The Armenians who fled Cilicia en masse late in 1921 usually left by ship, sailing from Mersin to nearby destinations chosen on the basis of one and only one criterion: that they not be under Turkish control. Late in December, fifteen thousand five hundred Cilician refugees disembarked in Beirut.3 At almost the same moment, some fourteen thousand Armenians who had been concentrated in Dörtyol left for Alexandretta. Still others, fewer in number, to be sure, settled in towns on the Lebanese coast. Two thousand refugees disembarked in Tripoli: French Mandatory officials put most of them up in old houses in the Al-Mina district on the coast, scattering the others throughout the
surrounding area, in Halba, Zghorta, Shekka, and Enfe.4 Two thousand more refugees settled in Tyre
and Sidon.5 Finally, about one thousand Armenians went ashore in Latakia. But Syria and Lebanon were not the Armenians’ only destinations. Eight thousand left for Cyprus; these families, however, were well-off and therefore self-supporting, and needed no help from the British authorities. The British had, indeed, closed the island’s ports to refugee ships; more generally, they had in November 1921 denied the refugees the right to land in any of the Eastern Mediterranean ports under their control, including Alexandria, Port Said, Haifa, Yaffa, and Larnaca. This explains why so many of the ships dropped anchor in Beirut, the only major port in the region that was open to the refugees without restriction. A few thousand refugees set sail for more remote destinations, among them Smyrna, Thrace, and Constantinople, not yet in Kemalist hands.6
The High Commission at first wished to see the Armenian refugees massed in areas far from the Turkish-Syrian border in order to appease the Turkish government, which insisted on this point; the French hoped that this would help them consolidate their relations with Syria’s powerful neighbor to the north. Robert de Caix, the interim High ... Read all
The First Refugee Camps in Syria and Lebanon
A young adolescent refugee in Beirut (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).
The “Quarantine” Armenian refugee camp in Beirut, probably photographed by Father Poidebard (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).