Betrayed Armenia

WHY AND WHEREFORE

In making a study of my race, I have found three marked characteristics Intelligence – Energy – Industry. Combined with these three characteristics is an intense Love of Nationality. We live in a complex world. In an independent people these characteristics and this sentiment are laudable Virtues. In a subject people they are Crimes.

After I had laid this bitter Truth to heart, I did not have to seek for the Why and Wherefore of the Armenian Massacres.

The Armenian Massacres stand without their parallel in history. The human mind staggers to contemplate the fiendish orgies of which they have been the victims, and no pen can describe their horrors: and this helpless christian people are to-day in the same deadly peril as they have been since the famous Treaty of Berlin consigned them bound hand and foot to the mercy of their executioners.

The Armenians may be led again “as sheep to the slaughter” and the work of extermination may be completed – Jesus Christ was crucified on Calvary and the servant is not greater than his Lord – but the work of their extermination can only be completed when the evil influences in the Turkish Empire have reached their culminating point. Hitherto the Powers of Europe have by their jealousies and rivalries cultivated these evil influences, they have watered them and made them grow, but when their culminating point is reached, they must re-act on Christendom and the natural consequence must follow. Those who sow the wind, must reap the whirlwind. It is in the natural order of things.

I will allow that Liberty, Justice, Equality, Fraternity are the watchwords of Young Turkey, but Young Turkey is only a small minority; the great majority of the Turkish nation are not Young Turks.

The question therefore resolves itself into this critical point: “What will Christendom do even now?”

The trouble began in Adana. An armed mob strengthened and augmented by soldiers fell in overwhelming numbers upon the unarmed Christians. The Armenian population of Antioch and vicinity were practically wiped out and the Armenian villages in the Alexandretta district destroyed with immense loss of life. Hadjim, Kessab and the neighbouring villages were burned. The Armenian quarter in Tarsus was ruined and ill-omened Marash stained again with the blood of thousands of Armenians. Zeitoon was desolated. The entire population of Kirikon between Aleppo and Alexandretta were massacred to the last babe. The mob and the soldiers burned what they could not carry away, so that the material loss has been enormous. In place of the former abundance and thriving industries there are instead desolated provinces and the charred and blackened remains of pillaged and ruined homes, and the residue of those who escaped massacre are reduced to homelessness and starvation.

DISINTERESTED EVIDENCE

I have thought it advisable to insert a few extracts from accounts of the Massacres of April, 1909, given by disinterested witnesses.

History repeats itself. In 1895 Turkish soldiers fell upon seventy to eighty young women and girls in a church, where they had fled for refuge, and after hideously outraging them, barricaded them in, setting fire to the building at the same time, and derisively shouting to their victims as they were being roasted alive, to call upon their Christ to save them now.

“We are having a perfectly hideous time here. Thousands have been murdered – 25,000 in this province they say; but the number is probably greater, for every Christian village was wiped out. In Adana about 5000 have perished. After Turks and Armenians had made peace, the Turks came in the night with hose and kerosene, and set fire to what remained of the Armenian quarter. Next day the French and Armenian schools were fired. Nearly everyone in the Armenian school perished, anybody trying to escape being shot down by the soldiers.”

“The Turkish Authorities do nothing except arrest unoffending Armenians, from whom by torture they extort the most fanciful confessions. Even the wounded are not safe from their injustice. A man was being carried in to me yesterday when he was seized and taken off to gaol. I dare not think what his fate may be.”

“For fiends incarnate commend me to the Turks. Nobody is safe from them. They murder babies in front of their mothers; they half murder men, and violate the wives while the husbands are lying there dying in pools of blood.”

“The authorities did nothing, and the soldiers were worse than the crowd, for they were better armed. One house in our quarter was burned with 115 people inside. We counted the bodies. The soldiers set fire to the door, and as the windows had iron bars, nobody could get out. Everybody in the house was roasted alive. They were all women and children and old people.” – Extract from letter of Mrs. Doughty-Wylie, wife of British Consul at Adana; published in the London “Daily Mail.”

“The soldiers led the way in these horrors and were guilty of atrocities so terrible that they can never be described in a public print. Even the soldiers landed at Mersina – the soldiers sent expressly to restore order – added to the crimes and for three days continued the murders unchecked.” – Extract from the London “Daily Mail.”

