1In one of the early books on the Jazira in north-eastern Syria written after the country’s independence in 1946, al-Jazira wa Rijalatuha [The Jazira and its Men] by Osman Ramzi and Salim Hâna, the Jazirans are described as follows:

• 1 Salim Hâna was born to a Syriac Catholic family in Turkey who migrated to French Syria after 1925. (...)

The Jaziran people hate [yamqut] politics and turn to agriculture with all of their energy ... that does not mean they do not understand politics but we mean that they see that their working in politics spoils their agricultural work ... and in case they sometimes raise their voice, they do so in order to demand construction [’imran], improve agriculture and secure the prosperity of the region (Ramzi and Hâna, date unknown: 5).1

2Both Ramzi and Hana arrived in Syria under the French mandate as migrants from Turkey, probably between 1926–1930, not more than two decades before they published the first comprehensive book on Jazira. Originating from a village of a once-Syriac enclave Midyat, in the Kurdish-Arab mixed city of Mardin in contemporary Turkey, they had lived through World War One and the Armenian Genocide (1915) and its afterlives, including a historical regime change from an empire to the Turkish nation state, in their villages in the vicinity of Mardin. Underlying their displacement to Syria was the Kurdish Sheikh Said Revolt (1925) and the ensuing violent counter-insurgency measures of the Turkish state in the Kurdish-majority, yet still multireligious east and southeast of Turkey. They lived in the fringes of Syria, ruled by France under a mandate from the League of Nations (1921-46), then fled to Beirut in the early years of the country’s independence. Their 70-page book conveys brief information about the prominent male personalities in Jazira, the majority of whom were refugees from Turkey after 1925.

3The significance of the book lies in its coverage of the political and economic elites of French Jazira, who would leave the country from 1958 onwards thanks to the gradual transformation in the social, political and economic regime after the land reform (Ramzi and Hâna, date unknown). The depiction of the Jazirans in the opening sentence of the book reveals the popular associations evoked by certain citizenship practices related to politics and agricultural labour during the early years of Syrian independence, which dated back to the mandate period. This representation purports to set politics aside, while fetishizing labour in various forms and acclaiming economic development for the sake of the Jazira region and Syria (Ababsa, 2009; Hanna, 1973; Khader, 1979; Schad, 2005). The formation of developmentalist discourses and accompanying narratives of national unity is emblematic of the post-colonial era in the Middle East and beyond (Hanna, 1985; Beinin, 2001:114–141; Davis, 2022). A similar narrative about the Jazira is embraced by Roupen Boghossian, another local resident (of Ras al-^cAyn), in his 1958 monograph, in which the discourse of particularism of Jazira and the controversial question of belonging to the political and economic collectivity on a Syrian national scale – an aspect, Boghossian argued, adversely provoked by the French – is overcome, to be replaced by the questions of economic development and the emancipation of the society from dependence (aider ainsi à l’affranchissement de la grande masse de servitude naturelle) (Boghossian, 1952:12). In the case of the Jazira, the formation of such associations is equally to do with the particularities of the French colonial rule, more specifically with local politics and property and labour regimes. In particular, the dual role of French political economy and refugee politics in the Jazira is implied in the ways in which the newcomers’ economic and political subjectivities were shaped in the post-colonial period. This article analyses the discourses of labour in the claims former refugees in the Jazira made about their position, and their future, in Syria.

