In studying inter-communal violence, there is a tendency to over-emphasize the ethnic and religious causes of conflict, while ignoring underlying social and economic factors. A nuanced approach that recognizes historical lessons – and their limits – is essential to guide reconciliation and long-term stability.
TEL AVIV – At the “end of history,” it seems, come genocide, ethnic cleansing, and a seismic explosion of tribalism and identity politics. These feral forces, and the socioeconomic tensions that often incite them, have time and again shattered nations, empires, and international politics. What can history teach us about preventing, and recovering from, such atavistic moments?
Inter-communal co-existence has almost always been central to empires’ pursuit of stability. It was the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, not the mastery of its imperial heyday, that opened the gates to the genocidal campaigns that accompanied the emergence of modern Turkey in the aftermath of World War I, leading to the deaths of almost two million mostly Christian, Assyrian, and Greek citizens of the defunct empire.
This quest for ethnic and religious purity led, for example, to one of the most vicious catastrophes of the modern age: the destruction of the Ottoman Empire’s most cosmopolitan city, Smyrna, by Turkish nationalists. Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 offers a grim and vivid description of the event, which included the slaughter of more than 100,000 people, with millions more left homeless.
But as the University of Oxford historian Eugene Rogan shows in his magnificent new book, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World, the causes of massacres are often more complicated. Notably, there is a tendency to over-emphasize ethnic and religious tensions and to overlook underlying social and economic factors.
From Social Change to Violent Chaos
As the Ottoman Empire crumbled in the mid-nineteenth century, minority groups grew increasingly assertive, including in Greater Syria, which encompassed modern Lebanon and Syria. In Mount Lebanon – some 60 miles outside of Damascus – the Christian Maronites were economically and socially better off than the Druze community of heterodox Muslims, just as Christians were better off than Muslims in Syria, thanks partly to the cultural influence of Western powers.
The Ottoman authorities, for their part, resented French and British intervention in the empire’s affairs. While their efforts to push back were mostly half-hearted, they were complicit with the Druze in their bloody campaigns against Christians in the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, it was the partition of Mount Lebanon into Maronite and Druze provinces in 1842 that exacerbated tensions between the groups, leading to a bloody clash in 1844 and then to the deadly conflagrations of 1860.
The violence erupted in Mount Lebanon on May 23, and in less than two months, between 7,000 and 11,000 Christians were killed, and hundreds of villages and religious establishments were burned to the ground. Had European powers not intervened to bring an end to the carnage – which had been made possible partly by the Ottoman-Druze alliance – the death toll would have been even higher.
Violence in Lebanon was bound to spill over into other parts of Greater Syria, particularly Damascus – the main focus of Rogan’s study – where thousands of Christian refugees sought shelter. And, indeed, on July 9, Damascus was gripped by a massacre of its own. Over the course of just three days, the city’s Christian quarters were looted and set on fire. Some 5,000 people – roughly 15% of the Christian population – were slaughtered by their Muslim neighbors and others who came from nearby villages to join in the killing spree.
As Rogan makes clear, while religion certainly factored into the tensions, the Damascus “events” – like the violence in Lebanon – had their roots in socioeconomic change, driven largely by the commercial penetration of Greater Syria by European powers that began in the late eighteenth century. Starting in 1839, the Tanzimat – a series of modernizing reforms, reflecting European ideas and intended to stem rising nationalism among groups within the empire – compounded the problem.
The Ottoman Empire declared that all of its subjects were equal. But for many Muslims, emancipation of the Christians (and the Jews) – who had previously been second-class citizens, required to pay specific taxes to secure state protection – upended the “natural” order. Such a reversal could be made sustainable only with a kind of “new deal” that would bring prosperity for all. Unfortunately, the Ottoman authorities recognized this only after the events of 1860.
So, in the years that preceded the massacres, Muslim communities watched their Christian counterparts’ socioeconomic fortunes improve significantly, and observed deepening cultural interactions with Western ideas, which they viewed with suspicion and disdain. When the violence erupted, Muslim rioters attacked European consulates for their presumed responsibility for the Tanzimat. They also focused their massacre on Bāb Tūmā, Damascus’s most opulent Christian quarter, while mostly ignoring working-class Christian neighborhoods, though one can always argue that they were merely looking for the best loot.