“The outbreak began in the Armenian bazaar on April 14th, and on the pretence that an Armenian revolt was in progress the Redifs or reserves were called out. These, as villainous a crew as could well be found, had arms and ammunition served out to them, and immediately joined in the slaughter, and all the worst of the subsequent killing, looting, and house burning was done by them.”

“The Armenians did not take their punishment lying down. Their quarter of the town was so well defended that the mob, mad as they were with lust for blood, would not venture into it. Houses on the outskirts were besieged by thousands of men and held by half a dozen; in fact, the courage of these hordes of Moslem savages was only equal to butchering women and children and unarmed men. I saw a Greek house which was held for eight hours by one Armenian with a shotgun against hundreds of Turks firing from the surrounding houses and the minaret of a mosque. At last his cartridges gave-out, but not for two hours after that did the mob pluck up courage to rush the house.” – Extracts from accounts by Mr. J. L. C. Booth, special correspondent of the London “Graphic.”

“Kessab was a thrifty Armenian town of about eight thousand inhabitants, situated on the landward slope of Mt. Cassius (Arabic, Jebel Akra) which stands out prominently upon the Mediterranean seacoast half-way between Alexandretta and Latakia. Kessab is now a mass of blackened ruins, the stark walls of the churches and houses rising up out of the ashes and charred timbers heaped on every side. What must it mean to the five thousand men and women and little children who have survived a painful flight to the seacoast and have now returned to their mountain home, only to find their houses sacked and burned! There were nine Christian villages which clustered about Kessab in the valleys below. Several of these have been completely destroyed by fire. All have been plundered and the helpless people driven out or slain.”

“Can you imagine the feelings of the Kessab people as they climbed on foot the long trail up the mountain, and then as they came over the ridge into full view of their charred and ruined dwellings? Their stores of wheat, barley and rice had been burned; clothing, cooking utensils, furniture and tools had gone; their goats, cows and mules had been stolen; their silk industries stamped out; their beloved churches reduced to smouldering heaps. The bodies of their friends and relatives who had been killed had not been buried. And yet the love of home is so strong that the people have settled down there with the determination to clear up the debris and rebuild their houses.” – Extracts from “The Sack of Kessab,” Stephen Van R. Trowbridge.

As these sheets are going through the press there comes news of famine at Zeitoon. The Rev. F. W. Macullum, American Missionary at Marash, writes to the Rev. W. W. Peet, American Missionary at Constantinople, that 12,000 souls in and around Zeitoon are dying of hunger; they are wandering about in rags, mixing bran and water, and cooking and eating it, if they can get even that. Rev. Macullum adds, “The same story comes to us from all sides. As we foresaw all along, from now on the distress will be greatest.”

If 50,000 were massacred, the list of those who have died and are dying of homelessness and starvation will exceed 150,000. It is true; and the numbers are not exaggerated. Last year the people reaped no harvest, and this year there are no sowings.

The latest news is that Mush, a prosperous Armenian village that had escaped the desolation of the massacres, has been plundered in a night attack by armed Kurds, and the villagers are now reduced to extreme distress. Before the outbreak the Armenian patriarchal vicar at Mush had repeatedly appealed to the Armenian Patriarch at Constantinople, and the Armenian Patriarch had repeatedly appealed to the Authorities at Constantinople asking protection for the villagers of Mush as a Kurdish attack was apprehended. It is evident that the authorities at Constantinople are unable to protect thriving Armenian villages from Kurdish and Turkish raiders.

PREFACE TO 2ND PRINTING

The first and second parts of this little book were written and printed in pamphlet form for circulation in the United States, shortly after the Adana Massacres of April, 1909. I have now thought it advisable to add a Supplement of a short history of the Origin of the Armenians and the Introduction and Revival of Christianity in Armenia.

The illustrations and the extracts from the periodicals “Harper’s Monthly,” “The Wide World” and the “Cosmopolitan” have been added to the 2nd printing.

