I
have often been impressed with the hopelessness of making people who have not
been eye-witnesses, comprehend the dreadful character of the massacres which
were carried on by the Turks against the Christian population of the Orient. I
have never been able to describe sights that I have witnessed in such manner as
to make my listeners actually see and understand. It frequently happens that
people, sitting in their comfortable houses, lay aside an article or book on the
subject, with the remark: “We are fed up on Armenian
atrocities.”
Here
is another strong point of the Turk’s position: he has killed so many human
beings and over so long a period of time that people are tired of hearing about
it. He can, therefore, continue without interference.
In
Doctor Elliott’s “Beginning Again at
Ararat”, gives the following story of a young girl, heard in the rescue home
in Turkey, of which she was in charge:
“I
was twelve years old, I was with my mother. They drove us with whips and we had
no water. It was very hot and many of us died because there was no water. They
drove us with whips, I do not know how many days and nights and weeks, until we
came to the Arabian Desert. My sisters and the little baby died on the way. We
went to a town, I do not know its name. The streets were full of dead, all cut
to pieces. They drove us over them. I kept dreaming about that. We came to a
place on the Desert, a hollow place in the sand, with hills all around it. There
were thousands of us there, many, many thousands, all women and girl children.
They herded us like sheep into the hollow. Then it was dark and we heard firing
all around. We said, “The killing has begun.” All night we waited for them, my
mother and I, we waited for them to reach us. But they did not come, and in the
morning, when we looked around, no one was killed. No one was killed at all.
They had not been killing us. They had been signaling to the wild tribes that we
were there. The Kurds came later in the morning, in the daylight; the Kurds and
many other kinds of men from the Desert; they came over the hills and rode down
and began killing us. All day long they were killing; you see, there were so
many of us. All they did not think they could sell, they killed. They kept on
killing all night and in the morning—in the morning they killed my
mother.”
This
quotation is given because it condenses in a few vivid and convincing words the
clearest description that has appeared anywhere of the character of the Turkish
“deportations” of the Armenians. All the official documents and the
testimony of a host of American, German and other eye-witnesses corroborate the
accuracy of this picture.
In
the report of the Military Mission to Armenia, commonly known as the “Harbord
Mission,” published by the American Association for International Conciliation,
in June, 1920, is to be found the following passage:
“Meanwhile
there have been organized official massacres of the Armenians ordered every few
years since Abdul Hamid ascended the throne. In 1895, one hundred thousand
perished. At Van, in 1908, and at Adana and elsewhere in Cilicia in 1909, over
thirty thousand were murdered. The last and greatest of these tragedies was in
1915. Massacres and deportations were organized in the spring of 1915, under a
definite system, the soldiers going from town to town. Young men were first
summoned to the government building in each village and then marched out and
killed. The women, the old men and the children were, after a few days, deported
to what Talaat Pasha called “Agricultural Colonies,” from the high, breeze-swept
plateaus of Armenia to the malarial flats of the Euphrates and the burning sands
of Syria and Arabia. The dead, from this wholesale attempt on the race, are
variously estimated at from five hundred thousand to a million, the usual figure
being about eight hundred thousand. Driven on foot under a hot sun, robbed of
their clothing and such petty articles as they carried, prodded by bayonets if
they lagged, starvation, typhus, and dysentery left thousands dead by the trail
side, etc., etc.”
I
have in my possession another report of a credible European who witnessed the destruction
of the Armenians at Aleppo and elsewhere, which gives many details similar to
those found in the memorandum of Mr. Geddes, but I refrain from offering it here
for fear of wearying the readers.
In view of the difficulty of producing the testimony of eye-witnesses, and as
this report has never been published, it is a valuable historical document.
Enough has been said, however, to convince the reader that the
extermination of the Christians of Turkey was an organized butchery, carried out
on a great scale, and well under way before the Greeks were sent to
Smyrna. We have seen it in operation in the days of Abdul Hamid,
“the butcher,” we have seen it more fully developed and better organized under
Talaat and Enver, those statesmen of the “Constitution.” We shall behold it
carried out to its dire finish by Mustapha Khemal, the “George Washington” of
Turkey.
This
part of the story would not be complete if I passed over in silence the
systematic extermination, and the satiating of all the lowest passions of man or
beast which characterize Turkish massacres of the Greeks and Armenians of the
Pontus.
There have been, from time to time, descriptions of the massing of bands of
these wretched people at different points on the shores of the Black Sea where
they had arrived after long journeys on foot and indescribable hardships, and of
the relief given them by American organizations. Often officers of these
organizations, or American missionaries, have uttered cries of protest, which
have caused a momentary feeling of wonder in the minds of the American people,
or have passed unheeded. Yet the systematic massacre, deportation,
plundering and violation that went on among the
Christians of once prosperous region of the Black Sea is one darkest and foulest
pages even in Turkish history.
The flourishing communities of
Amasia, Caesaria, Trebizonde, Chaldes, Rhodopolis, Colonia, centers of Greek
civilization for many hundreds of years have been practically annihilated in a
persistent campaign of massacre, hanging, deportation, fire and rape. The
victims amount to hundreds of thousands, bringing the sum total of exterminated
Armenians and Greeks in the whole of the old Roman province of Asia up to the
grand total of one million, five hundred thousand. Thus has been created that
“regenerated” Turkey, which has been compared in some quarters to Switzerland
and the United States.
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