Title: Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: community, land and violence in the memories of World War I and the French mandate (1915- 1939)
Author: Seda Altuğ
Place of publication: Netherland
Publisher: Utrecht University
Release date: 21 juni 2011

One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.1 This is a historico-anthropological study of Jaziran Christians’ and Kurds’ memories of the Armenian genocide (1915) and of the French mandate period (1921-1939) that they lived through following their flight from their homeland to refuge in the French Jazira. The study is based on an interactive reading of history/ies and memories, and is structured around two main sets of questions. The first set concerns how the ways of remembering the post-1915 period, and the accompanying re-construction of the self and community in the Syrian Jazira, are re-configured by the present power relationships and by official and popular representations of the past. The second set concerns how the events of 1915, and later the French mandate in Syria, as a social practice and discourse, haunt the present re-presentations of self and community.

What do the Jazirans remember of their post-1915
histories, and how to they remember them? How do they categorize their experiences? What is the role of remembering in the re-construction of communities and sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira? How does remembering relate to the ways in which the Syrian state structures and manages religious and ethnic differentiation as well as intercommunal and interethnic relations? How does the Syrian state’s politics of difference build upon intra-communal and inter-religious rivalries for political and economic power? These are some of the questions that will be addressed.
The memories will be contextualized and traced back historically on the basis of archival and first-hand material; and this is where the twofoldedness of my research question lies. The second set of questions aims to historicize the rememberings. It tries to demonstrate the formative role of French mandate rule in the French Jazira, and trace the change of that rule into the post-independence Arab nationalist regimes through change in the modes of remembering—and, thus, changes in the subjectivity—of the Jaziran Kurds and Christians.[1]