The late 1921 exodus of tens of thousands of Armenians from Cilicia, and the flight, after the Greeks were defeated by the Turkish nation-alists, of additional tens of thousands from Smyrna and its environs to the Greek mainland and islands precipitated a new humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. With this second wave of refugees, the process of reconstruction that had been underway since the Armistice came to a quick halt. Most of the new exiles were plunged into the rough, somber life of the refugee camps, a continuation, as it were, of the violence and hardship that they had endured since 1915. In late 1921, tens of thousands of Armenians in Mersin boarded ships that left them somewhere on the Lebanese shore. At almost exactly the same time, the Armenians massed in Dörtyol had to evacuate the region, which had been ceded to the Turks; they flocked by the thousands to the nearest safe place, Alexandretta (Iskenderun), in Syria under French mandate.
Yet another period of uncertainty and anguish began for all these refugees. Because Cilicia had been ceded to Turkey, they had lost the land on which they had hoped to establish themselves as a community and rebuild their lives after the horror of the genocide. Following the French withdrawal, a Turkish regiment was stationed in Cilicia; this meant, quite simply, that the Armenians’ former executioners had become the masters of the country. All France’s efforts to persuade them to stay notwithstanding, virtually all elected to leave, abandoning such property as they had managed to recover. The question, however, was what these exiles who had been turned out of their native land could now do. No quick answer suggested itself: it took years to invent a future for all these displaced, abandoned Armenians. But the urgency of their situation made it ... Read all
New Challenges in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Cyprus
Cilician Armenian refugees living in caves near Beirut (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).
Armenian refugee women eking out a living in Beirut by collecting paper and wood (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).