INTRODUCTION TO 2ND PRINTING

My object in writing this little book is to lay the hard case of my unfortunate race before the men and women of the United States; since it is from the United States that the American Missionaries have gone forth, who have been the only helping influence from without for my suffering people in Asiatic Turkey. To the earnest and devoted men and women of the American Missions, we Armenians owe a debt of gratitude which we can never repay.

If in the contents of the pages of this little book I have exaggerated Facts by one whit or one iota, if I have deviated by one hair’s breadth from the Truth, I stand to be judged.

“God save us from another Adana, but the sword of Islam has not been dulled” was one of the clarion notes sounded at the Sixth International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement, which was held at Rochester, New York. The man who sounded that clarion note knew Islam, and because knowing of my own knowledge that the sword of Islam has not been dulled, I tremble lest its sharp edge fall once more on the neck of my helpless race. If I knew and felt sure in mine own heart that the sword of Islam was dulled, I would be content to let bygones be bygones, and to hold my peace and be silent for ever.

Like the sudden explosion of a volcano in the physical world, comes the explosion of a Turkish Massacre of Armenians in the moral world. It comes just in that way; the subterranean fires are always there, but all of a sudden the sulphur flames of religious fanaticism burst, the lava floods of race hatred and lust of plunder, break forth and run in fiery streams; the unfortunate victims are pounced upon, swooped upon, pillaged, plundered, butchered, slaughtered, subjected to outrages so hideous, cruel, loathsome, and revolting, that no pen could depict their horrible realities and the details can never go into print. The human mind is staggered and asks itself the question if even the imaginations of fiends and devils could originate such horrors. Then this orgy of the human fiends is arrested. For the time being the appetite for blood, lust, and plunder is satisfied; for the time being, the eye is content with the scenes of havoc and desolation lying under the sun; the smell of corpses is in the air, the odor from the carcases of the “christian swine” reek in the nostrils of the Turk, he turns away, his jaws dripping with blood, and rests to couch for a future spring. We have seen that sort of an end to the tragedy of a tiger’s victim: the tiger has eaten his fill, he rests, to keep guard over the crunched bones and mangled bits of bloody flesh that bestrew the earth. So also now there is a residue left of those that have served as the meat and wine of this devil’s feast; the demons have gorged themselves over the banquet, and now there are left over the broken remains of the banquet, the miserable residue homeless and destitute.

Civilized nations have received a temporary moral shock, like a shock that spreads from the centre of an explosion; the electric vibration running far and wide from the scene of the centre of devastation. There are among these civilized nations generous and kind-hearted people who open their purse strings; they give money to purchase shelter, food and clothing for these homeless, naked and hungry beggars, made homeless, naked and hungry through no fault of their own. But oh! ye generous and kind hearted people! can any power under heaven assuage the heart anguish of this miserable residue? Can they be made by any means of human comfort to forget the black horrors or recover from the effects of the fires of the hideous affliction through which they have passed? What is there left for a woman who has seen with her own eyes the slaughter and heard with her own ears the dying cry of her murdered child? even her reason must give way under the stress of her anguish. All ye who are mothers, I appeal to you, for one moment to put yourselves in the place of thousands of such mothers, in whose hearts the same mother’s love burns as in yours, and then measure the depth of their agony.

Generous and kind hearted people who open your purse strings; would to God I entreat, ye would raise up your voices and demand that this hideous slaughter and oppression of a helpless christian race should cease. Would to God I entreat, ye would raise up your voices and demand that this people of an industrious, intelligent christian race, robust in mind and body, should be let to live. Would to God I entreat, that ye would raise up your voices and demand for them that security of life and property to which they are entitled just as equally as all other peoples.

Public Sentiment has done great things in the world’s history. Public Sentiment liberated Greece, The Lebanon, The Balkan States from Turkish Oppression. Slavery was abolished in the United States through Public Sentiment: but alas! does Public Sentiment sleep for this helpless Christian race. Are they not God’s creatures? have they not a right to live on God’s earth as other nations? Does Humanity, does Christianity allow that tender babes and children should be hideously and horribly mutilated and butchered before the eyes of their mothers, or that the ears of mothers should be rent with the cries of the dying agony of their murdered children? Does Humanity, does Christianity allow that helpless women should be forcibly subjected to the most hideous, the most loathsome, the most revolting, and the most cruel outrages? Does Humanity, does Christianity, allow all this?

