When Berge Setrakian suggested, in December 2002, that we write a history of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, we very gladly took up his offer, on one condition: that we be given access to the Union’s archives, so that we could put our assessment of a century of history on solid foundations.
Needless to say, we were not the first to embark on an adventure of this kind. Theavolume commemorating the AGBU’s twenty-fifth anniversary (1906-1931), written by Aram Andonian in collaboration with Vahan Malezian, had already shed considerable light on the operations carried out by the Union as a whole as well as its various branches in that quarter of a century. Andonian’s book is still indispensable for anyone wishing to understand why and how the AGBU was founded in Cairo in 1906. Since its publication, other commemorative histories and surveys, such as Bedros Norehad’s The Armenian General Benevolent Union, Its History and Purpose (New York, 1966), have seen the light, contributing to our knowledge of the organization. The last such work to appear to date, by the historian Edward Melkonian (Պատմություն Հայ Բարեգործական Ընդհանուր Միության [History of the Armenian General Benevolent Union], Yerevan, 2005), is the most comprehensive study by far; its greatest strength lies in its author’s utilization of new archival material from the Soviet period.
We began by locating the available archives and evaluating their contents. The Nubarian Library in Paris, the AGBU’s main library, possesses, thanks to its history, an exceptionally rich collection. It contains, notably, a complete set of the minutes of the Union’s central board meetings from 1906 to 1941, together with the related correspondence. All the AGBU’s official publications and a collection of several thousand photographs are also to be found in the Bibliothèque Nubar. This material enabled us to sketch the main lines of the Union’s history from its beginnings to the second World War. To go further, however–that is, to trace the day-to-day implementation of the organization’s programs–we needed to study the relevant files. Here, the archives of the AGBU’s executive committee in Cairo proved invaluable. The approximately one hundred fifty thousand documents on file in the Union’s Egyptian headquarters opened up prospects we had not dreamed of. This material provided general documentation of the fate of the Armenian genocide survivors in 1915 and their subsequent resettlement in Syria and Lebanon. Carefully preserved and well organized, the Cairo archives allowed us to trace the history to which they bear witness down to the individual case level: this is true, for example, of the personalized records of the orphans and young women admitted to the AGBU’s shelters. Thanks to such documentation, we were able to form a clearer picture of the psychological rehabilitation of these genocide survivors, who had been deeply shaken by their ordeal in the deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia, or Jordan.
Foreword