Rogan highlights another critical factor that can enable (or prevent) violence: who is in charge. While heightened inter-ethnic tensions in Damascus were almost a foregone conclusion amid the conflict between the Druze and Christian Maronites in Mount Lebanon, the simmering conflict was allowed to boil over on the watch of an incompetent official, Damascus Governor Ahmad Pasha.
What Reconciliation Requires
Rogan’s account highlights just how deadly the combination of inter-communal tensions and incompetent leadership can be, especially in a city as diverse as nineteenth-century Damascus. But he also offers a message of hope and humanity, and a lesson about the capacity of fractured societies to reconcile and rebuild.
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Consider the story of Emir Abdelkader, a religious and military leader who had fought against the French colonial invasion of Algiers in the early nineteenth century. One might expect that, after settling in Damascus, he would have fought for the emancipation of his Muslim brethren. Instead, he led a crucial intervention during the 1860 massacre, with his own paramilitary force – seemingly armed by the French – saving thousands of Christians. (Pasha, by contrast, barricaded himself and ignored pleas from the European consuls to act.)
More broadly, while the massacres shook the Ottoman Empire to its core, exposing its many suppressed and/or carefully managed vulnerabilities, they also triggered an impressive effort at reform and reconciliation by the Ottoman administration. This years-long process proved that religious differences do not have to preclude coexistence. When everyone has access to greater opportunities and rising prosperity, and under the watchful eye of capable leadership, social peace can prevail.
Damascus owed its success largely to Governor Fuad Pasha, who continued advancing the Tanzimat, but introduced the much-needed “new deal” for socioeconomic development, exemplified by the construction of new buildings and lavish marketplaces. He struck a delicate balance between deterrence, with perpetrators of violence facing harsh punishments, and social remediation. By protecting minorities and delivering stability, Pasha forestalled intervention by foreign powers under the pretext of restoring order. His successor, Mehmed Rashid Pasha, also deserves credit for taking up the mantle of peace and stability.
Crucially, the leaders of Damascus did not fully compensate affected Christians for their losses, but instead offered them a credible promise of a better future. This model is relevant to conflict situations everywhere, from Palestine to Ukraine: justice in post-conflict environments – the term today is “transitional justice” – can never be complete, and unconditional demands for it have often been the enemy of peace.
This insight was not lost on Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu: it was by convincing South Africa’s aggrieved black community that restorative justice, not retribution, was the key to a better future that these leaders were able to secure a peaceful transition from apartheid. Peace often represents a trade-off, in which the victims of the past are given qualified justice, for the sake of ensuring that there are not more victims in the future.
The Limits of History
Clues about what the future may hold can come only from studying the past, so surprises and setbacks are all but guaranteed. In any case, inter-communal peace is not an end goal which, once achieved, can be counted on to endure forever. For evidence of that, look no further than the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90, and the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and continues to rage today.
Christian survivors of the genocide that accompanied the fall of the Ottoman Empire largely either fled to the West or settled in Iraq and Syria, where military dictators offered them security in exchange for their economic acumen. But when dictators like Saddam Hussein in Iraq were toppled, so, too, were the minority protections they had offered. Post-Saddam Iraq’s Christian population plummeted, from as many as 1.5 million in 2003 to less than 500,000 today. Nearly one-third of Syria’s Christians – some 600,000 people – have fled Syria since the civil war began.
As for Lebanon – where Christians actually hold political power – the Christian population fell from 78% of the total in 1910 to just 34% a century later, owing partly to low birthrates, but mostly to emigration, fueled by a hostile political environment. Over the same period, the share of the Christian population of the Middle East as a whole dropped from 14% to just 4%.
But there is a broader challenge that arises when we try to apply the lessons of the past: the tendency to overestimate the commonalities between historical and current events. Though Rogan has crafted a superb work of historical research, and his analytical framework offers insights into how societies can overcome entrenched animosities, he may well have fallen into this trap, applying the lessons of the Damascus events to situations that have scant, if any, resemblance to them.
To understand the problem, consider what makes a genocide. Possibly inspired by Raul Hilberg’s argument that the elimination of a people is a “step-by-step operation,” Gregory Stanton has developed a theory that genocide is a process that develops in ten stages: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. At each of these stages – which should be imagined more like a Russian nesting doll than a linear series – preventive measures, such as intervention by a third party, can arrest the slide toward annihilation.