5The scholarly literature on pre-1948 refugees in the Middle East has usually operated within the fields of refugee, diaspora and minority studies. Refugees are usually viewed as part of the history of the empire, either as the side-effect of imperial upheavals or nation-state formations or tools of imperial domination in the post-Ottoman Levant. The last decade has seen a burgeoning of the literature on post–World War One refugees in the Middle East, in particular on the relationship between refugee settlement and colonial/imperial ambitions, histories of capitalism and international humanitarianism. Laura Robson and David Rodogno point out to the role of western imperial politics in humanitarian action and League of Nations – sponsored refugee resettlement (Rodogno, 2021; Robson, 2017; Pederson, 2015; White, 2017). Environmental histories of genocide and forced displacement of Armenians have also been studied (Dolbee, 2021). These contributions de-exceptionalize refugee history and link it with global history as well as with post–World War One western colonialism, humanitarianism, nation state-making, and the environment. But political histories continue to dominate the field. Social histories of forced displacement, settlement and its afterlives, is scarce; the integration of refugee histories in the mainstream Arab intellectual and political histories has barely begun. Research on labour, specifically unorganized labour, agricultural, urban or migrant labour and its link to political claim-making, has been rather unusual (Robson, 2023; Sajadian, 2023; Osseiran and Nimer, 2024; Hanieh and Ziadah, 2024). Local monographs about the role of refugee labour in the mise en valeur of urban or rural spaces, and the relationship of refugee labour to regional/national political projects, are almost absent. However, as much as refugees were part of the history of the empire, their history was part of the history of capitalism. They were labourers, urban and rural, and pioneers of urbanism or economic agents in opening the land to agriculture (Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, 2024; Sajadian, 2022). Furthermore, the refugees’ local forms of politics, in the Jazira and elsewhere, were almost always justified in relation to the discourses of labour they had spent in building their own lives and regional or national development. Different ex-refugees endorsed competing colonial, national and sectarian political projects, but discourses of labour were at the core of all of them. During the Franco-Syrian treaty negotiations of 1936-39 that promised independence to Syria within five years, ex-refugees in the Jazira, mainly Christians and Kurds from various social backgrounds, were engaged in politics regarding the future of the French mandate as well as new state-society relations in Syria. They asked for an autonomous administrative status for Jazira, inclusion of an article for the protection of minorities in the new Syrian Constitution, and continuation of the French mandate. While alternative historical discourses about space, people and materiality formed the justification for their novel entitlements to Jazira, (Sikor and Lund, 2009) the discourse of development, within which the ex-refugees featured as the main economic actors, framed the administrative, political and economic claims they made regarding their new land of refuge.

6This article offers a new analysis of refugee politics, privileging the refugees’ agency, by paying attention to the discourse of agricultural and urban labour of the newcomers in French mandate Syria and their local political context. It depicts the refugees as active agents of change, central to the making of history, rather than absolute victims of the violence accompanying political changes (Gatrell, 2017). It is widely assumed that refugees can solely be understood with reference to the past violence that they were exposed to in their home country. This assumption holds true particularly for the scholarly work on the post–World War One refugees in the Levant, especially the Armenian genocide survivors and other Christian refugees of French-ruled Syria and Lebanon. But while post–WWI refugees in the Levant were victims of state-sponsored and at times genocidal violence in the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Iraq, their post-genocide lives should not be reduced to this status, and nor should research about them. Tsolin Nalbantian, in her study on Armenians in Lebanon in the aftermath of the French mandate, critically reflects on the self-referential nature of the existing scholarship, and profoundly traces the question of “how to make sense of the Armenian presence in Lebanon without further marginalising the past violence and loss?” (Nalbantian, 2018). Benjamin White, too, in his groundbreaking article, argues that refugees were a site for the construction of the national, namely the Syrian state and the Syrian Arab nationalism as well as the international sphere thanks to the involvement of the refugee activists, nationalists, mandatory officers, other states, League of Nations and international humanitarian organisations (White, 2017). Similarly, this article attempts to demonstrate how these internally diverse groups of Kurds and Christian refugees, together with the semi(nomadic) Arab and Kurds in French-Jazira, remade the social, economic and landscape in Jazira through their mobilising discourses of labour and local sectarian or nationalist politics culminating in the negotiation of the terms of their belonging to Syria in 10 years following their arrival (Altuğ, 2011).

Refugee settlement in Syria (1921–1927)

• 5 CADN, MAE, Série Syrie-Liban, vol. 177, Relation Turquie-Française, 27 Janvier, 1925.

