Index of persecution
The index is the archive's organising spine. It classifies every recorded act of persecution against the Christians of Lebanon — from the massacres of 1860 to the killings of the present decade — so that separate events can be read as one continuous record rather than as isolated tragedies.
The index covers the territory of present-day Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora where an act was directed at a person because of their Lebanese Christian identity. It begins with the 1860 massacres of Mount Lebanon and Damascus and extends through the civil war, the occupation years, the post-war assassinations, and the events of the current decade.
An event enters the index when it is attributable to a specific date or period, a locality, and an identifiable community of victims. Where a figure is disputed, the index records the range and names the sources on each side rather than asserting a single number.
Incidents in which civilians were killed in groups because of their community, place of worship, or village. Each entry records date, locality, perpetrating force where established, and the range of casualty figures given by different sources.
Timeline →The killing, attempted killing, imprisonment, or forced exile of political, clerical, journalistic, and civic figures. Entries note the method, the investigation's outcome, and whether responsibility was ever adjudicated.
Leaders →Villages and neighbourhoods emptied of their Christian inhabitants, with the date of departure, the scale of the exodus, the condition of property, and the extent of any subsequent return.
Displaced →Laws, decrees, amnesties, and administrative practices that entrenched impunity, altered demography, or constrained the exercise of Lebanese sovereignty.
Laws →Churches, monasteries, cemeteries, schools, and archives damaged, desecrated, seized, or destroyed, recorded alongside the incidents in which the damage occurred.
Genocide & Massacres →First-person accounts from survivors, witnesses, clergy, and rescuers, preserved verbatim and dated, with the place and circumstances of the recording noted.
Testimonies →Entries are assembled from contemporaneous press reporting, judicial and parliamentary records, church and municipal registers, published histories, photographic material, and recorded testimony. Each claim is traced to the earliest source available to us, and later retellings are treated as secondary.
An entry is published once at least two independent sources agree on the date, the place, and the essential facts, or once a single primary document — a registry, a court file, a first-person account — can be cited directly. Where only one source exists, the entry says so plainly.
The archive corrects itself in public. When new material changes a date, a figure, or an attribution, the entry is amended and the change is acknowledged rather than quietly overwritten. Researchers, families, and witnesses are invited to submit documents, photographs, or corrections.