Abrahamyan’s “Armenian Refugees in French Mandate Syria” published
I.B. Tauris, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, has announced the publication of Dr. Victoria Abrahamyan’s Armenian Refugees in French Mandate Syria: Statelessness and Nation-Building in the Middle East. The book is part of the series Armenians in the Modern and Early Modern World, edited by Bedross Der Matossian of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In the aftermath of the World War I, the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish War of Independence, Syria became home to thousands of Armenian refugees. In this history covering 1920 to 1948, Abrahamyan examines the experiences of Armenian refugees in the Syrian Jazira as they navigated competing state-building efforts led by the French mandate authorities, Syrian nationalists and Soviet Armenia.
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Reading about this book the following incident came to my mind. Antranig Zarougin had presented himself to the French consul in Aleppo to go abroad for the first time and visit France upon invitation. The Consul told him “you had your chance appreciating France here as well, but you lost it.” Zarougian reflected and wrote, “the remark was obvious. Syrians had just recently gotten rid of French colonial rule with fight. And during those fights we, the Armenians, naturally had sided with the Arabs”. Zarougian had his passport stamped, but when he got to France he found out that the French consul in spite had it stamped for a temporary 24 hours stay. Syrian Armenian ties are intimately connected with Syrian history.