Since the beginning of the armistice, the biggest problem that the mandatory power is trying to resolve is the refugee problem. We have received 96,450 refugees since then and they are all impoverished people. France has made great economic sacrifices for them. Just for the sake of alleviating pressure in the north of Syria, we have settled two thirds of these poor people in inner Syria. The rest resides in Aleppo and in the Sanjak of Alexandretta. Their settlement was carried out calmly and with deference to the Muslim population.5

8The economic motivations of the colonial power were just as significant as political concerns in the resettlement of refugees. In rural areas, the mandatory administration used the refugees for developmentalist purposes, claiming fallow land for modern agricultural purposes. Refugees were encouraged to settle in Syrian towns and cities whose lands were not cultivated (Boghossian, 1952:39). The French founded agricultural colonies at Kirikkhan and the Amouk plain in the Sanjak of Alexandretta, at Ra’s al-‘Ayn, and on the al-Ghab plain (Jalabert, 1933). To realise these goals, they provided a basic kit for the formation of agricultural villages: seeds, livestock, tents and farming implements. Refugees then became the agents in the development of that land, and for the tightening of French state control to remote rural areas (White, 2017). In other cases, Armenian, Syriac and Assyrian refugees laboured for their own resettlement as well as to generate income and develop the land (Robson, 2023; Altuğ, 2011).

9However, the dispossessed refugees’ survival and integration into the host society was not as smooth as the Syrian official political histories written in the post-colonial period, or the post-memories of the refugee descended communities, would claim (‘Abdeh, 2002; Altug, 2011; Barsoum, 1982; Boghossian 1952; Ramzi and Hâna, n.d; Semerdjian, 2023). Neither the local population nor the Arab nationalist press of the 1920’s was as inclusive towards the newcomers as later written and oral accounts allege. The relationship between the local and newcomer groups unfolded in different forms depending on the region and the French refugee policy applied there. Local Syrians, some but not all of whom were Arab nationalists, hotly debated the refugee issue in various tones and venues. The refugee issue preceded the Arab nationalist political agenda at certain points, such as when the French officers embarked on manipulative efforts to counter anti-colonial Arab nationalist political activity through playing the “Christian refugee card” (Maizière, 1933) during the announcement of the new citizenship law (1925), the Syrian general elections (1926), the economic crisis (1929) (Khoury, 1987) and throughout the period between 1925 and 1933 when the refugee inflow to Jazira reached its peak (Longrigg, 1958). The refugee issue was taken by the locals as part of the colonial question of national sovereignty, as much as a social and economic problem. From the mid-1920s, the settlement of refugee groups – in particular Armenians – in Syrian cities of the interior began to be socioeconomically more visible (Velud, 1993; Watenpaugh, 2015). Relief, food programs, and settlement arrangements were offered by several missionary organisations, as well as the French mandatory authorities.

Refugees, sectarianism, and labour in Jazira (1925–1936)

12Efficient control of land, water and market communications were fundamental to mandatory rule. In this way, the region would be turned into an economically viable region and eventually be incorporated into the Syrian market. In the early 1930s, Jazira was connected by a railway line to Aleppo. This development facilitated interactions between Christian merchants from Aleppo and some Christian landowners in the Qamishli area. The Aleppo merchants provided their counterparts in Jazira with easy loans to invest in purchasing agricultural machinery and water pumps, which the Aleppo merchants then imported from abroad (el-Saleh, 2004, 2012, 2020).

• 15 “Suriyya allati la Hurmata Laha”, Al-Sha‘b, November 13, 1935.

Jazira is a Syrian Arab land. The Syrians will give it neither to the Armenians nor to non-Armenians... They [the Arabs] will resist the settlement by all means possible. We warn the Armenians that a future life in Syria, next to the “angry Arab,” will be insecure.15

• 17 CADN, Cabinet Politique, Box 576, Service Politiques, Bureau d’études, “l’Arménie et les Arménie (...)