Consider two genocidal moments that took place during the wars that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. In Srebrenica, the Dutch contingent that had been deployed precisely to prevent a mass atrocity proved incompetent, indifferent, or both, and Bosnian Serb forces ended up brutally murdering more than 8,000 people in 1995. But in Kosovo four years later, NATO airstrikes humbled Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and the Bosnian Serbs, arresting the slide toward genocide at the crucial extermination stage.
This squares with Rogan’s conclusion that the Damascus events did not develop into a total genocide, because a group of high-profile Muslims stepped in to cut the killing spree short. Nonetheless, Rogan’s description of the Damascus events as a genocidal moment looks rather forced – an attempt to tap into the contemporary debate about such moments in other fractured societies and conflicts.
Even those who, like me, are skeptical of using Procrustean constructs like Stanton’s “ten stages” framework to explain complex historical events – or human affairs in general – would agree that genocide does not just happen. True genocide requires both systematic preparation and a capacity for execution. A sudden eruption of mob violence, like the Damascus massacres, is a pogrom, not a genocidal moment.
Moreover, the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide by the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” But as Rogan rightly shows, the Damascus events were closer to a class war than a religiously motivated assault. (It is even possible that lower-class Jews took advantage of the chaos to loot Christian properties.) That is why a grand socioeconomic deal was enough to enable Muslims and Christians to co-exist in Damascus. Once the social divide was redressed, the sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer and the tolling of the bells in the churches of Damascus no longer sounded like calls for war.
History is riddled with inter-communal flareups which, like civil wars in general, tend to be particularly cruel. Paul Preston described the Spanish Civil War as the “Spanish Holocaust,” but that was a systematic, ideologically driven campaign of extermination that lasted three years. Does the three-day mob-led massacre in Damascus, in which 85% of Christians in the city were saved by Muslim notables, really fall into the same category?
If “genocidal moments” are everywhere, they are nowhere, and the concept’s utility in guiding historical understanding is lost. That is the danger of conflating the 1860 Damascus massacre with the systematically planned and executed “moments” that led to the genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, or Myanmar, the Halabja massacre of Iraqi Kurds, the Islamic State’s crimes against the Yazidis, China’s “re-education” camps for the Uighurs, and the Holocaust of European Jewry. That way leads to conceptual chaos.
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TEL AVIV – At the “end of history,” it seems, come genocide, ethnic cleansing, and a seismic explosion of tribalism and identity politics. These feral forces, and the socioeconomic tensions that often incite them, have time and again shattered nations, empires, and international politics. What can history teach us about preventing, and recovering from, such atavistic moments?
Inter-communal co-existence has almost always been central to empires’ pursuit of stability. It was the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, not the mastery of its imperial heyday, that opened the gates to the genocidal campaigns that accompanied the emergence of modern Turkey in the aftermath of World War I, leading to the deaths of almost two million mostly Christian, Assyrian, and Greek citizens of the defunct empire.
This quest for ethnic and religious purity led, for example, to one of the most vicious catastrophes of the modern age: the destruction of the Ottoman Empire’s most cosmopolitan city, Smyrna, by Turkish nationalists. Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 offers a grim and vivid description of the event, which included the slaughter of more than 100,000 people, with millions more left homeless.
But as the University of Oxford historian Eugene Rogan shows in his magnificent new book, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World, the causes of massacres are often more complicated. Notably, there is a tendency to over-emphasize ethnic and religious tensions and to overlook underlying social and economic factors.
From Social Change to Violent Chaos
As the Ottoman Empire crumbled in the mid-nineteenth century, minority groups grew increasingly assertive, including in Greater Syria, which encompassed modern Lebanon and Syria. In Mount Lebanon – some 60 miles outside of Damascus – the Christian Maronites were economically and socially better off than the Druze community of heterodox Muslims, just as Christians were better off than Muslims in Syria, thanks partly to the cultural influence of Western powers.
The Ottoman authorities, for their part, resented French and British intervention in the empire’s affairs. While their efforts to push back were mostly half-hearted, they were complicit with the Druze in their bloody campaigns against Christians in the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, it was the partition of Mount Lebanon into Maronite and Druze provinces in 1842 that exacerbated tensions between the groups, leading to a bloody clash in 1844 and then to the deadly conflagrations of 1860.
The violence erupted in Mount Lebanon on May 23, and in less than two months, between 7,000 and 11,000 Christians were killed, and hundreds of villages and religious establishments were burned to the ground. Had European powers not intervened to bring an end to the carnage – which had been made possible partly by the Ottoman-Druze alliance – the death toll would have been even higher.
