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

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

The Armenians constitute the sole civilizing force—nay with all their faults, the sole humanizing element in Anatolia: peaceful to the last limit of self sacrifice, law-abiding to their own undoing, and at the same time industrious and hopeful under conditions which would stagger the majority of mankind. At their best they are the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made. Most emphatically they are the martyr nation of the world.

They are Christians, believing as we believe that God has revealed Himself to the world in Jesus Christ for the salvation of men; and they have held fast to that faith in our common Lord in spite of disgrace and misery, in the face of fire and sword, in the extremest agonies of torture and death. Whether suffering death at the hands of the Persia Magi, or being built alive by Tamerlane into pyramids of hideous glory, scarcely a generation has passed to the grave without giving up its heroes and martyrs to the Cross of Christ. The murdered of Sassoun, of Van, or Erzeroum were also Christian martyrs: and any or all of those whose eyes have been gouged out, whose limbs were torn asunder from their bodies might have obtained life and comparative prosperity by merely pronouncing the formula of Islam and abjuring Christ. But instead of this, thousands have commended their souls to their Creator, delivered up their bodies to the tormentors, endured indescribable agonies, and died, like Christian martyrs, defying Heaven itself so to speak, by their boundless trust in God, though he seemingly does not hear their cries for deliverance.

The apostacy to Islam by those who can no longer endure these horrors will, certainly, be laid at the doors of Christian Europe and America, who left them to perish in the direst, darkest hour of human history. All Christendom knows what they are suffering yet not a Christian power has said in words like solid shot: “These persecutions must cease.” Identity of ideals, aspirations and religious faith give this unfortunate but heroic people strong claims on the sympathy of the English-speaking peoples, for our ancestors whatever the form of their religious creed never hesitated to die for it, and whenever the breath of God swept over them breasted the hurricane of persecution.

But even in the name of a common humanity to say nothing of race or creed what special claims to our sympathy are needed by men and women whom we see, treated their masters, as in the dark ages the damned were said to be dealt with by the devils in the deepest of hell’s abysses? Our written laws condemn cruelty to a horse or cat or dog; our innate sense of justice would compel us to punish the man who should wantonly torture even a rat by roasting it alive. And yet we read of wounded Armenians being thrown into wells where kerosene was poured upon them and then being burned alive and we are as cool as ever. What more is needed to compel us to stretch out a helping hand to tens of thousands of virtuous women and innocent children to save them from protracted tortures with some of which the Gehenna of fire were a swift and merciful death.

Why is it that the sentimental compassion of England has not gone out into effective help to poor Armenia? For reason of “higher politics.” Her interests demand that the Turks and Kurds in whose soulless bodies legions of devils seem to have taken up their abode, shall be protected; the integrity of the Empire and the rule of Islam are essential—indispensable to Christian civilization, i.e., to England’s commercial prestige.

Armenian Mountaineer of Shadokh.

By the terms of the Berlin Treaty and the occupation of Cyprus, England bound herself to see to it that the Christian peoples under the rule of the Porte should have fair, humane treatment. This has been fully and clearly shown in our chapter on the Russo-Turkish war. At the close of that war (1878) the condition of Armenian Christians was from a humane point of view deplorable. Yet nothing was done—no efficacious step was taken to fulfil that solemn promise. Things were allowed to drift from bad to worse, mismanagement to develop into malignity, oppression merge into persecution, until just as in 1876 most solemn promises of reform were followed by the Bulgarian horrors, so the promises for reforms in Armenia after the Sassoun massacre were followed by the still more terrible atrocities which have not yet ceased.

The Turk knew that the powers would not agree in compelling the enforcement of the promises made. Time was needed. Yes time in which to slaughter and to starve the Armenians whom by the treaty of Berlin all the Great Powers were bound to protect in their rights.

But the unfortunate action and reaction of the English government made themselves immediately and fatally felt in the very homes and at the fireside of hundreds of thousands of Christian men and women driving them into exile, shutting them up in noisome prisons and subjecting them to every conceivable species of indignity, outrage and death. By pressing a knob in London, as it were, hell’s portals were opened in Asia Minor, letting loose legions of fiends in human shape who set about torturing and exterminating the Christians there. Nor was the government ignorant of the wide-reaching effects of its ill-advised action. It is on record that for seventeen years it continued to watch the harrowing results of that action without once interfering to stop it although at any moment during that long period of persecution it could have redeemed its promise and rescued the Christians from their unbearable lot.