The Armenian is a guest in this country and this fact is accepted by the mandatory power and the noble Arab people. It is clear that the guests do not have a claim to pursue anything but politics. The so-called project of “installation of an Armenian homeland in Syria is therefore without any foundation and beyond imagination.”17

Imagining the Future in Syria: Labour, political claim-making and sectarianism (1936–1939)

17The Franco-Syrian treaty foresaw the full independence of the country within the next five years and the incorporation of its autonomously administered regions, namely the Sanjak of Alexandretta, Sanjak of Alawites, Sanjak of Druze and the Jazira, into a centralised, united and independent Syria. It was negotiated by the National Bloc, which on the basis of the initial agreement became the Syrian government and supported by various Arab nationalists aiming to put an end to mandatory rule. However, a fierce and violent controversy took place over two fundamental articles of the treaty, namely the protection of minorities and unity of Syria. The dispute over these two articles generated the formation of two rivalling political movements in the autonomously administered regions: unionists and autonomists, in their French designations. The public debates in the media, over diplomatic tables, and in the streets (sometimes with guns) had long-lasting implications for the construction of the terms of national belonging in Syria. The demand for administrative autonomy and the continuation of the mandate, as articulated by the autonomist or as rejected by the unionist groups in Jazira and elsewhere, give clues about the terms of entitlement to the land and belonging to the community and nation.

21It was during this politically controversial period that the notions of minority and majority in Syria were redefined and gained a more solid content, and discourses about labour and regional development played significant roles in their formulation (White, 2011). Alternative geographical contextualizations of the Jaziran land, and the labour expended on the region’s economic transformation, stand out as the most important markers of political-claim making: the basis on which entitlement to financial and political autonomy for the Jazira, or unity with Syria, was asserted. The autonomists oscillated between a Christian/Kurdish ethnoreligious definition of minorityness and a territorially-based definition. For the autonomist party, the value accrued from the labour and development was granted to Jaziran Christians or the Jaziran communities at large. For the unionists, on the other hand, the political and economic actors of the development of Jazira were framed as part of the Syrian Arab nation; the economic value produced in Jazira was considered an organic contribution to the Syrian national economy.

22Almost all the pamphlets produced by the autonomists have as their introduction a brief historical sketch, “Un mot d’histoire”. In these, the Jazira is geographically contextualized in relation to Mesopotamia, not to Syria, indicating that the region’s incorporation into a unified Syria centred on Damascus lacked historical relevance. French mandatory rule in Syria is presented as the sole reason for the flow of populations towards the Jazira (and nowhere else in Syria). The narratives of emigration from Turkey are furnished with a pro-French tone, appealing both to historical gratitude for French rule and a historical estrangement from the Damascene rule. The labour expended for regional development is represented as the yardstick of attachment to land and people, and entitlement to rule over them. Making their political claim on the added value accrued by the labour of the Jazirans, autonomists refused to share it in the future with a centralised and independent state in Damascus.

23In a formal report addressing the League of Nations entitled “La vérité sur les événements sanglants du Juillet 1937”, the mayor of Qamishli privileged French agency in the making of Jazira:

• 22 Archives Dominicaines, Fonds Haute Djeziréh, Série IV, Dossier 58, Rapport adressé à la SDN par (...)

Before the war, the region was a deserted waste land. It was entirely devastated. There were no more than two villages which were also ruined and in a miserable condition. Tens of millions of nomads had made no single effort to make their land a habitable place. Attracted by the prestige of the three-coloured flag, the emigrants of all kinds ... arrived in Jazira. Thanks to the French military, which first pacified the region and then greatly contributed to its renovation, we witnessed the development of two cities: Hassatche and Kamichlié. In addition, the flourishing of 500 prosperous villages should also be considered as their work.22

• 25 CADN, Cabinet Politique, Fonds Beyrouth, Box 503, Dossier 1, no. 9492. Archives Dominicaines Fonds (...)

