The case of Cilicia is illustrative here. From the moment that the French administration was established in the region, it ran up against the resistance of the Turkish nationalists, who were determined to combat what they considered a foreign occupation. In response to this threat, the strategy of the French authorities in the Levant was to make a bid for the support of local non-Turkish groups: Armenians, Arab Alawites, Kurds, and Circassians. Among the most tangible manifestations of French policy was, precisely, the transfer to Cilicia of several tens of thousands of Armenians, most of them natives of the region, who had survived their deportation to the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts.
In January 1919, the Allied high command decided to repatriate all the Armenian deportees who had found refuge in camps in Syria and Palestine to the region in Asia Minor from which they had come. France was entrusted with the task of carrying out this mammoth operation, and agreed to finance it. An agency specifically charged with overseeing the repatriation was rapidly set up in Aleppo. Christened the Central Office for Armenian Repatriations, its main objective was to relocate the tens of thousands of Armenians from Cilicia then living in camps in Aleppo and Beirut. The same Office, as we have already noted, also took responsibility for finding women and children kidnapped during the War and held captive by Muslim families.
The British high command was, however, determined to step up the pace of these repatriations in order to avoid incidents of the kind that the presence of Armenian refugees might spark, and also to conciliate the regime of Emir Faysal, who had become master of the region between Aleppo and Damascus.2 These considerations led the British high command to clear the Aleppo district of its Armenian refugees, regardless of the deplorable living conditions that would be produced when these deportees, most of them destitute, arrived in Cilicia en masse. Thus were Cilician towns and villages repopulated by their returning Armenian inhabitants. Read all
The Armenian Refugees in the Near East
The entry of the French cavalry into Adana in June 1919
(Arch. F. Taillardat/Bibl. Nubar/Paris).