Joseph O'Neill - Blood-Dark Track

French interest in Cilicia dated back to the Crusaders, who enjoyed friendly relations with the local Armenian kingdom, an offshoot of Greater Armenia that finally collapsed in 1375. The French-Cilician connection was restored in 1536, when François I — and here one returned to Oncle Georges’ speech — acquired extraterritorial privileges, known as capitulations, in Ottoman lands which, since its conquest from the Egyptians in 1515, included Cilicia. French subjects enjoyed liberty of residence and movement, freedom of religion, substantial immunity from Ottoman jurisdiction in civil and criminal matters and, most importantly, freedom of commerce. Even though the rival powers enjoyed capitulations of their own, France became the dominant trading partner of the Ottoman Empire and French its language of business, communications and education: in 1907, my grandfather, a seven-year-old primary school student in Iskenderun, was one of around 70,000 Syrian children attending a French religious school.

By this time, France had long assumed the role of chief ‘protector’ of Christians in the Empire. The position of Ottoman Christians was, true enough, less than ideal. Although each religious community was substantially autonomous in matters of worship, law, marriage, healthcare and education, and in this sense enjoyed privileges not extended to religious minorities, notably Jews, by western States, non-Muslims suffered from economic and social disabilities and occasional violence. From the mid-nineteenth century, a culture arose, among the increasingly nationalistic Christian subjects of the Sultan, of judicial and political recourse to the foreign powers and their capitulatory jurisdictions. Predictably enough, this aggravated Turkish suspicions of Christian disloyalty, which exacerbated intercommunal hostilities, which, in completion of a self-perpetuating cycle, provided further grounds for western interventionism: most notoriously, in 1860 French troops occupied Syria in response to massacres of Syrian Christians. When I raised the subject in Mersin, nobody seemed to know about the massacres, even though they were extremely serious (25,00 °Christians reportedly died in Damascus alone); had led to the creation of an autonomous Lebanon; and, it seemed to me, were possibly connected to their ancestors’ decision to migrate: it was in around 1860, for example, that my grandmother’s grandfather and his brother decided to leave Syria for Mersin.

The next major French action on behalf of Ottoman Christians came in 1895, when, as a result of ‘atrocities’ committed against Armenians, France and other European powers forced Abdul Hamid II, the Red Sultan, to introduce reforms. However, the reforms only led to further killings of Armenians: reported figures for the number of dead fluctuated between a few thousand to 200,000. This was a very wide spectrum, and all I could feel sure of, after I’d hesitantly dipped into the historical literature, was that the precise fate of the slaughtered lay at the bottom of a cold and profound sea of misconceptions into which, if I took my research further, fresh errors of my own would trickle. I took refuge in this problem, and also in a concrete thought: there were no reports of Armenian casualties in Adana or anywhere else close to my grandfather’s world. This fortified my inclination to skip the Armenians, as if their history formed a disagreeable, non-vital college course. I was afraid, of course, of being sucked into the morass of the Armenian genocide, about which I only knew that it was hotly disputed, that it involved death-marches, and that it had taken place during the Great War. I couldn’t see what Joseph Dakak had to do with the fate of the Armenians, whom I had never connected to Mersin. (Didn’t the Armenians essentially come from north-east Turkey?) So I moved straight on to the next, most interesting, link between France and Turkey: the post-war French occupation of Cilicia, the name given by the occupiers to the boomerang of part-mountainous, part-fertile land comprising the eastern Taurus and the Amanus mountains and the maritime lowlands they enclosed.

And here I made a startling discovery. According to the French, Christians in Cilicia (215,000) outnumbered Muslims (185,000), and of the latter only a small minority were Turkish: in 1920, the French administration tallied 28,000 Greeks, 500 °Chaldaean and Assyrian Christians, 100,000 Ansarian Arabs, 30,000 Kurds, 15,00 °Circassians, only 20,000 Turks, and finally 120,000 Armenians. These last were mainly shepherds and husbandmen living in small, prosperous settlements in the Taurus — the remnants of the old medieval kingdom — and maintained close contacts with Tarsus and Adana, where Armenians were an important commercial presence. Even allowing for gross imperialistic statistical manipulation — and the numbers given for the constituent ethnic groups fell around 80,000 short of the given total population of 400,000 — I was presented with a picture of ethnic and religious diversity completely at odds with my sense of a region I thought I knew reasonably well.

The first wave of French and British forces reached Iskenderun in November 1918, shortly after the signing of the Armistice. In February 1919, British troops arrived to reinforce the French and Armenian battalions. They made a magnificent impression. They organized tennis matches, played polo, put the finishing touches on the Taurus rail tunnels, and repaired the Mersin — Tarsus railway: every day, one French onlooker marvelled, six thousand Hindus, shepherded by sergeants carrying whips, went singing to work. In June, the permanent occupying force of French troops began to arrive. A Colonel Thibault received the following words of welcome from a schoolgirl:

We salute you and acclaim France, whom we have summoned with our most fervent wishes. France, the object of our dreams; France, whose benevolent deeds in the world we have learned to bless; France, hitherto known only in the pale and cold reflections of history and the teachings of our schoolmasters, whom we at last see with our own eyes. She has set foot in our Cilician land, and our heart trembles with joy.… Flag of France, whose victory brings with it justice, peace, prosperity and liberty, flutter forever over this Cilician land.

I was again saddened by the reckless zeal of the schoolmasters who had placed this speech in the hands of a schoolgirl. But I wasn’t surprised. Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), the ideologue invoked in Oncle Georges’ speech and obviously revered by the Capuchin brothers in Mersin, was an arch-conservative monarchist, and his followers would not have hesitated to fit out their students — the usual Levantine mix of Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians — in the stiff, perilously enchanting garments of French nationalism. It must have been a curiously improvised job of ideological costuming, because surely not even the most francophile Cilician Christian could have dreamt of living under the French flag alongside their Kurdish, Circassians, Ansarian Arab and, yes, Turkish neighbours. But it appeared that this was precisely what the Armenian Cilicians were encouraged by the French to believe: that Cilicia, in some form or other, would be a country they could call their own. In 1919, eight thousand repatriated Armenians landed at Mersin and Iskenderun. Most of the Armenians resettled in Adana and the Cilician highlands; two or three thousand went to Mersin. Orphanages had to be build for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Armenian children.

This information made me think of Joseph Dakak’s spell as an interpreter for the (presumably British or French) Red Cross. In his capacity as a Red Cross worker, which he assumed at some point after the termination of his employment on the railway construction in February 1919, he would inevitably have been involved in local relief efforts, which in Cilicia would have meant extensive contacts with displaced and homeless Armenians.