Description
In August 1919, fifty-three American service members left behind the war-torn Western Front to embark on an investigative mission to former Ottoman territory. There, on orders from President Wilson, they would assess the potential cost of committing resources to restore governance in Anatolia and Caucasia. As they ventured deep into the interior, the American Military Mission to Armenia encountered Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Azeris and various other geopolitical groups vying for legitimacy amid lingering devastation and uncertainty. Through the mission’s records, I have a different lens to examine interactions between local elites and relief workers. Not only do the mission members’ observations, paired with local sources, illuminate this fraught relationship, the mission’s itinerary serves as a vehicle to challenge homogenous characterizations of the region and helps expose alternate outcomes for a fallen empire in flux.
When Wilson directed the mission, resurgent violence obscured all predictions on the future of Ottoman territory. Not only were the victorious Allies still reconciling the effects of WWI, but localized events heightened instability. Among them, the Armenian Genocide had eliminated vast swaths of the Anatolian population, the Turkish War for Independence had begun, and Wilsonian idealism had inspired new claims to territory. Witness to this were relief workers, interspersed throughout the mountainous Caucasian frontier who attempted to manage the refugee crisis. Though local leaders accommodated the mission’s requests to move through no-man’s land and observe the situation, it was the impartiality that American officers engendered in the region that exposed them to contentious complaints of unfair relief distribution and the deplorable refugee conditions. For this paper, I will focus on the final three days of the mission’s remote itinerary from Erivan to Nakhichevan and their observations on how relief organizations engaged in local power dynamics, which ultimately influenced their final recommendations to Wilson and the world.
