Akçam Lectures on Publication Project of Genocide Survivor Stories in Aleppo Rescue House

Surviving young boys and girls often were placed in orphanages or taken into Muslim households. Young girls and newly widowed women were forcibly married to Muslim men as part of an assimilatory state policy, while others were raped, kidnapped, and exploited as servants or sex slaves.

Akçam in his lecture with slides provided some background to this process and related specific stories preserved in the League’s archives. He pointed out that there were no precise figures on the numbers of Islamicized women and children, but writer Zabel Yesayan, the German Protestant missionary and Orientalist Johannes Lepsius, and the British scholar Arnold Toynbee all gave an estimate of around 200,000, while the Armenian National Union of Beirut in 1919 wrote that around 150,000 were in the regions of Cilicia, Mesopotamia and Syria as far south as the Suez Canal.

Rescue efforts began by Armenians and non-Armenians during the war in areas occupied by Allied troops, and continued after the war. Only a few incomplete figures exist on the numbers who were rescued, but a large number remained in Muslim hands. The Allied forces after the war in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres included an article proclaiming that forced conversions were invalid and that the Ottoman government was obligated to return forcibly converted Armenian women and children to their families through a League of Nations commission.

In 1921 the Commission of Inquiry for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near East was formed by the League of Nations. Composed of three people, it set up two rescue or care homes, one in Istanbul and one in Aleppo.

Karen Jeppe, the Danish member of the commission who ran the Aleppo home, declared that she wanted “to leave no stone unturned and to make sure that at least within Syrian territory no Christians are detained among Moslems without their own free consent, and that the opportunity of returning to their people has been offered to every one of them.” A number of Armenian organizations and international relief groups also worked towards the same end.

In Jeppe’s house, the newly-arrived Armenian women and children were first given medical treatments, given haircut and baths, photographed and then had their experiences recorded by the staff. They were housed in dormitories and given education (in Western Armenian, Arabic, religion, math and singing) and vocational training so that they could begin new lives.