The league of nations' rescue of armenian genocide survivors and the making of modern humanitarianism, 1920-1927

American Historical Review

Volumn 115, Issue 5, 2010, Pages 1315-1339

  Watenpaugh, Keith David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ALTRUISM; ARMENIA; ARTICLE; CHILD; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FEMALE; HISTORY; HOMICIDE; HUMAN; HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE; INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION; LEGAL ASPECT; OTTOMAN EMPIRE; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; REFUGEE; RESCUE WORK; SOUTHERN EUROPE; SURVIVOR; VIOLENCE;

ALTRUISM; ARMENIA; CHILD; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HOMICIDE; HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES; HUMANS; INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES; MEDITERRANEAN REGION; OTTOMAN EMPIRE; REFUGEES; RESCUE WORK; SURVIVORS; VIOLENCE; WOMEN;

EID: 78650537307     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.115.5.1315     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. I have adopted the practice in this article of capitalizing the word "Genocide" when referring to the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians.
2. Archives of the League of Nations, United Nations Organization, Geneva [hereafter ALON-UNOG], Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 1920-1947, Registers of Inmates of the Armenian Orphanage in Aleppo, 1922-1930, 4 vols.
3. Ibid., vol. 2, no. 961, March 25, 1926.
4. A rich literature based on oral history and first-person memoirs has emerged around the topic of rescued captives, most notably Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley, Calif., 1999);
5. Mae M. Derdarian, Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide (Los Angeles, 1997);
6. and Aram Haykaz's autobiographical Ch'ors tari K'iwrtistani lernerun mej [Four Years in the Mountains of Kurdistan] (Antilias, 1972).
7. Estimates range as high as five million deaths from war, famine, civil violence, and genocide in the period. James L. Gelvin, The Israel Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (Cambridge, 2007), 77.
8. On the broad outlines of the political narrative of this period, see David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 (New York, 1989).
9. For a discussion of renewed scholarly interest in the League of Nations, see Susan Pedersen, "Review Essay: Back to the League of Nations", American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007):1091-1117.
10. Recent scholarship on Wilsonianism includes Erez Manela's provocative The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007).
11. Craig Calhoun, "The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action", in Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, eds., Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca, N. Y., 2008), 73-97, 78-79.
12. Western Christian missionary hospitals and schools had been operating in the Eastern Mediterranean since the 1840s. However, that work was generally inscribed in the interstices of the various Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire. Late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century missionaries tended to view non-Western forms of Christianity, including Armenian Apostolic Christianity, as nominally Christian, often insisting on the conversion of native Christians to Protestantism. The entire enterprise was imbued with a distinctly American and European cultural chauvinism. For recent discussions of the ideological and cultural content of missionary work in the nineteenth-century Arab Middle East, see Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, N. Y., 2008);
13. and Heather J. Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton, N. J., 2008).
14. "Although hardly a new idea in the fin-de-siècle, the civilizing mission acquired greater currency in the age of democratic empire; ruling elites in France sought to reconcile themselves and the recently enfranchised masses to intensified overseas conquest by claiming that the newly restored republic, unlike the more conservative European monarchies, would liberate Africans from moral and material want.
15. Alice L. Conklin, "Colonialism and Human Rights: A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895-1914", American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (April 1998):419-442, 420.
16. Gary J. Bass, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York, 2008).
17. Samuel Moyn, "Spectacular Wrongs: Gary Bass's Freedom's Battle", The Nation, October 13, 2008, http://krogers-dev. the nation.com/doc/20081013/moyn.
18. This transition was noted and endorsed at the time. As Frank T. Carlton observed in 1906, "The opening years of the twentieth century are witnessing the development of a new and powerful humanitarian movement. The economic developments of the preceding quarter of a century furnished the germ. This movement is concerned with social settlements, charity work, educational reform, municipal betterment, civil service reform and socialism." Carlton, "Humanitarianism, Past and Present", International Journal of Ethics 17, no. 1 (October 1906):48-55, 54.
