Patriarch Kirril, head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, has become upset at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s independence and wants to re-assert control of Ukraine’s Orthodox churches. Over half of the churches of the Ukraine are still affiliated with Moscow while less than half joined the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Of the 800 or so churches affiliated with Moscow, 400 Russian Orthodox priests appealed to the “Council of Primates of the Ancient Eastern Churches” claiming that Patriarch Kirril was preaching the “doctrine of the Russian World”. The Orthodox priests were upset at the Patriarch’s staunch support of Vladimir Putin during his harsh prosecution of the war in Ukraine.

In our present year, 2022, Vladimir Putin, has Tsarist aspirations and asserts Russia’s intention to re-create a region of influence so as to prevent the expansion of NATO. The Crimean Peninsula has been under the flag of Ukraine from 1954 to 2014 after it was annexed by Russia. But despite this annexation Ukraine continues to refer to Crimea as the “Temporary occupation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sebastopol by Russia”.

If the Ukraine War follows the same destructive path as the original Crimean War, the consequences of which resulted in a fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, and a Europe that became more divided. In the same way, the Ukraine War will most likely result in a society with deep-seated resentments and may take decades to achieve some degree of reconciliation toward those who took part in the violent invasion of their country.

The Historian Tacitus, while discussing Agricola’s conquest of Celtic Britain, related an insightful aphorism: “we hate most those we harm the most” in reference to the Roman policy of compelling servitude upon the conquered. This too could be said of Vladimir Putin’s legacy: that hatred and vindictiveness has been growing in opposition to his plans for conquest, which have been thwarted by Ukrainian resistance and a profound need for independence. Putin’s attempts to reawaken the ghosts of Empire have become more strangely improbable at a time that Russia’s economy continues to shrink as a result of sanctions, an economy that is barely on a par with Canada’s. It is unlikely that in the future Russia will be able to support a military that is comparable to nations with economies ten to twenty times larger.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi took the artifacts back to Iraq in a dedicated airplane this week after his visit to the White House.

Officials of the Bush administration were mostly philistines who had no idea that Iraq is home to some of the most glorious ancient civilizations, and, indeed, was among a handful of sites that invented what we now call civilization (cities, role differentiation, writing, astronomy and other sciences, mathematics, literature and epic).

This cultivated ignorance resulted in the destruction of a great deal of the history of Iraq, which can now never be recovered. I suggested the term “Cliocide” for what we Americans did to the country in wiping out so many documents. Clio is the muse of history, and I fear that in Iraq after the US got done with her she doesn’t look so good.

George W. Bush used demeaning terms for the Iraqis, at one point suggesting that they would soon be ready “to take the training wheels off,” as though he had anything to teach other peoples about good governance, and as though Iraqis were three years old.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson alleged that “white men” had created civilization when Iraqis were “illiterate monkeys.” Let’s not get into his racialized notion of ancient history, and just say, “No.”

Wikipedia notes that the US even used some mounds around cities like Babil (the ancient Babylon) as helipads andfor other military uses. Those mounds contained libraries of clay tablets and other remnants of ancient civilization, and they were pulverized by the heavy machinery and helicopters! Wiki writes,

“US forces under the command of General James T. Conway of the I Marine Expeditionary Force were criticized for building the military base “Camp Alpha”, with a helipad and other facilities on ancient Babylonian ruins during the Iraq War. . . In a report of the British Museum’s Near East department, Dr. John Curtis described how parts of the archaeological site were levelled to create a landing area for helicopters, and parking lots for heavy vehicles.”

“Curtis wrote of the occupation forces:

‘They caused substantial damage to the Ishtar Gate, one of the most famous monuments from antiquity […] US military vehicles crushed 2,600-year-old brick pavements, archaeological fragments were scattered across the site, more than 12 trenches were driven into ancient deposits and military earth-moving projects contaminated the site for future generations of scientists.'”

The US never had enough forces in Iraq to supply basic order, and militias and mafias grew up that funded themselves by antiquities looting and smuggling. W.’s minions either couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about it.

The late Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense, actually went on television and denied there was any looting in Iraq.

The smuggled artifacts just returned by the Biden administration are a small fraction of the country’s — and the world’s — heritage that was looted, and much of the rest has been likely forever lost. And that’s not counting all the artifacts Bush crushed under helicopters and tanks.

I have a friend who is a specialist in ancient Iraq who seriously wondered whether its archeology is over with forever.

Of course, the guerrilla and civil wars and waves of terrorism Bush’s invasion set off in Iraq were much more grave than the archeological losses, but even though we are Americans it is worthwhile shedding a tear for what we did to civilization.

I visited the Iraqi national archives in Baghdad in 2013 and was gravely informed that the Ottoman-era documents for Baghdad Vilayet were in an annex that was bombed by the US Air Force. That is a period I write about as a historian. I wept.

Some 4,000 artifacts were bought by the evangelical Green family behind Hobby Lobby for their vanity project, the “Museum of the Bible” in Washington, D.C. The Greens were apparently insufficiently careful about provenance. These objects were seized by federal authorities and were among the pieces sent home with Mr. al-Kadhimi.

One of the clay tablets tht was seized from the Museum of the Bible was the “dream tablet” of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The tablet was doubly appropriated, physically stolen but then also put to an inappropriate use by an alien culture.

The Epic of Gilgamesh much preceded the Bible, which echoes it in places. But it did not belong in an evangelical museum anyway, because it is one of the first documents of humanist philosophy. It is in part about a quest for immortality, which inevitably fails. The message: you’ll just have to get used to your mortality. It is sort of the opposite of Christian fundamentalism.

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Bonus Video:

Al Jazeera from 2017: “Hobby Lobby fined for buying ancient Iraqi artifacts”