Nations on the Move: U.S. Humanitarians and Refugee Management in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1918–1923.

In January 1923, a treaty between the warring nations of Greece and Turkey authorized by the League of Nations empowered the two states to denaturalize and expel over one and a half million residents of their nations in what became known as the Greco-Turkish population exchange. In the executive committee meeting recounting the organization's work in 1920, NER president Charles Vickrey relayed that this new wave of funding allowed NER to supervise over 100,000 orphans in camps around the Eastern Mediterranean.[24] As NER's presence continued to grow in the region, workers and administrators sharpened their vision for what a reshaped Near East looked like. While the Greek and Turkish governments oversaw the eviction and expulsion of their counterparts' newly made citizens, the actual movement of these refugees took place largely under the official protection of the U.S. Navy, with the transportation out of Turkey under the auspices of an American humanitarian organization, Near East Relief (NER). With the transportation process wrapping up, one NER executive wrote to his superiors that it was time for "the responsible governments [to] organize [and] take over the work."[80] Even in their own imaginations, NER could no longer be the sole arbiter of managing Christian minorities in the region. [Extracted from the article]