19. See Merle Curti, "The History of American Philanthropy as a Field of Research", American Historical Review 2, no. 2 (January 1957):352-363.
20. The shift to the "scientific" management of humanitarian crises or disasters accompanied the emergence of the social sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century.
21. See Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Baltimore, 2000).
22. Merle Curti, "The Changing Pattern of Certain Humanitarian Organizations", Pressure Groups and Propaganda, Special Issue, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 179 (May 1935):59-67.
23. Florence Brewer Boeckel, "Women in International Affairs", Women in the Modern World, Special Issue, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 143 (May 1929):230-248, 232-236.
24. Dame Rachel Crowdy, head of the Opium and Social Questions Section of the League Secretariat, observed: "You may disarm the world, you may reduce your troops or abolish your battleships, but unless you introduce better economic conditions, better social conditions and better health conditions into the world, you will not be able to maintain peace.
25. Crowdy, "The Humanitarian Activities of the League of Nations", Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 6, no. 3 (May 1927):153-169, 153.
26. Eric D. Weitz, "From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions", American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008):1313-1343, 1339.
27. I discuss the evolution of the mandate system and its reception by Arab liberal nationalists in Syria and Lebanon in my Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, N. J., 2006);
28. see also Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945 (Princeton, N. J., 1988).
29. "Modern humanitarianism's roots are located in the West. Although these values might have universal appeal, or might have become universal as a consequence of interactions and cross-cultural dialogue, the history of humanitarianism reflects many of the tensions that exist between the 'West' and the non-Western world. Indeed, one of humanitarianism's defining traits is the attempt to spread the values and practices of the 'international community' to places where they are either absent or dormant." Michael Barnett, "Humanitarianism as a Scholarly Vocation", in Barnett and Weiss, Humanitarianism in Question, 235-263, 241.
30. Calhoun, "The Imperative to Reduce Suffering", 81-82.
31. Carole Fink, "The League of Nations and the Minorities Question", World Affairs 157, no. 4 (Spring 1995):197-205.
32. See in particular Raphael Lemkin's discussion of the technique of cultural genocide in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New York, 1944), 84-86.
33. On this narrative, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N. J., 2009)
34. and his earlier "Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe", Daedalus 126, no. 2 (1997):47-63. As Weitz's "From the Vienna to the Paris System" also makes clear, "the history of human rights [is] a great deal messier than many accounts in this newly burgeoning field suggest" (1315). Far from inscribing a smooth upward line of expanding freedoms and rights, seamlessly connecting Enlightenment ideas with the post-World War II enactment of human rights in international law, the modern concept of human rights is linked, in part, to the form of humanitarianism emerging alongside late colonialism, what Weitz calls "the development of the civilizing mission into a comprehensive program", as well as to the kinds of international politics of minorities practiced in nineteenth-century Europe and the interwar Eastern Mediterranean.
35. ALON-UNOG, 12/15998/4631, Deportation of Women and Children in Turkey, Asia Minor, and the Neighbouring Territories, Report Presented by the Fifth Committee, Geneva, September 21, 1921 [hereafter+ Report of the Fifth Committee].
36. See Dzovinar Kévonian, R éfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: Les acteurs européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l'entre-deux-guerres (Paris, 2004).
37. "Article 142", Treaty of Peace with Turkey. Signed at Sèvres, August 10, 1920 (London, 1920).
38. Writing to the League in May 1920, suffragist Helena Swanwick suggested, "This question [of] the enslavement and dishonouring of women and children all over the East as a result of the war is one which might well be taken up by a special Commission of the League of Nations upon which women of standing in the East would be found to take an active part.
39. ALON-UNOG, 638 12/4631/647, H. M. Swanwick to Robert Cecil, May 20, 1920. Writing to the League a few years later, Emily Robinson, secretary of the Armenian Red Cross and Refugee Fund of Great Britain, argued: "will you also kindly represent the intense bitterness of feeling that has been fostered on many sides owing to the fact that many scores of thousands of Armenian women and children are still detained in Moslem houses, where they have been captive since 1915. The Armistice with Turkey provided for the release of 'all prisoners of war.' Only the men were released and the terms of the Armistice as regards women have not been carried out... The present state of things is hazardous in the extreme to the cause of peace in the East besides being a scandal and a disgrace to the civilization of the 20th century." ALON-UNOG, R 1763 48/25899/38147, Letter from Emily Robinson, Secretary of the Armenian Red Cross and Refugee Fund (Great Britain), September 28, 1924; emphasis in the original.
