SYRIA DAWN CHATTY Syria The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State A A Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Copyright © Dawn Chatty 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Dawn Chatty. Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State. ISBN: 9780190876067 Printed in India on acid-free paper CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1. Forced Migration and Refuge in Late Ottoman Syria 15 2. The Circassians, Chechnyans, and Other Caucasian Forced Migrants Reimagining a Homeland 49 3. The Armenians and Other Christians Seek Refuge in Greater Syria 85 4. The Kurds Seeking Freedom of Ethnic Identity Expression 111 5. Palestinians Return to their ‘Motherland’ 145 6. The Making of a Cosmopolitan Quarter: Sha’laan in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 177 7. Iraqis and Second-Wave Assyrians as Temporary Guests 197 8. The Unmaking of a State as Syrians Flee 219 Notes 247 Bibliography 256 Index 269 v To Lucy and Charles de Burgh ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has several beginnings: my early childhood fascination with the diversity of peoples I saw walking the streets of old Damascus; my later discovery of its outlying Cretan, Circassian, and Kurdish quarters made up of refugees from the end of the Ottoman Empire, and my academic study of forced migration in the modern states of the Levant. It was a conversation with Alasdair Craig, a commissioning editor at Hurst Publishers, that persuaded me that this book needed to be writ- ten. Syria’s long history as a place of refuge needed to be retold, espe- cially now with the horror of Syria’s violent conflict and humanitarian catastrophe part of our daily news. The interviews that are quoted in this book were collected over nearly a decade between 2005 and 2015 in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan thanks to, first, a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation and later grants from the British Academy and the Council for British Research in the Levant. Often working with local research associates, I was able to gain access to many key informants though their good offices. I need to thank Sarab Atassi, the former scientific director at the French Institute for Near Eastern Studies in Damascus (IFPO) as well as Jihad Darwaza and her sister Watfa Darwaza in Damascus for all their help in hosting me, arranging interviews, tran- scribing them, and discussing meanings and various interpretations with me—often over long evenings on balconies in Damascus drinking coffee or herbal teas. Tawfik Al Asadi also led me to key informants and assisted in the conduct of interviews and in transcriptions. In Turkey, Onver Cetrez, the deputy director of the Swedish Institute in Istanbul, ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS provided me with accommodation and made many useful suggestions regarding possible key informants. I had the assistance of Mazen Gharibah and his team of Syrian researchers in Istanbul as well as Kirsten Biehl, a doctoral student from Oxford fluent in Turkish and English. In Gaziantep I was particularly grateful for the support I received from Urs Fruehauf at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and also from Zeina Bali in assisting with my interviews with displaced Syrians. I was fortunate to have the support of Dr Ali Zafer Sagiroglu from Beyazit University in accessing displaced Syrians in the Turkish-run refugee camps near Nizip. In Lebanon I had the help of Lena Al-Habash and Maha El Helou, as well as the staff of the Amel Association in reaching out to displaced Syrians. The Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development (JOHUD) facilitated my entry into Za’tari refugee camp, and Maha Al-Asil worked closely with me in identifying key informants and co- interviewing with me. I owe a great debt to Nigel James, Michel Athanson, and Sebastian Ballard for preparing the maps in this book. I would also like to thank Margaret Okole, and Mary Starkey for editing and searching out of inconsistencies that I could no longer see. My thanks also go to Jon de Peyer, senior editor at Hurst Publishers, for viewing hundreds of pho- tographs until he finally located the image for the front cover. My greatest thanks go to my husband, Nicholas Mylne, for his acceptance of a very distracted companion for over a year. His patience and kindness saw me through the writing of a story which is full of dark shadows and sadness. In the end, it is the hope of a return to Syria some day which many of those I interviewed still hold that I must applaud. It is the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Some of the material in this book appeared originally in the follow- ing article and book, and is used here with permission: ‘The Making of a Cosmopolitan Quarter: Sha’laan in the 20th Century’, Syria Studies 6 (2) (2014): 29–54 and Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. x INTRODUCTION That land known as Syria has long fired the Western imagination. For much of the nineteenth century its cities, particularly Aleppo and Damascus, were part of the itinerary of the more adventurous Europeans making their ‘Grand Tours’ to the relics of ancient civilizations. These two cities vied for the accolade of being the longest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and over the centuries both hosted groups seeking refuge. Damascus, furthermore, had strong links to Christian and Muslim tradition: Saul is known to have had a revelation—called his Damascene moment—as he approached the city, leading him to convert from Judaism to Christianity and take the name Paul. Muhammad is said to have approached the ‘fragrant city’ from the desert and been so over- come by the luxuriant and fertile gardens before him that he turned back, saying he was not yet ready to enter paradise. Much of ancient Greek tradition is supposed to have been preserved and then passed on to the West via the keen husbandry of the early Muslim Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus. The seven centuries of Muslim rule in Spain and Portugal also traced their heritage and roots back to the Damascene caliphate. During these centuries many diverse social groups maintained their ethno-religious character, secure in a widespread tolerance of these various syncretic religious and social communities, some tucked away in the mountainous coastal region of Syria and others comfortably established in suburbs of Damascus and other cities. Only once was this local conviviality shattered, in response to the 1860 civil war in Mount Lebanon between the Maronite Christians and the local Druze community. Many Druze from Mount 1 SYRIA Lebanon sought refuge in Syria, primarily in the Hauran region of South Syria. But in Damascus and also Aleppo riots erupted, only to be quelled several days later, by Abdul Qadir al-Jaza’iri, the exiled Algerian national ‘freedom fighter’ whom Napoleon III had permitted to leave his house arrest in France to take up open residence in Damascus along with a few hundred of his men. Wherever one turned in Syria one came across stories—some underplayed and others exaggerated—of exile, refuge, and asylum. My story was no exception. I had just accepted my first teaching post at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in September 1975. Upon arrival at the airport, I learned that the country was under curfew, and, though it was unacknowledged at the time, was facing a civil war. After a few terrifying days getting used to the sound of rocket fire and semi-auto- matic weapons, I was granted faculty accommodation on a back street connected to the University Hospital. My sense of safety, however, was shattered when I discovered that numerous armed militias were com- peting to control the street, moving their snipers from one rooftop to another on the street behind my flat. Often during these clashes I felt the need to lie flat on the floor of my bedroom in case any flying bullets pierced the walls. Street fighting in the city put an end to any thought of starting the teaching term on time, and for two months we awaited instructions to commence our courses. During this time I began to look for escape from the city, which was tearing itself apart. Often I negotiated trips to Damascus by taxi for myself and some of the other new faculty. Taking back roads over the mountains, we generally made the trip in three or four hours instead of the usual two.