Violence in Lebanon was bound to spill over into other parts of Greater Syria, particularly Damascus – the main focus of Rogan’s study – where thousands of Christian refugees sought shelter. And, indeed, on July 9, Damascus was gripped by a massacre of its own. Over the course of just three days, the city’s Christian quarters were looted and set on fire. Some 5,000 people – roughly 15% of the Christian population – were slaughtered by their Muslim neighbors and others who came from nearby villages to join in the killing spree.
As Rogan makes clear, while religion certainly factored into the tensions, the Damascus “events” – like the violence in Lebanon – had their roots in socioeconomic change, driven largely by the commercial penetration of Greater Syria by European powers that began in the late eighteenth century. Starting in 1839, the Tanzimat – a series of modernizing reforms, reflecting European ideas and intended to stem rising nationalism among groups within the empire – compounded the problem.
The Ottoman Empire declared that all of its subjects were equal. But for many Muslims, emancipation of the Christians (and the Jews) – who had previously been second-class citizens, required to pay specific taxes to secure state protection – upended the “natural” order. Such a reversal could be made sustainable only with a kind of “new deal” that would bring prosperity for all. Unfortunately, the Ottoman authorities recognized this only after the events of 1860.
So, in the years that preceded the massacres, Muslim communities watched their Christian counterparts’ socioeconomic fortunes improve significantly, and observed deepening cultural interactions with Western ideas, which they viewed with suspicion and disdain. When the violence erupted, Muslim rioters attacked European consulates for their presumed responsibility for the Tanzimat. They also focused their massacre on Bāb Tūmā, Damascus’s most opulent Christian quarter, while mostly ignoring working-class Christian neighborhoods, though one can always argue that they were merely looking for the best loot.
Rogan highlights another critical factor that can enable (or prevent) violence: who is in charge. While heightened inter-ethnic tensions in Damascus were almost a foregone conclusion amid the conflict between the Druze and Christian Maronites in Mount Lebanon, the simmering conflict was allowed to boil over on the watch of an incompetent official, Damascus Governor Ahmad Pasha.
What Reconciliation Requires
Rogan’s account highlights just how deadly the combination of inter-communal tensions and incompetent leadership can be, especially in a city as diverse as nineteenth-century Damascus. But he also offers a message of hope and humanity, and a lesson about the capacity of fractured societies to reconcile and rebuild.
Secure your copy of PS Quarterly: Age of Extremes
The newest issue of our magazine, PS Quarterly: Age of Extremes, is here. To gain digital access to all of the magazine’s content, and receive your print copy, subscribe to PS Premium now.
Subscribe Now
Consider the story of Emir Abdelkader, a religious and military leader who had fought against the French colonial invasion of Algiers in the early nineteenth century. One might expect that, after settling in Damascus, he would have fought for the emancipation of his Muslim brethren. Instead, he led a crucial intervention during the 1860 massacre, with his own paramilitary force – seemingly armed by the French – saving thousands of Christians. (Pasha, by contrast, barricaded himself and ignored pleas from the European consuls to act.)
More broadly, while the massacres shook the Ottoman Empire to its core, exposing its many suppressed and/or carefully managed vulnerabilities, they also triggered an impressive effort at reform and reconciliation by the Ottoman administration. This years-long process proved that religious differences do not have to preclude coexistence. When everyone has access to greater opportunities and rising prosperity, and under the watchful eye of capable leadership, social peace can prevail.
Damascus owed its success largely to Governor Fuad Pasha, who continued advancing the Tanzimat, but introduced the much-needed “new deal” for socioeconomic development, exemplified by the construction of new buildings and lavish marketplaces. He struck a delicate balance between deterrence, with perpetrators of violence facing harsh punishments, and social remediation. By protecting minorities and delivering stability, Pasha forestalled intervention by foreign powers under the pretext of restoring order. His successor, Mehmed Rashid Pasha, also deserves credit for taking up the mantle of peace and stability.
Crucially, the leaders of Damascus did not fully compensate affected Christians for their losses, but instead offered them a credible promise of a better future. This model is relevant to conflict situations everywhere, from Palestine to Ukraine: justice in post-conflict environments – the term today is “transitional justice” – can never be complete, and unconditional demands for it have often been the enemy of peace.
