THE BEGINNING OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE AGBU AND SOVIET ARMENIA: THE QUESTION OF THE ORPHANS
With the defeat of the Greek armies on the West Anatolian front, Mustafa Kemal had become, by 1923, undisputed master of Anatolia. The Turkish military victories paved the way for the Lausanne Conference, which brought formal recognition of the Turkish Republic within the borders drawn by Kemal. The Armenians’ last hopes of seeing an Armenian national home created somewhere in the new Turkey were shattered forever. Cilicia and Izmir, two locales with high concentrations of Armenian genocide survivors in the immediate post-War years, were wholly emptied of their Christian population and brought under Kemalist control. Constantinople was the one remaining place where a compact Armenian population could still be found living under the now unchallenged rule of Turkey’s new rulers.
This change in the region’s geopolitical situation was, obviously, a matter of no little concern to AGBU leaders. For, in the early 1920s, the Union was not only responsible for several thousand orphans in Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, but had also taken tens of thousands of refugees in Greece under its wing. While it was not the only organization involved in assisting all these uprooted Armenians, it nevertheless saw itself as bearing the primary responsibility for what became of them. It was concerned not only with the orphans’ education and, after they left their orphanages, their integration into society, but also with the environment in which they would find themselves living when they grew up. For the residences ... Read all
The AGBU and Soviet Armenia
Famine caused terrible suffering in Soviet Armenia. A tragic scene in the streets of Yerevan in 1922 (Arch. Bibl. Nubar/ Paris).
Arshag Safrastian (1885-1958), former British consul in Bitlis, secretary of the AND, and member of a humanitarian mission sent to Armenia in December 1921 (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).