40. For a recent discussion of the Armenian Genocide, including its denial, and a review of the current literature, see Ronald Grigor Suny, "Truth in Telling: Reconciling Realities in the Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians", American Historical Review 114, no. 4 (October 2009):930-946.
41. See also Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, 6th rev. ed. (New York, 2004);
42. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005);
43. and Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, Conn., 2008)
44. in particular chap. 10, "The Armenian Genocide: National Chauvinism in the Waning Ottoman Empire", 395-416.
45. Alan Duben, "Household Formation in Late Ottoman Istanbul", International Journal of Middle East Studies 22, no. 4 (1990):419-435, 422-424.
46. Many of the rescue narratives found in the Aleppo Rescue Home's intake forms describe the intensely precarious living conditions that women and children survivors faced in the cities and countryside of Upper Mesopotamia and Southern Anatolia. For example, Loutfie Bilemdjian, daughter of Adour and Mariam, who entered the home in 1926 at age seventeen, had been abducted by a Chechen irregular during the deportations and sold to a Kurd, who then sold her to a wealthy Turk named Mahmut Rasha [or Pasha] in Veranshehir. ALON-UNOG, Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 1920-1947, Registers of Inmates of the Armenian Orphanage in Aleppo, 1922-1930, vol. 3, no. 1010, May 18, 1926, 478.
47. Similarly, Fehmi, son of Terthagian, was taken by a Bedouin from a passing deportation caravan at Mardin and sold to a Christian Arab named Habib, who taught him the tailoring trade. Habib subsequently fell on hard times and gave Fehmi to a local Turkish family, who treated him poorly, causing him to flee to Aleppo. vol. 2, no. 962, March 25, 1926, 508.
48. Dikranouhi, daughter of Panos, who entered the home at age sixteen in 1925, meaning that she had been six years old at the beginning of the Genocide, explained that her father had died while serving in the Ottoman army, and she was deported with her mother. On the road, a Kurd took them both and forced her mother into servile concubinage. When the mother later fell ill and died, Dikranouhi became a servant in the man's household.
49. When she reached sexual maturity at the age of fourteen, he attempted to take her as a concubine, but she fled and was abducted by an Arab in a neighboring village, where she became an abused maidservant. vol. 2, no. 820, September 18, 1925, 523.
50. On the besleme, see Nazan Maksudyan, "Foster-Daughter or Servant, Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire", Journal of Historical Sociology 21, no. 4 (December 2008):488-512. Several of the narratives collected by the Neutral House, two of which appear later in this article, describe the experiences of children and women who fell into this other category. For a compelling description of the experience of a group of upper-and middle-class Armenian college graduates sold or kidnapped into elite Istanbul Muslim households
51. see Mabel Evelyn Elliott, Beginning Again at Ararat (New York, 1924), 24-28, in which Elliott, who was an American physician and the medical director of the American humanitarian organization Near East Relief, describes her meeting with a group of rescued women at a rehabilitation center established by the organization in 1920.
52. As waves of Caucasian Muslims took refuge in Anatolia as a consequence of Russian expansion into the Southern Caucasus circa 1864, the Ottoman state placed "unattached" Muslim girls with elite and middle-class Ottoman families in order to forestall their being sold by their refugee parents. Like the Armenian children during and after the Genocide, they belonged to the household, were generally employed as domestic help, and could be used as sexual objects.
53. Ferhunde Özbay et al., "Adoption and Fostering: Turkey", in Suad Joseph, general ed., Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, vol. 2: Family, Law and Politics (Leiden, 2005), 5-6.
54. While some recent scholarship has emerged on children who are the product of mass rape, the question of child transfer-which is an element of the crime of genocide-remains largely unstudied.
