Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I by Louis Farshee

Author:Louis Farshee [Farshee, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Published: 2014-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

In the years before the Great War and the imposition of land and sea blockades, Zgharta was a market town. Itinerant merchants from Syria’s Akkar District and nearby Tripoli brought camels and mules loaded with grain and other goods to market. Local and neighboring farmers and others also brought their produce and other items to sell or trade. There were dozens of villages in the Zgharta district, and the market was a lively place. Depending upon the season a wide variety of items might be for sale: goats, sheep, poultry, fowl, olives, fruits and vegetables of every kind, herbs, spices, beans, rice, wheat, and salt, plus clothing, household items, and bric-a-brac.8 After the Turks cordoned off Mount Lebanon, merchants from Tripoli, Akkar, and other parts of Syria were no longer permitted to travel there.

Some historians and other writers theorize that the Famine’s severity was partly attributable to the hoarding of food. This was reportedly a serious problem in some towns and villages where people with more food than they needed did not share it with hungry neighbors. But this did not occur in Zgharta. Villagers who had sufficient flour baked bread for those who had none.9 The community was organized in such a way that everyone was sufficiently fed.10 Draft animals that had escaped government requisition were shared on a communal basis. Whether the organization was formal or informal, everyone collaborated in the quest for survival and none of the villagers died from starvation.

That does not mean that the town did not face great economic and physical suffering. When the Ottoman Empire entered the war, food prices began to escalate.11 Between the demise of the Zgharta market and the havoc brought on by the locust invasion and subsequent Allied sea blockade, the Zghartawis found it necessary to find and obtain affordably priced food on their own. Because of the rising food prices, many in Mount Lebanon became the victims of overpriced commodities sold by money-hungry or black-market merchants. Some of the grain sellers in nearby Tripoli, a city and district under the governorate of Damascus and not Mount Lebanon, were unscrupulous in their business practices. A favorite scam was to sell grain to an individual from Mount Lebanon and then report the buyer to the Turks.12 It was an ugly practice, but lucrative for the informant. The announced policy of the Turks was to reward anyone who told them about smugglers by giving five to ten percent of the confiscated cargo to the informant.13 This meant that those Tripoli merchants who sold grain and reported the buyer to the Turks could retrieve some of the previously sold goods at no cost to themselves and then sell it again, continuing their cycle of duplicity. To merchants with this penchant for greed, a hungry human being was a profit center.

Money was in short supply. Available options to raise cash often included selling household and personal possessions, sometimes at bargain-basement prices. Another option was to borrow money from lenders in Mount Lebanon,

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