Christian Governments have organized a Hague Conference of Peace and Civilization, but they have closed its doors to the cause of a bleeding christian race groaning under the yoke of the cruellest oppressors that the world has yet known. Christian men and women have held up their hands in horror at the Indian Juggernauth; but alas! the political wheels of Christian Governments have been a Greater Juggernauth for a helpless christian race. It is by Christian Governments that “we are made as the filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this day.” It is as if the answer to our groanings had been made by Christian Governments in just these words:

“We know that you have had frightful grievances, such as have been beyond the measure of human endurance. We know that since the Treaty of Berlin your history has been written in blood and tears, as the history of no other nation has been written before or now. We know that your women are subjected to the most revolting and hideous agonies, and your babes and children hounded to hideous deaths. We know that the sum total of your wrongs and sufferings is so great, that the cry of its anguish is piercing the very heavens, but really, our political and commercial jealousies prevent; and we each one of us being on the look out lest our separate political and commercial interests in the Empire of your oppressors be endangered, cannot regard you. It may be the deadliest scandal of Christendom that we Christian Powers should be all gathered together, one against another, in the Empire of your Oppressors, as eagles gather together round a carcase; but really there is no help for it; and if you must die hideously by a hellish extermination, why then you must die, and we have to condone your hellish extermination, for in any case, each one of us must secure his own political and commercial interests in this same Empire of your Oppressors.”

In “Transcaucasia and Ararat,” published by Mr. James Bryce in 1876, there occurs in the chapter entitled “Some Political Reflections” the following passage:

“The attention of the West was so much drawn towards Herzegovina and Bulgaria by the events of 1876 that the miseries of the Asiatic subjects of the Porte have been unreasonably forgotten or neglected. They are fully as wretched as the Slavs or Cretans have been; and in so far worse off, that in Europe there exists no large body of tribes making murder and robbery its regular and daily occupation as the Kurds, and latterly the Circassians also, have done in Armenia. If anyone will take the trouble to read the complaints of oppressions and cruelties presented to the Porte by the Armenian Patriarchate in 1872 (since reprinted in England) and some of the more recent statements printed by the Armenians in England on the same topic, he will see that the state of Turkish Asia presents as grave and pressing a problem as that of Bulgaria itself.”

In the 4th edition of the same book, published in 1896, the following note appears to the passage I have quoted:

“Shortly after this was written, the Blue Books presented to Parliament, containing reports from British Consuls in Asiatic Turkey, showed that things were really far worse there than they had been in Bulgaria or Herzegovina.”

What has followed since 1876 is too well known. For seeking redress from their frightful grievances the Armenians were hunted like wild beasts and killed like rats and flies during the Hamidian régime.

You will tell me, my christian friends, that with the rise of the reform party in Turkey, the era of massacres is at an end, and I will tell you that the conditions of 1876 and 1896 have not actually changed, though they may seemingly appear so to the uninformed and uninitiated. I will answer you that the hideous massacres of April last happened nine months after the reform party first rose in power, and nine months after the inauguration of the Constitution. I do not question the goodwill of the reform party, but the reform party does not comprise the whole Turkish nation, and until the Turk learns to become liberal, civilized and human, there may be no more Armenians left, unless some Christian Power such as the United States demands their protection and enforces it. No! my Christian friends, it can be well for other Christians in the Turkish Empire with their powerful Governments at their back; but alas! there is no security for a subject people alien in race and religion.

The massacres in April last raged from Adana to Alexandretta, and according to authenticated reports about fifty thousand men, women and children were hideously exterminated; more than this, the last massacres were especially characterized by the most hideous, the most loathsome, the most revolting and ferocious cruelties perpetrated on women and children. Now what other name can we find for the perpetrators of this diabolical orgy, except to call them fiends incarnate; and who is the bold man who can guarantee that these same fiends incarnate have become metamorphosed and changed all of a sudden; or that the handful of liberal Turks at Constantinople are capable of controlling and restraining them. We have not even heard that the leaders and participators of the last massacres have been punished as they deserved; and what is the reason they are left unpunished? because the Government is afraid to punish Mahommedans for killing Christians; because the liberal Turks dare not punish the “true believers” for killing “Kaffirs.”

