Stories from the Boxes: Algerian Siblings and the Syrian Border

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

While Anatolia and Syria were part of the same polity for centuries under Ottoman rule, the end of the First World War drew a line between the two regions that following the French withdrawal from Cilicia, ran along the border of the province of Adana in Turkey and the Sanjak of İskederun under French control. As a result, people on both sides of the border suddenly became separated from their family, friends, and property on the other side. 

In this letter, we have an interesting example of two siblings, neither Turkish nor Syrian, separated by the new border. Sadïé Brouzik was an Algerian woman living in the small town of Kozan located north of the city of Adana, presumably having come sometime before the French formally relinquished control of the region in January 1922. Her brother Saleh was living less than two hundred kilometers away on the other side of the border in Kırıkhan just southeast of İskenderun. Since Algeria was administratively part of France, they were both French subjects. 

In 1930, Saleh wrote the following letter to the French consul in Adana with a picture of his sister attached in hopes of getting her a passport:

Ma soeur légitime nommée Brouzik Sadïe se trouvant actuellement à Kozan (villayet d'Adana), devant rentrer aujourd'hui en Syrie et me réjoindre à Kirik-Khan je vous serais très reconnaissant de la faire munir d'un passeport et lui porter l'aide nécéssaire, car algerienne elle se trouve comme moi sujet Français.

Saleh seeks the help of the French consulate in Adana to help his sister join him in what is after all a French territory. However, we can detect an assertion being made as well in his request for assistance stressing that she like him is an Algerian, i.e. a French subject. In France and the colonial administration governing Algeria, the status of indigenous (indigène) Algerians within emerging notions of citizenship and race was being hotly contested. Algerian Muslims had French passports and IDs and were subject to French law, yet they were not by default considered full French citizens as Algerian settlers were (and Jews after 1870). Perhaps it was for this reason that Saleh felt it is necessary to stress the French subjecthood of his sister as an Algerian living abroad. The consular records contain no other documentation of Sadïé's case, so it is not clear if she was granted the passport and assistance or not.

Source: MAE-Nantes, 8PO/1/8

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