War Crime or Catastrophe? Lingering Political Effects of the World War I Syrian Blockade

This paper explores the consequences of suppressing inquiry into the Allied blockade of Ottoman Syrian ports during World War I. Allied leaders knew the blockade contributed to about 500,000 Syrian deaths from hunger and related diseases. They also knew they violated the 1909 London convention on blockades designating food as “conditional contraband,” to be captured only if clearly intended for the enemy’s military forces. And yet, the protests against the Syrian blockade went unheeded.

Linking legal history with the history of humanitarianism, this paper argues that neglect of the blockade at the Paris Peace conference was foundational to a century of discrimination and human rights abuse, culminating in the European Syrian refugee crisis in 2012-14. Syrians were denied recognition of their rights as war-crime victims at exactly when Paris proclaimed a new world order based on international law and the rights of large and small states.

To illustrate the political consequences, I compare the treatment of Syria and Germany. During the peace conference, public protest forced the Allies to end the blockade of Germany, despite scant evidence that anyone had actually died. While German bodies were to be protected against war crimes, Syrians were treated as victims of mere catastrophe. Worse, Allied propaganda blamed the famine solely on Ottoman Muslim fanaticism, perpetrated alongside the mass murder of Christian Armenians.

My conclusion is inspired by Judith Shklar’s classic treatise, The Faces of Injustice, which argued that casting crime as catastrophe produces skepticism and revolt against the legal system. The Syrians responded with anti-systemic, anti-liberal Islamist movements and dictatorship. Europeans responded in 2014 to Syrian bodies with a new blockade, denying asylum to Syrians as unfortunate victims not as humans enjoying universal rights.