Armenian Weekly April 2012 Magazine

FOR THE RECORD
Syrian-Armenian Memory
and the Refugee Issue in
Syria under the French
Mandate (1921–46)
By Seda Altuğ
An overwhelming majority of today’s Syrian-Armenians are
the descendants of Ottoman-Armenians who survived the
1915 Armenian Genocide. The 120,000–150,000 deportees
in Ottoman Syria, who had hoped to return to their homeland
as soon as World War I was over, returned to Cilicia,
which, by the time of the Mudros Armistice (Oct. 30, 1918), had come under
French occupation. All hope of rebuilding their communities, however, vanished
with the Turkish National Liberation War (1919–21) and the ceding of
Cilicia to the Turkish Republic following the formalization of the Turco-
Syrian border in the Ankara agreement on Oct. 21, 1921.
During these years, the killing, intimidation, abduction, and
stigmatisation of Armenians in Cilician cities—such as Adana,
Mersin, Tarsus, as well as in cities like Urfa, Kharpert, Malatya,
Diyarbekir, and Arabkir—continued, culminating in a second
Armenian exodus towards French Syria and Lebanon. Between
1921–23, 80,000 new refugees arrived in Syria and Lebanon by
land or by sea. Richard Hovannisian estimates that by the end of
1925, approximately 100,000 refugees were living in Syria; 50,000
in Lebanon; 10,000 in Palestine and Jordan; 40,000 in Egypt;
25,000 in Iraq; and 50,000 in Iran. 1
The third wave of expulsion towards French Syria, in particular
north-eastern Syria, in Jazira, took place following Turkey’s
military suppression of the Kurdish Sheikh Saïd Revolt in 1925.
According to figures compiled by the League of Nations, between
8,000 and 10,000 Kurdo-Armenians, as named by the French
sources, from the rural parts of Diyarbekir, Mardin, Shirnak,
Siirt, Bitlis, and Cizre, joined the Armenian deportees who had
arrived in Syria earlier, in 1915–16
and 1921–23. 2
The history of the post-genocide
world in Syria has not yet been
critically assessed. Very few scholarly
works have incorporated the
social and political history of the
Armenian refugees into the general
history of Syria. It seems that the
politics of fear—which is embodied
in space, in people’s minds and
bodies—is also quite pervasive
among researchers. Accordingly,
the scholarly field inevitably
silences and marginalizes controversial
historical phenomena from scholarly scrutiny, such as the
issue of sectarianism or the refugee issue. This piece will shed
some light on the Armenian refugee experiences upon their arrival
to their new residence in French Syria.
In the Syrian-Armenian memory, 1915 is seen as a decisive
event, a violent ending, but also as a new beginning, and a new
period of struggle in a hostile and foreign setting. The violence of
the genocide—while it took different forms in social, class, cultural,
and geographic terms—constitutes the foundation of all the
historical narratives of that time. And they all begin with the violence
the survivors were exposed to in their home towns or on the
deportation routes to Syria, namely an entire life was left behind
and would never be returned; Its fields, trees, rivers, and climate
are remembered with extreme grief, and the new refuge is never
really accepted as a substitute.
The French mandate (1921–46) rule in Syria and the colonial
agency are obscured, or rather assimilated, into a survival narra-
April 2012 | THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY | 45