Such a granary against this dearth that these vast deserts were transformed into the most fertile fields of Syria: in 1927, the Jazira gave 1,000 tonnes of wheat and in 1938 she gave 5,000, which means 500 percent more. We built 1,500 villages thanks to France who sustained the order and security here. But the Franco-Syrian treaty avoids granting protection for the non-Muslim minorities here in the midst of the desert who are 850 km away from Beirut and who are left to the mercy of pillars and assassinations in the hands of the Bedouins who are agitated by certain groups in Damascus.25

25The seemingly colonial sectarian discourse here deserves comment. Autonomists did not passively repeat the colonial Christian sectarian discourse and transferred the agency in the development of the Jazira to the French: they actively re-interpreted it in line with their own interests. The official publication of the autonomist bloc, “Comité général de Défense de la Haute Djézireh,” empowers the Jaziran agency through the labour they spent in the development of the region vis-à-vis the French and the central Syrian government.

• 26 Archives Dominicaines, Fonds Haute Djeziréh, Comite Général de Défense de la Haute Djézireh, L (...)

We, the “refugees” provided the agricultural labour and made sacrifices in order to transform this desert country, from a refuge of the raiders, a desert of Bedouins, plunder of the brigades, to a flourishing centre of agriculture and trade inhabited by people. The French established these refugees in this country under her protection and ever since we can work in peace and security ... this collaboration between the French and the refugees was successful. It was a sincere collaboration with the French which is never to the detriment of the country. It has been the population who has profited… The French officers have made a long tour in the bled [country], visited the tribes for the peace to reign and regulated various differences, jealousies, and quarrels in the region. They built the tracks and the bridges. They controlled and managed the work of the officers. They regulated the frontier incidents and made the city plans. ... . Hassatche has reached 10 thousand inhabitants with 300 villages, Kamichlié counts 20 thousand inhabitants with 400 villages, Derbessié 8,000 inhabitants and 200 villages, Ras el Aïn 5,000 inhabitants and Amouda 7,000 inhabitants. The Kurdish population lives mostly in the villages and more than 20,000 people form the Arab nomadic tribes... Tell Kotchak, the last stop of the railway line, has become an important point for transit trade. In 1936-37, at certain days 100 trucks of wheat had arrived from Mosul to be transported to the inner Syrian towns. Thanks to the security provided by the French army, petrol was discovered by the I.P.C Company. The soil has an incomparable fertility. The exported wheat in 1936 only by the railway exceeded 55,000 tones against 1,000 in 1927. The Syrian soil is very favourable for the cultivation of barge, rice, and corn. Cotton is the same. When Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo were demonstrating against the mandatory power in 1936, Djézireh rested in calm and worked. The testimony of Hight Commissariat and General Jacquot shows that without the Jaziran crops, Syria would suffer from famine in the 1936–1937 winter.26

• 29 CADN, Cabinet Politique, Box 572, Kamichlié, à son excellence Monsieur de HC de la R.F auprès de (...)

At the time of our emigration to Syria in 1926, we joined the Muslim section of the Hevêrkan, which was in absolute minority in the tribe. Having been received by Lieutenant Terrier and installed at Qubur al-Bid, Terrier provided us with “30 villages” in the name of the tribe of Hevêrkan. 29

27But Hadjo Agha did not repay their loyalty:

• 30 Ibid.

“Encouraged and exhilarated” by the confidence that we have given to Hadjo and by acknowledging the hospitality and services that we have rendered him, Hadjo Agha has registered 4 villages, Koubour al-bid, Dridjié, Khezmok and Merdahm, in his name and in the name of his family, without the knowledge of the Christian section, which is indeed the true holder of an important part of the land under question. Not satisfied with that flagrant usurpation that he registered in his own name with a government degree, he had the audacity to make us leave “his territories” that we have made flourish in at the cost of 100 human lives and financial sacrifices.30

28The archives do not contain sufficient information to trace the destiny of Melke Chenom, but several intelligence reports from the late 1930s inform about the protests of the landholders against cadastral surveys, which confirm the argument that the regionalist movement was also informed by sectarianism from above – and that an autonomist notable could exploit a crucial instrument of Syrian state centralisation like the cadastre.

