Back مجاعة جبل لبنان Arabic Grande famine du Mont-Liban French הרעב הגדול של הר לבנון HE Bencana Kelaparan Besar Gunung Lebanon ID Grande carestia del Monte Libano Italian Lübnan Dağı'nın Büyük Kıtlığı Turkish

Great Famine of Mount Lebanon

Great Famine of Mount Lebanon
مجاعة جبل لبنان
Starving man and children in Mount Lebanon
CountryMount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Empire, modern day Lebanon
LocationMount Lebanon
Period1915–1918
Total deathsEst. 200,000
Effect on demographicsPopulation of 400,000 declined by 50%

The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915–1918) (Classical Syriac: ܟܦܢܐ, romanized: Kafno, lit. 'Starvation'; Arabic: مجاعة جبل لبنان, romanized: Majā'at Jabal Lubnān; Turkish: Lübnan Dağı'nın Büyük Kıtlığı) was a period of mass starvation on Mount Lebanon during World War I that resulted in the deaths of 200,000 people, most of whom were Maronite Christians.[1]

There were many reasons for the famine in Mount Lebanon. Natural as well as man-made factors both played a role. Allied forces (United Kingdom and France) blockaded the Eastern Mediterranean, as they had done with the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe, in order to strangle the economy and weaken the Ottoman war effort.[2][3][4] The situation was exacerbated by Jamal Pasha, commander of the Fourth Army of the Ottoman Empire, who deliberately barred crops from neighbouring Syria from entering Mount Lebanon, in response to the Allied blockade.[5][6] Additionally, a swarm of locusts devoured the remaining crops,[7][5] 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. Ottoman Mount Lebanon had the highest per capita fatality rate of any ‘bounded’ territory during the First World War.[8]

Other areas in modern-day Lebanon, according to multiple sources, were also famine-stricken. However, due to poor documentation, casualties were never recorded. Some of the areas hit with no documentation include Tyre, Zahle, Akkar and Bint Jbeil.

  1. ^ Taoutel, Christian; Wittouck, Pierre. Le peuple libanais dans la tourmente de la grande guerre 1914-1918 d'après les Pères Jésuites au Liban (in French). Presses de l'Université Saint-Joseph. ISBN 9953455449.
  2. ^ Cummings, Lindsey Elizabeth (2015). Economic Warfare and the Evolution of the Allied Blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean: August 1914-April 1917 (Thesis). hdl:10822/760795. S2CID 130072266.
  3. ^ Linda Schilcher Schatkowski, «The famine of 1915-1918 in greater Syria», in J. Spagnolo (dir.), Problems of the modern Middle East in historical perspective, Essays in honor of Albert Hourani, Ithaca Press, Reading, 1992, 229-258
  4. ^ Pitts, Graham Auman. “Make Them Hated in All of the Arab Countries: France, Famine, and the Creation of Lebanon.” Environmental Histories of World War I. Richard P. Tucker, Tait Keller, J.R. McNeill, and Martin Schmid, eds. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press (2018)
  5. ^ a b Ghazal, Rym (14 April 2015). "Lebanon's dark days of hunger: The Great Famine of 1915–18". The National. Retrieved 24 January 2016.
  6. ^ Deringil, Selim (2019). The Ottoman Twilight in the Arab Lands: Turkish Memoirs and Testimonies of the Great War. Academic Studies Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-1-64469-090-1.
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference BBC was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ "Was Capitalism the Crisis? Mount Lebanon's World War I Famine". Environment & Society Portal. 2021-01-23. Retrieved 2023-05-10.

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