The Intertextuality of Wartime Memoirs: Ohannes Pasha’s Account of Famine and Mass Murder in Lebanon and Anatolia

Ohannes Pasha, the last governor of Ottoman Mount Lebanon’s special district  (mutasarrifiyya) witnessed the onset of famine in early 1915.  He fled into exile later that year, fearing for his life, as he heard of the mass deportation of Armenians from Eastern Anatolia, and the murder of Armenian members of parliament.  In 1920 Rome, he penned a memoir where he recalled that he had been an ardent supporter of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. He had believed in the co-existence of Muslims and Christians until the outbreak of war, when he began to  fear that Lebanese Christians were slated for the same treatment as Armenians.  He despaired at the disappearance of the “good old Turk," he wrote.  But then he closed the memoir by blaming all Turks for the mass death of Armenians and -- in a repudiation of his earlier liberalism-- to demand an Armenian national state.   This paper argues that Ohannes Pasha aimed his memoir at the Paris Peace Conference, and that inconsistencies in the text reflect a tension between norms of personal narrative and the political functions of the text.  It supports this argument by comparing the memoir to other postwar memoirs and personal appeals written by Armenians, Turks and Arabs to suggest how they constituted political explanations for mass death and tied their trauma to the abandonment of liberal values.   The paper closes by suggesting a similarities between the Middle East and Europe  in the postwar demise of liberalism.