A century after the Great War, history repeats itself in Syria

Speaking to the BBC last month from the old city of Homs, Baibars Altalawy reflected on the horror unfolding in western Syria. Under a long- term government siege, parts of Homs had relied on leftover supplies of food, medicines and fuel – but all had now run out.

So desperate for food were Mr Altalawy and his fellow residents that they were “eating anything that comes out of the ground, plants, even grass” just to survive.

“These shrubs and grass that we’re eating causes illnesses, such as indigestion and fever. A few days ago an elderly man died within six hours of eating the grass,” he added. With the UN-led evacuation of Homs also bringing to light the terrible human cost of the siege, Arab historians have begun to draw grim parallels with another wartime episode in the region a century ago. From 1915 to 1918, some 500,000 residents in what was then the Ottoman province of Greater Syria – including today’s Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories – died of starvation or starvation-related diseases as the bloody horror of the First World War gripped the Middle East.

Those fortunate enough to flee the Greater Syrian coastal areas to Cairo in 1916 described how, as one contemporary account put it, the “poor picked up and fed on orange and lemon peel and also chewed pieces of sugar cane, and when the rains stopped, the women and children went out into the fields and picked weeds and other green stuff that sprouted up, in a desperate endeavour to keep body and soul together”.

That war is hell is a self- evident truth. That the fate of many of those innocent men, women and children in today’s Syria has distressing similarities to those who perished in Greater Syria almost a century ago underlines how history has a terrible habit of repeating itself.

So far, more than 100,000 have been killed in Syria since the conflict began. In the Great War, it took a period of four years for five-times that figure to fall victim not to bullets and bombs, but extreme hunger in a tragedy of epic proportions.

Bread riots in Damascus, rail- way workers in the Greater Syrian countryside raiding fields to feed on unripened crops or to forage for grass and weeds were just some of the widely reported incidents of the Greater Syrian famine.

Today, it seems extraordinary that an episode in which half a million people died from sustained hunger as a result of a global conflict is not a more familiar part of the history of the Great War.

Yet, while the reasons behind this genuine wartime disaster have been obscured by history, the cynical sentiments behind them are not alien in our modern Middle East.

There was the fundamental failure of ruling Ottoman officials to assure adequate supplies to civilian populations, the British and French blockade of the Greater Syr- ian coast and the deliberate manipulation of civilian food supplies to aid the great 1916-18 Arab Revolt in which a certain TE Lawrence found fame. Yet, as Britain, France, the US and others send humanitarian aid to Syria today, so some Austrian and German officials implored their governments to intervene in what must have been a disturbing spectacle of human suffering in Greater Syria. Germans and Americans both undertook crucial civilian relief work, and there were other more individual and local acts of generosity, all intended to negate the turmoil that swept a coastal and internal expanse where, as Ottoman notes lost value, gold became the only currency to purchase food in Damascus and elsewhere.

A century on, and there is nothing refined about the unfolding crisis in modern Syria. The world may have become considerably smaller over the last century, but for those trapped in Homs and forced, like their forefathers before them, to forage like animals, grim isolation would have been their sole overriding emotion.

As pro- and anti-Assad forces continue to trade blows, and 250,000 civilians from across Syria remain besieged in their own battered communities, it is plus ça change for a part of the Arab world that, in many ways, might simply be reliving the horrors of its distant past.