The Kafno: 200,000~ (jan 1, 1915 – dec 1, 1918)

Description:

The Mount Lebanon Famine (also known as Kafno meaning "Starvation" in Classical Syriac, or the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon) was carried out primarily by the Ottoman Empire under General Jamal Pasha (commander of Fourth Army and Governor of Greater Syria, nicknamed "the Bloodthirsty"), with contributing responsibility from Allied Powers (Britain and France through naval blockade) between 1915 and 1918 (ending with Ottoman collapse), with an estimated death toll of 200,000 people (representing one-third to one-half of Mount Lebanon's population of 400,000-500,000, the highest per capita mortality rate of any region in WWI), mostly Maronite Christians.

Ottoman authorities engaged in deliberate land blockade preventing grain from Syrian interior entering Mount Lebanon despite reported surpluses (Jamal Pasha's orders prohibiting wheat/barley transport), requisitioning local harvests for military use, suppression of food smuggling with executions, forced sale of farmers' grain, dissolution of Mount Lebanon's autonomous status and imposition of martial law, expulsion of European missionaries who provided social services/education/healthcare, arbitrary executions of suspected nationalists (11 men hanged August 21, 1915 for alleged treason), military conscription removing agricultural laborers, economic strangulation through prohibition of silk exports (50% of local revenue), currency devaluation (80% loss by 1918), while Allied naval blockade cut off remittances from Lebanese diaspora and humanitarian relief. Deaths occurred from starvation, typhus, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery—with reports of people eating cats, dogs, rats, searching trash for food, cases of cannibalism, bodies piled in streets, and one town reduced from full population to 94 survivors.

It has been labeled as genocide by some Maronite activists including Dr. Amine Iskandar (President of Syriac Maronite Union who states "We must inform the coming generations about the Kafno Genocide"), Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran (who wrote May 26, 1916: "The famine in Mount Lebanon has been planned and instigated by the Turkish government...The same process happened with the Christian Armenians"), scholars who cite alleged quotes from Jamal Pasha ("We have rid ourselves of the Armenians by the sword. We shall do away with the Lebanese by famine") and Enver Pasha ("The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation"), and some historians who characterize it as targeted deliberate starvation of Christians.

However, genocide classification is intensely contested. Scholars note there were no coded Ottoman instructions to murder Maronites en masse nor religious fatwas as existed for Armenians. Many historians including Tyler Brand argue the famine resulted from complex factors—locust plague destroying 1915 crops, Allied blockade, Ottoman military prioritization, poor administration, wartime resource scarcity—rather than deliberate extermination policy. The Lebanese government has not officially recognized it as genocide. No international body has made genocide determination. Debate centers on whether Ottoman intent was punitive starvation of suspected pro-Allied Maronites (genocidal) versus wartime resource mismanagement affecting all communities (non-genocidal). The first memorial was erected in Beirut only in 2018, 100 years after the famine ended, demonstrating how this catastrophe remains politically sensitive and historically contested, with Maronite memory emphasizing Ottoman targeting while scholarship increasingly views it as complex wartime disaster with shared Allied-Ottoman culpability.

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