recollections of Barkev Sarkahian, first cousin of the first Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrossian (Der-Bedrossian??)
Born 1933 in ?? Moved with family to Anjar in 1939 after first moving to Beirut before the rest of the community in 1937 without signing away his lands like the others did in the agreement to be resettled.
The Mousal Dagh mountain rescue in 1915 by French Navy Captain Dartij?? De Fourne took 4500plus?? Armenians to Port Said, Egypt. [18 had died in defending the population on the mountain.] Most of the boys and men joined the French Foreign Legion (army) to fight in Palestine against the Ottoman empire. After the war the part of the empire where Mousa Dagh is became a French colony and the residents resettled there in 1919.
On the eve of World War II, France gave Turkey this coastal region as an incentive not to join Germany, but the Armenian enclave near Mousa Dagh, but the Armenians felt unsafe and somehow ?? got the French to resettle them (deported??) into their territory in Lebanon.
Movses Der Kaloustian, Armenian general in French army [see biography in Armenian by Boghos Senabian, 2004, later the Speaker of the House in the Lebanese parliament and a respected Lebanese politician] played an instrumental role in acquiring the land on the eastern edge of the Bekaa Valley for this resettlement. The Muslim owner of this parcel of land defaulted on a bank loan or something. The French acquired the land in 1938 from the bank. The French government gave money to construct all the houses according to a standard one floor model home. But the war started. In 1940 the houses started to be built but someone in charge of the designated funds stole part of those funds that were to be used to construct the houses (corruption) so they had to make less complete versions of the model home. The people lived 1 1/2 years in "tents" (canvas rectangles serving as roofs built with tree branches to support them). They were finished in 1943, with all the families working on construction (15 years old and older males).
After the war in 1946-1947 Stalin enticed many Armenians to return to Armenia.
From the website: http://www.armenianhistory.info/ussr.htm
The new wave of the Armenian migration.
In 1946, many patriotic Armenians from the foreign Armenian colonies decided to repatriate to their historical homeland to contribute the post-war restoration. However, in years1948-1949, Stalin launched a new campaign of terror, and thousands of those repatriated Armenians were illegally arrested and forcibly deported to Siberia and Altay. From the beginning of the 60s, Armenians began to emigrate from the Soviet Union on a large-scale. The Soviet leaders considered the Armenians, together with the Jews and the Germans as "unreliable elements" of the Soviet system.
Half the families abandoned Anjar to return to Armenia, including one of Barkev's uncles (name ??) whose son Levon later became the first president after independence, leaving empty houses. In 1948 Palestinian refugees fled what was then called Palestine (now Israel) into Lebanon, and the government placed some into these empty houses. They stayed until 1955-1956 or so, but then wanted to build a mosque in the Christian town and the Armenians also began to fear intermarriage (which was still very unacceptable then), and so the Armenian women went after the Palestinians with sticks (but of course all the men were armed to back them up) to scare them. The Lebanese army protected them ??, but Movses Der Kaloustian negotiated their relocation out of Anjar?
NEEDS LOTS OF WORK. But Barkev passed away in 2017.