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Alexandropol runs out of food for 18,000 children. NER Weekly, 11 Jun 1921.
Location
Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey
Year
1921
Item Detail
On 13 April seventeen Americans with local staff were carrying the whole of the Caucasus work for roughly 25,000 children. Milton D. Brown's requisition from Alexandropol put flour down to ten days against a monthly use of 2,300 sacks, with fats, milk, meat, vegetables, seed and sewing needles exhausted or nearly so for 18,000 children. Eight hundred children taken off the streets were still outside the orphanages on a ration Brown calls pitifully small. Russell B. Main traced the severe enteritis and heavy mortality to malnutrition amounting to semi-starvation, and counted 3,129 scabies cases at Kasatche Post.
Context
The Near East Relief Weekly Bulletin was a four-page weekly printed in Constantinople for the organization's own staff. It continued The Acorne, the bulletin of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, and took the new title with Vol. II, No. 42 on 23 October 1920, when the organization itself was renamed Near East Relief.
Because it was written for people already in the field and not for donors at home, the Weekly is plainer than anything Near East Relief printed in America. Station reports give the numbers (e.g., children fed, beds occupied, pairs of shoes made, tons landed at Batoum) and the personnel notes record who arrived, who transferred, who married and who died.
The run covers the fall of Kars, the landing of Russian refugees in Constantinople in the winter of 1920, the famine in Armenia through 1921 and 1922, and the French withdrawal from Cilicia.
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Holding Institution
Columbia University Library
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External Link
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Attribution
Digitized by Columbia University Libraries; available through HathiTrust (Public Domain).
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Rights
No known copyright restrictions. Based on available information, NERHS is not aware of copyright restrictions on this material. Items are presented for non-commercial research and educational use. Users are responsible for determining rights status and compliance with applicable law. If you believe you hold rights in this material or have information about rights holders not currently reflected, please contact [email protected].
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Notes
Most of the people described in these pages were survivors of the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians and of the killing and deportation of Greeks and Assyrians in the same years. The bulletin does not use the word "Genocide," which was not coined until 1944. Its writers say "the deportations", "the massacres", or simply "the troubles", and often say nothing at all about how a child came to be an orphan. Where an issue documents the events or their aftermath, the record indicates this in the Subject field. The period's own vocabulary is kept in the original article titles and in quoted phrases.
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Document Contents
E. A. Yarrow reports that seventeen Americans and local staff kept the Caucasus program open during the political upheaval; Milton D. Brown's Alexandropol requisition says flour, fats, milk, meat, vegetables, seed and sewing needles were exhausted or nearly so for 18,000 children; 800 children gathered from the streets remain on inadequate rations outside the orphanages; Russell B. Main attributes severe enteritis and child mortality to semi-starvation, cold and damp and records 3,129 scabies cases at Kasatche Post; four ships deliver 2,355 tons of supplies after 13 April; Alexandropol's local employees volunteer to work without salary on half rations; C. D. Ussher writes from Erevan that starvation is acute and war has stopped spring sowing; later reports give the Ismid girls' menu, Broussa school work and the Armenian Red Cross program.