This insight was not lost on Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu: it was by convincing South Africa’s aggrieved black community that restorative justice, not retribution, was the key to a better future that these leaders were able to secure a peaceful transition from apartheid. Peace often represents a trade-off, in which the victims of the past are given qualified justice, for the sake of ensuring that there are not more victims in the future.
The Limits of History
Clues about what the future may hold can come only from studying the past, so surprises and setbacks are all but guaranteed. In any case, inter-communal peace is not an end goal which, once achieved, can be counted on to endure forever. For evidence of that, look no further than the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90, and the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and continues to rage today.
Christian survivors of the genocide that accompanied the fall of the Ottoman Empire largely either fled to the West or settled in Iraq and Syria, where military dictators offered them security in exchange for their economic acumen. But when dictators like Saddam Hussein in Iraq were toppled, so, too, were the minority protections they had offered. Post-Saddam Iraq’s Christian population plummeted, from as many as 1.5 million in 2003 to less than 500,000 today. Nearly one-third of Syria’s Christians – some 600,000 people – have fled Syria since the civil war began.
As for Lebanon – where Christians actually hold political power – the Christian population fell from 78% of the total in 1910 to just 34% a century later, owing partly to low birthrates, but mostly to emigration, fueled by a hostile political environment. Over the same period, the share of the Christian population of the Middle East as a whole dropped from 14% to just 4%.
But there is a broader challenge that arises when we try to apply the lessons of the past: the tendency to overestimate the commonalities between historical and current events. Though Rogan has crafted a superb work of historical research, and his analytical framework offers insights into how societies can overcome entrenched animosities, he may well have fallen into this trap, applying the lessons of the Damascus events to situations that have scant, if any, resemblance to them.
To understand the problem, consider what makes a genocide. Possibly inspired by Raul Hilberg’s argument that the elimination of a people is a “step-by-step operation,” Gregory Stanton has developed a theory that genocide is a process that develops in ten stages: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. At each of these stages – which should be imagined more like a Russian nesting doll than a linear series – preventive measures, such as intervention by a third party, can arrest the slide toward annihilation.
Consider two genocidal moments that took place during the wars that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia. In Srebrenica, the Dutch contingent that had been deployed precisely to prevent a mass atrocity proved incompetent, indifferent, or both, and Bosnian Serb forces ended up brutally murdering more than 8,000 people in 1995. But in Kosovo four years later, NATO airstrikes humbled Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and the Bosnian Serbs, arresting the slide toward genocide at the crucial extermination stage.
This squares with Rogan’s conclusion that the Damascus events did not develop into a total genocide, because a group of high-profile Muslims stepped in to cut the killing spree short. Nonetheless, Rogan’s description of the Damascus events as a genocidal moment looks rather forced – an attempt to tap into the contemporary debate about such moments in other fractured societies and conflicts.
Even those who, like me, are skeptical of using Procrustean constructs like Stanton’s “ten stages” framework to explain complex historical events – or human affairs in general – would agree that genocide does not just happen. True genocide requires both systematic preparation and a capacity for execution. A sudden eruption of mob violence, like the Damascus massacres, is a pogrom, not a genocidal moment.
Moreover, the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide by the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” But as Rogan rightly shows, the Damascus events were closer to a class war than a religiously motivated assault. (It is even possible that lower-class Jews took advantage of the chaos to loot Christian properties.) That is why a grand socioeconomic deal was enough to enable Muslims and Christians to co-exist in Damascus. Once the social divide was redressed, the sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer and the tolling of the bells in the churches of Damascus no longer sounded like calls for war.
History is riddled with inter-communal flareups which, like civil wars in general, tend to be particularly cruel. Paul Preston described the Spanish Civil War as the “Spanish Holocaust,” but that was a systematic, ideologically driven campaign of extermination that lasted three years. Does the three-day mob-led massacre in Damascus, in which 85% of Christians in the city were saved by Muslim notables, really fall into the same category?
If “genocidal moments” are everywhere, they are nowhere, and the concept’s utility in guiding historical understanding is lost. That is the danger of conflating the 1860 Damascus massacre with the systematically planned and executed “moments” that led to the genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, or Myanmar, the Halabja massacre of Iraqi Kurds, the Islamic State’s crimes against the Yazidis, China’s “re-education” camps for the Uighurs, and the Holocaust of European Jewry. That way leads to conceptual chaos.