AVC Multimedia e-Book Series e-Book#3: AGBU 100 Years of History (Vol. I) | Page 81

While it was an enormous challenge to make the Armenian resettlement program in Cilicia a success, one that several Armenian humanitarian organizations took up with brio, it must not be forgotten that such operations called for financing in amounts that excited people’s greed. The Adana-based Armenian National Union, a young organization that counted representatives of all Armenian denominations and political and humanitarian organizations in its ranks, was already present in every Cilician city. Loosely organized, poorly structured, and lacking cohesion, its local chapters were often led, as Zabel Yesayan noted, by incompetent, poorly educated people who had been arbitrarily appointed by an ANU leadership in Adana that maintained only very slack ties with its own chapters.36 Furthermore, the creation of these chapters had been promoted by the Allied forces—the French in Cilicia and the British in Syria—because they needed interlocutors who could fairly claim to represent the diverse components of Armenian society. As soon as the Armistice was signed, both General Edwin Allenby, commander of the Allied forces in the Near East, and Georges Picot, the French representative in the region, encouraged the formation of branches of the ANU in all the Allied-occupied areas in which there was an Armenian population. In Cilicia, the ANU and the representative of the Paris-based Armenian National Delegation, Mihran Damadian, were, in the view of the French administration, nothing less than quasi-official spokesmen for Armenian interests. In theory, the ANU limited its operations to political and security matters; in fact, as we have already seen, it sought to expand into the field of humanitarian action as well. Operating in semi-official fashion under ... Read all

Humanitarian Work in Cilicia

The “Enver Pasha” orphanage, founded in 1909 and administered by the Vorpakhnam from 1919 on (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).

Urfa (Coll. Michel Paboudjian).