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    Perspectives on History
    The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association


    The Human Rights Historian and the Trafficked Child Writing the
    History of Mass Violence and Individual Trauma

    Keith David Watenpaugh, October 2013

    >From The Art of History column in the October 2013 issue of
    Perspectives on History

    Photo from Khachadour Beroian's 1923 intake survey, League of Nations'
    Rescue Home, Aleppo, Syria. Courtesy of the United Nations.

    The eyes of a young woman, stolen from her family when she was six
    years old and kept as a slave for a decade, stare back at me from a
    League of Nations' document and across the elapse of 90 years.1 They
    belong to Loutfiy Bilemdjian from the city of Ayntab, now Gaziantep,
    in southern Turkey. Hers is the 1,010th entry in a collection of
    notebooks that record the narratives of young survivors of the 1915
    genocide of the Ottoman Armenians as they entered the care of the
    league's Rescue Home in Aleppo, Syria. In addition to the narrative,
    each page includes a photograph taken at the time of admission and as
    much biographical information as the young person could
    remember-parent's name, place, and date of birth.

    As Loutfiyé told a league relief worker, at the onset of the genocide,
    she and her family had been forcibly displaced to upper Mesopotamia,
    where they were set upon by Ottoman irregular soldiers. She witnessed
    the killing of her mother, father, and one of her brothers. A soldier
    took her as booty and sold her to someone, who then resold her to a
    wealthy man named Mahmud Pasha. He sent her to his house, where she
    remained for 11 years. In 1926, she escaped across what had become the
    international border between Syria and Turkey and reached Aleppo,
    where she found one of her surviving brothers.

    Elements of her story are similar to entry number 961, which tells the
    story of Zabel, the daughter of Bedros from Arapg#r, a village known
    for its wine grapes and woven textiles. She was sent into the Syrian
    desert in 1915 with her mother, five sisters, and a brother. Along
    with other girls from her village, she was gathered by Ottoman
    gendarmes and sold. In the elliptical language of the interwar period,
    her purchaser "married her." She was 7 or 8 years old at the
    time. After 11 years she learned that other Armenians had
    survived. She escaped and made her way to Aleppo where she was
    reunited with family. Her story is not unlike that of number 209,
    Khachadour Beroian, from the city of Kharpert, now Elaz## in Turkey,
    whose picture shows him wearing a kaffiyya and a wool-lined caba'
    coat-clothes he wore as an unpaid agricultural laborer in eastern
    Syria before he ran away from the farm where he'd been forced to work
    for 9 years. He was around 12 years old when his father, Avedis, was
    killed at the beginning of the genocide. Like other orphaned children
    in his city, he had been rounded up and sent to Syria in a deportation
    caravan.

    Over the course of two summer days, I sat in the reading room of the
    league's archive in what is now the UN's Geneva headquarters, and read
    these stories, one by one, hour after hour. Each record told a
    consistent story of survival in the face of extrajudicial murder,
    forced migration, enslavement, or sexual violence.

    The stories tore at me.

    Perhaps it was because I knew people who could have been their
    descendants; their names, their faces, their places of origin were all
    familiar. I knew, as a historian of the period, that these were the
    few who by force of will or circumstance (or both) had
    escaped. Hundreds of thousands of children were killed during the
    genocide, and, at the time of the Rescue Home's operation, tens of
    thousands of Armenian young people were still living in slavery.

    The stories stayed in my mind even as I left the archive and walked to
    my apartment, passing under the canopy of the most magnificent Cedar
    of Lebanon I had ever seen. That night I awoke screaming from a dream
    the details of which I'm glad I couldn't recall. Making Meaning of
    Trauma

    What burdens do such stories of individual trauma and survival place
    on the historian? Trying to answer this question is important,
    inasmuch as the spoken, written, and forensic texts of witness,
    memory, and testimony form the building blocks of human rights
    history. But the question can also be answered by thinking about why
    the league's administrators recorded and preserved these
    stories. Clearly, the biographical data and pictures were a tool for
    family reunification. Sometimes, a page's overleaf has an entry on the
    placement of the young person with family nearby, or, like Khachadour,
    emigration to join his brother in America. Combining photographs and
    individual stories gave human meaning to the raw numbers needed by the
    league's bureaucracy; it was calculated to generate funding or support
    from representatives of member states and secretariat officials.

