The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide*

Abstract

Abstract In the contentious historiography of the Armenian genocide, the desert has been acknowledged by almost everyone as the endpoint of the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenian citizens in 1915 and the years that followed. Those who use the term ‘genocide’ suggest that this action was tantamount to a death sentence, while those who oppose the term claim that the desert exculpates the Ottoman state. This article unpacks the meaning of the Jazira region — one of the arid regions to which Armenians were sent — and suggests how Ottoman officials used the desert to kill and Armenians used it to survive, mostly as part of nomadic groups among whom they were somewhere between slaves and family members. The desert even came to shape the humanitarian rescue campaign in the wake of the genocide and World War I, as organizations worked to remove Armenian children from the desert and, subsequently, to transform the desert itself by establishing Armenian agricultural colonies. Yet some Armenians stayed, and remain to this day in the Jazira calling themselves Armenian Muslims in honor of their heritage. The desert not only shaped Armenian suffering and survival. The marginal environment also incubated a population of imperial survivors, whose existence did not fit comfortably with post-Ottoman national divisions, or the historiographies influenced by them.