The religion of Mahommed, the religion of the sword, has been infused into the Turk, and to understand the effect of the religion of Mahommed upon the Turk, it is necessary to regard it from four aspects, or from four points of analysis. First, the fundamental doctrine and law of the religion. Second, the character of the founder as an example to his followers. Third, the racial and ethnographic characteristics of the Turk. Fourth, the effect which this particular religion would be likely to have on this particular race. When we have viewed the Turk and his government from these four points of analysis, we have the explanation of all the woe and desolation which have lain over the countries under Turkish rule.

“When ye encounter the unbelievers strike off their heads until you have made a great slaughter of them” is a chapter of the Koran which the Turk has religiously and steadfastly made his creed.

In conclusion, I will ask my readers to compare one point of difference between the two races, the oppressor and the oppressed. Thousands upon thousands of Armenian women, thousands upon thousands of Armenian children, have been hounded to death, or savagely, ferociously, horribly and loathsomely maltreated by the Turk, and yet in all the agonizing years when Massacre has succeeded upon Massacre, has there been one known case or one single instance of a Turkish woman or child maltreated by Armenians?

The last massacres though especially organized from the Palace at Constantinople, were officially announced to originate from an affray between one Armenian and three Turks, in which the single handed one, on the one side, grappling with the three on the other, killed one of the three: given equal numbers and arms, the Armenian is always a match for the Turk, but alas for him that unequal numbers and want of arms have always made him the victim of his oppressor.

Ahmed Riza Bey in the first part (Ses Causes) of his book “La Crise de L’Orient” published in Paris in 1907 holds a brief for his nation which through its own fallacious arguments falls to the ground. I will quote one passage as an example.

“Jamais les populations chrétiennes ne se sont révoltées, spontanément, d’elles-mêmes. Les révoltes ont toujours été partielles et espacées, ce qui tend bien à prouver qu’elles sont provoquées non par certains injustices administratives que nous savons être constantes et les mêmes pour tous, mais par les sourdes menées de l’extérieur. Les agences consulaires, les écoles étrangères, les maisons des missionnaires, couvertes par les Capitulations, ont servi de foyer de propagande, de dépôts d’armes, et même de refuge pour les perturbateurs. Souvent les ambassadeurs sont intervenus pour faire gracier des rebelles pris et condamnés. On se rappelle avec quelle solennité les Arméniens qui s’étaient introduits dans la Banque Ottomane furent conduits sains et saufs à bord d’un bateau par le drogman de l’Ambassade russe – leur complice.

“Si ces prétendus patriotards sont tant soutenus et choyés dans le monde occidental, c’est parce qu’ils constituent un élément ou plutôt un instrument de destruction au service de certains Européens élevés dans les préjugés des Croissades et qui crient avec Chateaubriand: (‘L’espèce humaine ne peut que gagner à la destruction de l’Empire Ottoman’).”

The author of “La Crise de L’Orient” continues in this strain. Are we then to suppose that the British Consuls, men whose truthfulness has never been impeached, whose reports on the unsupportable sufferings of the subject christian races and the oppressions and hideous atrocities of the Turks, have filled volumes: and likewise the American Missionaries, men who have deservedly gained the honor and respect of the world, whose statements have corroborated the British Consular reports; have been according to Ahmed Riza Bey the mischief-makers in the Turkish Empire? since it is from them alone the world has gained the widest and most correct knowledge of the daily miseries and oppressions under which the subject Christian races have groaned. Are we also to suppose that men like Mr. James Bryce and Dr. Dillon have by mendacious writings upheld them, British Consul and American Missionary, liars, and mischief makers? Or rather are we not to suppose that if thinking men and women in the world have come to cry out with Chateaubriand “L’espèce humaine ne peut que gagner à la destruction de l’Empire Ottoman” it is because the Turks have earned the world’s condemnation through their own diabolical acts, and on account of the woe and desolation which Turkish rule has worked over the fairest provinces under the sun. If the Turk will turn from the evil of his ways unto good, the stigma of “the unspeakable Turk” which now attaches itself to him, will cease to be a veritable truth. The bringing about of the transformation rests with himself.