    Campaign poster for refugee relief, c.1917, W.B. King, Conwell Graphic
    Companies, NY. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,
    Washington DC.

    A league-produced reenactment of a young woman entering the Rescue
    House from a 1926 film-itself a remarkable and evocative piece of
    evidence-shows her telling her story to a league employee, who then
    translated and wrote it down.2 The field workers believed that the act
    of telling one's life story at entry helped the individual mark that
    moment as a rupture between the time she spent as a trafficked child,
    unconsenting wife, or domestic slave, and a new life as a member of a
    natal community. Putting the story-her history-down on paper
    acknowledged the past in a way that could help her make a dignified
    return to something approaching a normal life. The break from the past
    was reinforced as the young people shed the clothes they wore upon
    entry and were given Westerntyle dresses or pants and had their hair
    cut.

    Bringing human meaning to "the number" is among the central challenges
    of writing about genocide or other kinds of mass human rights abuses
    like state violence, ethnic cleansing, and slavery. As historians, we
    need to be able to write about the anonymous scope and remorseless
    uniformity of genocide-to explain its modernity, its political and
    social importance, and the intent of perpetrators. But as the numbers
    mount they become numbing and mute, and the historical experience of
    genocide is flattened.

    A focus on the individual behind the cold numbers of dead or
    trafficked children can obscure the larger concepts and even leave the
    historian vulnerable to claims that his history is merely anecdotal or
    unrepresentative. We have, nonetheless, a responsibility to listen
    when we can to the voices of those victimized by human rights abuse
    and to disentangle those voices from dominant narratives of powerful
    institutions and nation states-especially in those very rare instances
    when we hear children's voices.

    The Unbearable and the Historian's Humanity

    To achieve balance between these two ways of writing the history of
    episodes like the Armenian Genocide, the historian should embrace his
    emotional responses, like the ones I had at the archive, to unleash as
    a tool of method his empathetic imagination. This way of imagining is
    central to what makes our discipline humane and helps the historian
    retain the humanity of his work (and himself) when confronted with
    hate, violence, and inhumanity. Moreover, it can bring history and the
    historian into broader conversations about justice, acknowledgement,
    and reconciliation, which is one of the promises of human rights
    history.

    In the years since I returned from the archive, those narratives have
    shaped the way I've written about humanitarianism and human rights in
    the Middle East.3 As Syria has again become a killing field, the
    stories helped me think about what it means to be a young person
    displaced by war-nd led me to a refugee camp in the Jordanian desert
    to research and advocate for displaced Syrian university students.4

    Even now, when I tell the story of the children in the notebooks to my
    students or, recently, to a group of high school social studies
    teachers preparing a curriculum on genocide, I can still feel a
    burning ember of the sadness I experienced in the archive.

    -Keith David Watenpaugh is a historian of the modern Middle East and
    director of the University of California, Davis, Human Rights
    Initiative. His work has appeared in the American Historical Review,
    International Journal of Middle East Studies, Social History, Journal
    of Human Rights, and Humanity and has been translated into Arabic,
    Armenian, German, Persian, and Turkish. He is the author of Being
    Modern in the Middle East, and the forthcoming Bread from Stones: The
    Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism.

    Notes
    1. Archives of the League of Nations, United Nations Organization,
    Geneva, Records of the Nansen International Refugee Office, 1920-47,
    "Registers of Inmates of the Armenian Orphanage in Aleppo," 1922-30, 4
    vols.

    2. Karen Jeppe, Danish Film Institute, director unknown (1926).

    3. See my article, "The League of Nations' Rescue of Armenian Genocide
    Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920-1927," AHR
    115, no. 5 (December 2010): 1315-39.

    4. K. D. Watenpaugh, A. E. Fricke, et al., "Uncounted and
    Unacknowledged: Syria's Refugee University Students and Academics in
    Jordan," a joint publication of the University of California, Davis,
    Human Rights Initiative and the Institute of International Education
    (April 2013).


    http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2013/the-human-rights-historian-and-the-trafficked-child


    From: Baghdasarian
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