55. See R. Charli Carpenter, "Surfacing Children: Limitations of Genocidal Rape Discourse", Human Rights Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2000):428-477.
56. The phrase is used in Turkish human rights lawyer Fethiye Çetin's memoir, Anneannem: Anlati (Istanbul, 2004);
57. English trans., My Grandmother (London, 2008), 102.
58. "We have to do with many, who have lived in slavery similar to that of the one in 'The Uncle Tom's Cabin.' They have been purchased and sold more than once, have drudged to obtain only unsufficient food and endured much ill treatment." 10. Baalbek to Geneva, August 24, 1922, enclosure in ALON-UNOG, Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 1920-1947.
59. This idea of "chaos" resonates with similar Indian and Pakistani efforts to reverse the abduction and sequestration of Hindu and Muslim women at the time of India's partition: "The proper regulation of women's sexuality had to be restored, and the sexual chaos that mass abduction represented had to be reversed. Thus, the individual and collective sins of men who behaved without restraint or responsibility in a surge of communal 'madness' had to be redeemed by nations who understood their duty in, once again, bringing about sexual discipline and, through it, the desired reinforcement of community and national identities." Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition (New Brunswick, N. J., 1998), 108.
60. For a comprehensive description of the rescue movement in Aleppo, see Vahram L. Shemmassian, "The League of Nations and the Reclamation of Armenian Genocide Survivors", in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, N. J., 2003), 81-111.
61. On accounts of early rescue efforts and attempts at reintegration by Armenian organizations, see Vahé Tachjian, "Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide", Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 1 (2009):60-80. As an American Near East Relief official, Stanley E. Kerr participated in several of these rescues from Aleppo, including the recovery of fifty children from a Bedouin encampment.
62. See Kerr, The Lions of Marash: Personal Experiences with American Near East Relief, 1919-1922 (Albany, N. Y., 1973), 43-48.
63. As Matthias Bjørnlund concludes, "She saw herself as an aid worker and rescue worker, and, increasingly, as an activist working for national self-determination for the oppressed... Armenians who had been... almost completely eradicated by the Ottoman Empire." Bjørnlund, "Karen Jeppe, Aage Meyer Benedictsen, and the Ottoman Armenians: National Survival in Imperial and Colonial Settings", Haigazian Armenological Review 28 (2008):9-43, 9. For a discussion of early Scandinavian relief/missionary efforts in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean
64. see Inger Marie Okkenhaug, "Women on a Mission! Scandinavian Welfare and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1905-1917", in Nefissa Naguib and Inger Marie Okkenhaug, eds., Interpreting Welfare and Relief in the Middle East (Leiden, 2008), 57-82. As Okkenhaug observes, unlike American and British Protestant missionaries (and the local Apostolic church), Scandinavians were primarily concerned with addressing the health and welfare of women, especially widows, through education and small-scale commercial development. They also pioneered the use of media in raising awareness of need in their home countries.
65. Karen Jeppe, "Account of the Situation of the Armenians in Syria and of My Own Work amongst Them from the 1st of May til the 1st of September 1922", 18. Enclosure in ALON-UNOG, Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 1920-1947.
66. Karen Jeppe, "Account of the Situation of the Armenians in Syria and of My Own Work amongst Them from the 1st of May til the 1st of September 1922", 18. Enclosure in ALON-UNOG, Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 1920-1947, 15.
67. Karen Jeppe, "Account of the Situation of the Armenians in Syria and of My Own Work amongst Them from the 1st of May til the 1st of September 1922", 18. Enclosure in ALON-UNOG, Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 14-15.
68. Calhoun observes that this phenomenon is also a reflection of the changing nature of religion and religious vocation in the late nineteenth century; "The Imperative to Reduce Suffering", 79.
69. Kāmilal-Ghazzī, Kitāb Nahral-dhahab fītarīkh Halab, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Aleppo, 1991-1993;
70. original ed., Aleppo, 1923-1926).
71. original ed., Aleppo, 1923-1926 3:557.
