Nadene Goldfoot
Lebanon's population was made up of Muslim Arabs, Maronite Christians and a few Jews. Christians were once a majority inside Lebanon and are still a majority in the diaspora of the nearly 14 million Lebanese people living outside of Lebanon. The president of the country is traditionally a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. The majority are Muslims. Jews lived in Beirut, Tyre and mainly in Aleppo.
The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915–1918) was a period of mass starvation during World War I that resulted in 200,000 deaths. Allied forces--Great Britain, France, USA Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States who blockaded the Eastern Mediterranean, as they had done with the German Empire in Europe, in order to strangle the economy with the knowledge that it might lead to a profound impact on civilians in the region.
At the outbreak of war, the arid Mount Lebanon was a semi-autonomous area within the powerful Ottoman Empire. Its economy was based on the production of raw silk, which was woven by women in mills and exported to Europe.
But the Ottoman alliance with Germany caused the Allies to cut off international trade routes, damaging the silk trade and choking the economy. Food was scarce and prioritized for the soldiers of the Ottoman war effort. Turkish soldiers below
A Jewish community existed in Lebanon since King Solomon's days (961-920 BCE), when Solomon procured Cedars of Lebanon for the Temple, the population concentrating mainly in Beirut, the capital, but also in Tripoli, Tyre and Sidon, and they engaged in commerce.
The situation was exacerbated by Jamal-Djemal Pasha, commander of the Fourth Army of the Ottoman Empire, who barred crops from neighbouring Syria from entering Mount Lebanon.
Ahmed Djemal Pasha (1872-1922) was one of the leading members of the Young Turk administration prior to and throughout World War One, and one of few initially pro-Entente senior politicians. Holding numerous wartime posts Djemal also served at the head of Fourth Army on the Palestine Front. He further held the military governorship of Ottoman Syria, operating what was in effect a huge personal fiefdom encompassing Palestine and the majority of Arabia. He was known to be a cruel man.
Additionally, a swarm of locusts devoured the remaining crops, creating a famine that led to the deaths of half of the population of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a semi-autonomous subdivision of the Ottoman Empire and the precursor of modern-day Lebanon.
To counter the Allied blockade, the Ottomans adopted a severe policy of acquisition by which all food supplies were prioritized for the army. The crisis further exacerbated a black market run by well-connected usurers.
The Ottoman government had appropriated all of the empire's railway services for military use, which disrupted the procurement of crops to parts of the empire. One of the first cities to be hit by the grain shortage was Beirut, the capital.
On 13 November 1914, only 2 weeks after the Ottoman Empire joined the war, a group of citizens stormed the Beirut municipality to warn the municipal council of the severe shortage of wheat and flour in the city. The train freight cars that regularly transported grains from Aleppo, had not arrived and the bakery shelves were empty. Angry mobs looted the bakeries of whatever little reserves of flour and grain they had left.
The municipal council dispatched a message to then Beirut Vali Bekir Sami Kunduh who requested grain provisions from the governor of Aleppo Vilayet and urged the Ottoman authorities to prioritize grain shipping to Beirut.
Acquiring train freight cars to transport anything to the Beirut Vilayet was impossible without paying large bribes to military commanders and to the railroad authorities. Grain prices began to soar, which prompted the president of Beirut's municipal body, Ahmad Mukhtar Beyhum, to address the grain supply bottlenecks himself.
On 14 November 1914, Beyhum took off to Aleppo, where he negotiated with authorities, securing grain freight cars from the Ottoman Fourth Army. The wheat was paid for from the municipal treasury. Grain freights arrived to Beirut on 19 November 1914 to the relief of the masses; however, the crisis was to worsen as both reports of the Ottoman officials and correspondence from the Syrian Protestant College indicated that food shortages were to become a daily occurrence past November.
Around 200,000 people starved to death at a time when the population of Mount Lebanon was estimated to be 400,000 people. The Mount Lebanon famine caused the highest fatality rate by population during World War I. Bodies were piled in the streets and people were reported to be eating street animals. Some people were said to have resorted to cannibalism. There were reports of bloated bodies dead in the street, even cannibalism. One account from a Jesuit priest tells of a father coming to confess he had eaten his own children.
Soup kitchens were set up but had little effect in relieving the starving population. The Lebanese community in Egypt funded the shipping of food supplies to the Lebanese mainland through Arwad. This assistance was delivered to the Maronite patriarchate (Christians) who distributed it to the populace through its convents.
The Syrian–Mount Lebanon Relief Committee was "formed in June of 1916 under the chairmanship of Najib Maalouf and the Assistant Chairmanship of Ameen Rihani" in the United States.
The first memorial to memorialize the victims of the famine was erected in Beirut in 2018, marking the 100th year since the end of the famine. The site is called "The Great Famine Memorial", and is located in front of the Saint-Joseph University It was erected based on initiatives by Lebanese historian Christian Taoutel (curator of the memorial) and Lebanese writer Ramzi Toufic Salame.
The finances of the world affect the affairs just as much as the people's religion does. As a prelude to
Before World War I, the scene was set for further problems. European economic activities that grew significantly during the 19th century benefited mostly Christians (and some wealthy Muslim and Jewish merchants) but damaged the livelihood of Muslim artisans and traders, members of the traditional middle classes. They and members of the lower classes were also badly affected by the newly introduced Ottoman reforms of the Tanzimat in 1839, 1856, and 1876, namely, regular taxation, mandatory recruitment to the army as well as some reduction in the role of and equal status granted to non-Muslims, particularly Christians. This would be the Dhimmi status, 2nd class citizens which Jews also were who had to pay more taxes and were under certain stipulations not required by others.
All these developments – European intervention, the Tanzimat reforms and periodically provocative Christian behavior – led to Muslim-Christian tension and violence, particularly in Aleppo in 1850 and in Damascus in 1860.
In Damascus thousands of Christians were massacred by Muslims, assisted actively by . Around the same time Druze in massacred many Christian Maronites in an ongoing attempt to curb their socio-political ascendancy in Mount Lebanon.
Resource;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon****
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Lebanon
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30098000
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