Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of Islam

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

INTRODUCTION.

At no time of the world’s history have there ever been two months so rich in grand tragedy as the Armenian period of November and December, 1895. It is not the enormous number of the killed nor the frightful suffering of the survivors that give this period its unique character, but the fact that the great majority of the 75,000 or more of the massacred Christians had a free choice to make between life and death, and they chose death. Civilized humanity is bound to take a supreme interest in the action of those heroes and heroines who sacrificed all the interests of existence to their moral ideal of life,—in those women who, in order to escape from the outrage of a bestial soldiery, threw themselves into the river Euphrates and were drowned,—in those virgins who, captured by the brutal Moslems, received twenty, thirty sword cuts in defending their honor,—in those men who, when threatened with instant death if they would not embrace Islam, answered, “we are ready to be immolated for the love of Christ,” and they were slaughtered like sheep. The historian and the dramatic writer, the poet and the painter will soon follow the diplomatist and the journalist to take up the matter, and the Christian peoples of all lands will continue to receive now a thrill of pious admiration, now a tremendous shock at the recital of these events.

In fact, the Armenian occurrences have two sides, one glorious, and one of hellish darkness. They bring out in the most striking fashion, the infernal genius of the Mahommedan religion. The Moslems, high and low, exhibited such foul sensuality, such satanic cruelty and such delight in ferocity of which even the savages are incapable. And these qualities are precisely those which Mohammedanism cultivates.

The Armenian crisis served also as a test to bring out the actual degree of European morality. Alas! who would have believed a year ago that the Christian powers of Europe would permit the Turk to attempt before their eyes the extermination of a Christian nation and church by wholesale massacre and forced conversions? Such is, nevertheless, the dreadful revelation of the year. They did not prevent the most colossal crime of the century, nor did they punish the criminal who by their mercy alone had the power of committing such a crime; moreover, they had the front, at least some of them, to declare that, for reasons of high diplomacy, they were ready to support the authority of the monstrous criminal over his victims.

What makes this infamous course of the Christian governments the more ominous, is the fact that the Christian peoples and churches did not seem to be shocked. They stifled their indignation and swallowed their own protests if they felt or uttered any, and we see no nation whatever boiling with the sacred rage of revolting conscience.

The British government and press have tried hard to show that England has done all she could in order to protect the Armenians. Russia has yet her national conscience very imperfectly developed, Germany’s conscience is nearly dead under the curse of her success against France. It is only the government of Great Britain that feels the obligation of executing itself. But its failure in protecting Armenia is not merely the forced consequence of the course of the other powers in the matter, as it would like to make the public believe. England had sinned against Armenia during all the long period of 18 years before the matters came to a crisis. She had been, in 1878, the champion of the Turk against Russia, and in order to justify her support of a Moslem power which had been the curse of its Christian subjects, Great Britain pledged herself by the Cyprus Convention to protect the Christians against Turkish misrule as she would protect Turkish territory against Russian aggression.

Did England fulfill her solemn obligation toward Armenia? No! The British consuls in Armenia did report to the government that the Turkish authorities and Kurdish beys and Hamidieh troops continued to oppress the Armenians just as before, nay, worse than before,—that their worthiest leaders, bishops, professors, influential men were being exiled, the benevolent associations scattered, the useful books censured, the peasantry ground to dust, and hundreds of innocent men flung into prison and tortured—but the British Government did not move.

Let there be no misunderstanding as to my meaning. I do not mean England remained absolutely indifferent, but she never acted in time, and with adequate energy. She remained always behind the times. She brought to bear upon the Sultan a pressure of 1,000 tons when a weight of 10,000 was required, and used 10,000 when 100,000 was needed, with the result that Abdul-Hamid, instead of coming to his senses, grew bolder after each successful resistance. With trifling concessions he pushed his way and had the Kurdish brigands organized into imperial troops, acquitted Moossa Beg, enjoyed the Erzeroum massacre, undertook the more important massacre of Sassoon, and after all, the crowning massacres of 1895. Had England insisted upon Moossa Beg’s being hung, the Erzeroum slaughter would not have been allowed, and if the leaders of the Erzeroum carnage at least were punished, the greater devastation of the Sassoon province would have been prevented. Evidently it was much easier for the British government to successfully coerce the Sultan for the exemplary punishment of the first criminals than later to check the greater tides of sweeping evils. To judge aright, we must consider the whole course of the British in the matter and not merely what happened at the critical moment when the task was so much harder. And even then, namely in October last, did England show herself equal to the requirements of the crisis? Whatever Lord Salisbury and his party organs may say, he must have many times since avowed to himself that he did not act then as he could and ought to. He lacked courage and now the prestige of Great Britain has sunk to a miserably low degree in the Orient.

For the present the Sultan reigns in Constantinople and the Czar governs. The situation is evidently an unsettled one, as Hamid’s suicidal policy has prostrated the whole country, and a radical change is to come in the near future. The final doom of the Ottoman Empire can not delay much longer. The world expects to see some sudden developments in the affairs of the East. The fate of agonizing Armenia will be decided, and the relations of the Christian with the Moslem world will enter on a new phase.