29However, a significant number of Arab nationalists all over Syria, and their counterparts Jazira, rejected the autonomists’ demand for minority status and political claim-making based on labour, refugeeness and geography. They avoided engaging with the local political and economic articulations of the minority question and promoted a political definition of non-territorial, non-ethnic and non-religious understanding of minorityness. An example revealing the relation between refugeeness, minorityness and labour comes from Najib al-Rayyes immediately before the non-ratification of the treaty. In an article titled “Syria does not recognise a question called the Jaziran question” he states:

• 31 No title, Al-Qabs, June 15, 1939.

Jazira is made up of Arabs and Kurds. They are the original inhabitants [al-sukkan al-asliyyun], they are the majority, they are the holders of land and they are the holders of interest [ashab al-masalih]. They do not ask for special privileges or think about any kind of separation [infisal] from Syria. The majority of the refugees [Armenians, Assyrians, Syriacs, and Kurds] take the same stand like the original element [unsur asliyya]. The refugees coming from Turkey and Iraq were granted vast amounts of land and several opportunities. Syria accepted this favour because they were poor, pitiful, and helpless. But, in case these refugees grow into a rebellious and unruly agglomeration [jama‘at mutaqattila maslaha ‘atiyya ‘asiyya] and gain strength with the nourishment provided by Syria, attack its laws, assassinate its officers, with the pretext [hijja] that they hate Syrians, the French must see the dangers of the situation.31

• 37 Ibid, 28.

It is said that it was the new inhabitants of Jazira who built it. A childish observation! The Syrians have been producing value to that region for over four thousand years. Under the Umayyads and the Abbasids, Jazira was one of the richest regions of the Orient, and our poets never ceased to praise the fertility of the basins of the Khabur, the Tigris, and the Euphrates…. The Arabs themselves contributed by building dams, digging wells, constructing fortifications, planting trees, and undertaking significant projects. Under their rule, it became one of the granaries of Asia. At that time, there were about 40,000 gardens in the Qamishli region.37

31The introduction of a political definition of the notion of majority/minority was an effective tool to incorporate the non-Muslim and non-Arab Jazirans into the Arab nationalist movement fighting for Syrian independence.

32Eventually the Franco-Syrian Treaty was not ratified and the regional autonomy and minority questions across the country came to a relative halt. Following the annexation of the Sanjak of Alexandretta by Turkey (1939) and the failure of the autonomy movement in Jazira, the notion of “majority of Jazirans”, namely those Jazirans who endorsed unity and independence of Syria against the “pro-autonomy minority” came to represent the whole of the Jazirans (ahl al-jazira). Thanks to Arab nationalists’ silencing of the political agency of the pro-minority group, Jazira would enter the post-colonial era, to be followed in 7 years time, with the erasure of one local form of politics that thrived under the French mandate.

Conclusion

34This article has aimed to de-marginalise the post WW1 refugees’ experience in Syria and do justice to their historical agency in the carving of their own and other Syrians’ lives in their new setting. Through elaborating the discourses about labour and local politics, this article attempted to present the intricate story of the ex-refugees becoming Syrians. It is during this period that the former refugees transformed the Jaziran space through their agricultural and urban labour and were engaged in Syrian sectarian and nationalist politics. Against the mainstream scholarship where post WW1 refugees are solely referred to as spillover effects of the Armenian genocide (1915) and later the anti-Kurdish policies of the Turkish Republic (1923-), this piece embraced the controversial process of naturalisation of ex-refugees and highlighted the vernacularisation of their politics and its various articulations. The Franco-Syrian treaty negotiations (1936–1939) had long-lasting implications for the construction of the terms of national belonging in Syria where political loyalty to the Syrian national ideals of unity, anti-sectarianism and anti-colonialism were singled out and negotiated at various scales in the society. In local Jazirans’ memory in the late 2000s, labour spent for the development of Jazira and political loyalty continued to stand out as one of the essential markers of a Christian-Jaziran identity. They have remained as instruments of claim-making about one’s self, sect and their entitlement to Syria and the Syrian nation. However, a similar political and economic conformity could hardly be argued to exist for the majority of the Kurds of Jazira who were labelled as refugees by the official Ba’ath ideology from 1963 onwards through which their disenfranchisement and dispossession were justified in the eyes of the state and the larger society.