72. original ed., Aleppo, 1923-1926 3:557.
73. original ed., Aleppo, 1923-1926, 3:558.
74. original ed., Aleppo, 1923-1926, 3:558.
75. On the changing nature of the family, and especially the role of women in the interwar period, see Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 1999), 31-35.
76. Beginning in the late Ottoman period, all orphans housed in state institutions were considered Muslims. This was especially the case for foundlings, even when evidence of their mothers' religious affiliation may have been present. The records of renaming in this case suggest that when orphaned or abandoned older children entered a state orphanage, they were still able to state their original names. The clerks subsequently changed those names in accordance with policy. See Nazan Maksudyan, "The Fight over Nobody's Children: Religion, Nationality and Citizenship of Foundlings in the Late Ottoman Empire", New Perspectives on Turkey 41 (2009):151-179, 161.
77. Report of the Fifth Committee, 356.
78. "Obituary of Emma Cushman", American Journal of Nursing 31, no. 4 (April 1931):417-419.
79. The Ottoman Red Crescent Society, the Ottoman cognate of the Red Cross Society, was founded when the empire ratified the First Geneva Convention in 1865. Little-used until the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877, it was disestablished during the reign of Abdulhamid II and reestablished in the Young Turk revolutionary period in 1911. See Nadir Ozbek, Osmanli Imparatorlugu'nda Sosyal Devlet: Siyaset, Iktidar ve Mesruiyet, 1876-1914 (Istanbul, 2002);
80. Ozbek, "Defining the Public Sphere during the Late Ottoman Empire: War, Mass Mobilization and the Young Turk Regime, 1908-1918", Middle East Studies 43, no. 5 (September 2007):795-809;
81. and Henri Coursier, La Croix-Rouge internationale (Paris, 1959).
82. See Zaruhi Pahri (Zarouhi Bahri), Keank'is vepe [My Biography] (Beirut, 1995). She recounts in her memoir one case from the house. When a very pretty young woman was brought from a Turkish home, Bahri arranged to have her marry rather than be institutionalized. The future husband asked Bahri and his bride to keep her background a secret, even from his parents, presumably to conceal the shame of her rape and lost virginity. The lack of a larger body of Armenian language sources is due in no small part to how recounting the experience of enslavement, kidnapping, rape, and sequestration has tended to evoke a series of responses ranging from shame to outright denial in the Armenian diaspora; only recently have younger, particularly ethnic Armenian Turkish scholars, including Lerna Ekmekcioglu and Melissa Bilal, begun to address this history through archival and oral historical research. At the time, as Bahri's story indicates, there were clear practical reasons for concealment in social situations that placed a premium on modesty. It also signals how the rescued women and female children were caught between two patriarchal systems.
83. ALON-UNOG, 12/15100/4631, Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul to Major Arnold, August 7, 1919.
84. ALON-UNOG, C. 281m.218, Letter from Miss Cushman (to W. A. Kennedy), August 25, 1921.
85. ALON-UNOG, C. 281m.218, Letter from Miss Cushman (to W. A. Kennedy), August 25, 1921., 2.
86. ALON-UNOG, 12/15100/4631, Index of Children Brought to the Neutral House, July 1920.
87. ALON-UNOG, 12/15100/4631, Index of Children Brought to the Neutral House, July 1920.
88. Halide Edib Adivar, Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York, 1926).
89. Halide Edib Adivar, The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York, 1928), 17.
90. Halide Edib Adivar, The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York, 1928), 16.
91. Halide Edib Adivar, The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York, 1928), 18.
92. ALON-UNOG, 12/15100/4631, W. A. Kennedy, "Interim Report", August 25, 1921, 3.
93. Hüsnü Ada, "The First Ottoman Civil Society Organization in the Service of the Ottoman State: The Case of the Ottoman Red Crescent" (M. A. thesis, Sabanci University, Istanbul, 2004), 100-101.
94. Report of the Fifth Committee, 359-360.
95. Report of the Fifth Committee, 360.
96. Report of the Fifth Committee, 358-359.
97. Cemiyet-i Akvam ve Türkiyede Ermeni ve Rumlar (Istanbul, 1921), published simultaneously in English and French. Quotations taken from the English translation. Throughout the text, passages deny that slavery persisted or that the transfer and sale of young women and children had occurred. For example, "We claim very openly and positively that other than the Greek and Armenian servants who in return of definite salaries customarily stay in the houses in CONSTANTINOPLE, there is not a single Greek or Armenian woman or child kept forcibly in the Turkish families... [It is] obvious that the incidents published about Turkey with mean intentions are nothing other than mere imagination and dirty calumny" (29-30).
98. ALON-UNOG, RG 638 C.181.m.99.1922. IV, Djevad to Secretary General, Geneva, March 31, 1922, 4; emphasis added.
99. o al-Mawdudi, authored pamphlets defending Turkey with titles such as The State of Christians in Turkey (1922)
100. and The Tyrannies of the Greeks in Smyrna (1922).
101. Cited in Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford, 1996), 19.
102. ALON-UNOG, Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 1920-1947, internal document no. 9771, Memorandum to the Secretary General, "Relationship between the Resolution Adopted by the Assembly of the League of Nations at Its Meeting Held on Wednesday 15 December, 1920 (Morning), and Article 142 of the Turkish Treaty", Geneva, December 18, 1920.
103. ALON-UNOG, Publications of the League of Nations, IV. Social. 1927. IV.6, Report of the Commission for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near East, 1.
104. This shift was also a feature of League efforts at "population unmixing", and a manifestation of the conclusion that restoring refugees to their homes in formerly multiethnic empires contradicted the established policy of rationalizing nation-states. Weitz, "From the Vienna to the Paris System", 1338.
105. See Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (New York, 2003).
106. This process of emblematizing anticipates a phenomenon observed by Liisa Malkki in the way the international community treated Hutu refugees in 1970s Tanzania. For Malkki, bureaucratic humanitarian intervention transformed the political and social categorization of the refugees in a profound manner that had far-ranging implications for their assistance. "Refugees stop being specific persons and become pure victims in general: universal man, universal woman, universal child... The problem is that the necessary delivery of relief... is accompanied by a host of other, unannounced social processes and practices that are dehistoricizing. This dehistoricizing universalism creates a context in which it is difficult for people in the refugee category to be approached as historical actors rather than simply as mute victims." Malkki, "Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization", Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (August 1996):377-404, 378.
107. See Ayşe Gül Altinay and Fethiye Cetin, eds., Torunlar [Grandchildren] (Istanbul, 2009)
108. for a collection of oral history memoirs of the grandchildren of "hidden Armenian" women. Cetin's 2004 memoir also tells about her discovery that her grandmother, whom she knew growing up as Şeher, was born with the name Hranuysh and was a child survivor of the Genocide. Cetin retells Şeher/Hranuysh's story in a way that is hauntingly reminiscent of Zabel's: after the men and older boys of her village of Havva were executed, the women and children were sent on a march toward Mesopotamia. Among the horrors she witnessed en route was her grandmother drowning two of her infant grandchildren only to then fling herself into the water after them. Eventually Şeher and the other girls in the caravan were separated and "adopted" by various officers, she by a Colonel Huseyin. Later she learned that her brother Khoren, renamed Ahmet, had been sold to a local farmer and worked as a shepherd. Their father, who had emigrated to America before the war, returned to Aleppo, where he located her mother. He sent word via smugglers to both of his children for them to join him. Khoren did, but Hranuysh, now named Şeher and married to a local Turkish man, was unable to do so. Nevertheless, she maintained some contact with her family until the 1950s. A respected and beloved grandmother, Şeher/Hranuysh practiced Armenian rituals, including the baking of a sweet bread, çorek, at Easter, which she shared with other former Armenian women in the village; she and other former Armenians never quite fully assimilated and maintained in forms of practice a memory of their origins. As an adult, Cetin renewed contacts with her American-Armenian cousins. Anneannem: Anlati (My Grandmother), 58-97 7 (references to English translation).