Mr. Dillon says that if a detailed description were possible of the horrors which England’s exclusive attention to her own mistaken interests let loose upon Turkish Armenians, there is not a man within the kingdom of Great Britain whose heart strings would not be touched and thrilled by the gruesome stories of which it would be composed.
During all those seventeen years written law, traditional custom, the fundamental maxims of human and divine justice were suspended in favor of a Mohammedan Saturnalia. The Christians by whose toil and thrift the empire was held together were despoiled, beggared, chained, beaten, banished and butchered: First, their movable wealth was seized, then their landed property was confiscated, next, the absolute necessaries of life were wrested from them, and finally honor, liberty and life were taken with as little to do as if these Christian men and women were wasps and mosquitoes. Thousands of Armenians were thrown into prisons by governors like Tahsin Pasha and Bahri Pasha, and tortured and terrorized till they delivered up the savings of a lifetime and the support of the helpless families to ruffianly parasites. Whole villages were attacked in broad daylight by the Imperial Kurdish cavalry without pretext or warning, the male inhabitants killed or turned adrift, the wives and daughters falling victims to the foul lusts of these bestial murderers.
In a few years some of the provinces were decimated: Aloghkerd for instance being almost “purged” of Armenians. Over twenty thousand woe-stricken wretches once healthy and well-to-do, fled to Russia or Persia in rags and misery diseased or dying. On the way they were seized over and over again by the soldiers of the Sultan who deprived them of the little money they possessed, nay, of the very clothes they were wearing, most shamefully abused the wives and daughters and then drove them over the frontier to hunger and die. Those who remained behind for a time were no better off. Kurdish brigands lifted the last cow and goats of the peasants and carried away their carpets and their valuables. Turkish tax-gatherers followed after these, gleaning what the brigands had left, and lest anything should escape their avarice they bound the men, flogged them till their bodies were a bloody mass, cicatrized the wounds with red hot ramrods, plucked out their beards hair by hair, tore the flesh from their limbs with pincers and often even then hung the men whom they had thus beggared and maltreated from the rafters of their houses to witness with burning shame and impotent rage the hellish outrages of these fiends incarnate.
Terrible as these scenes are even in imagination, it is only proper that some effort should be made to realize the sufferings which have been brought down upon these thousands and hundreds of thousands of helpless men and women, and to understand somewhat of the shame, terror and despair that must take possession of the souls of Christians whose lives are a daily martyrdom of such unchronicled agonies, during which no ray of the life-giving light that plays about the throne of God ever pierces the mist of blood and tears that rises between the blue of heaven and the everlasting grey of the charnel house called Armenia.
These statements are neither rumors nor exaggerations concerning which we are justified in suspending judgment,—though the Turks long denied the reports of the Sassoun massacres. History has set its seal upon them. Diplomacy has slowly verified and reluctantly recognized them as accepted facts. Religion and humanity are now called upon to place their emphatic protest against them on record.
The Turks in their confidential moods have admitted these and worse acts of savagery. The Kurds glory in them at all times. Trustworthy Europeans have witnessed them and described them: and the Armenians have groaned over them in blank despair, and the sweat of their anguish has been blood.
Officers and nobles in the Sultan’s own cavalry regiments like Mostigo the Kurd, glory in the long series of crimes and outrages which have marked their career, and laugh to scorn the idea of being punished for robbing and killing the Armenians whom the Sublime Porte desires them to exterminate.
The stories of the Bulgarian atrocities were repeated here. It was the Armenians themselves who were punished if they dared complain when their own relatives or friends were murdered. And often they were punished on the charge of having committed these outrages themselves, or else on the suspicion of having killed the murderers who were afterwards found living and thriving in the Sultan’s employ, and were never disturbed there.
Three hundred and six of the principal inhabitants of the district of Khnouss in a piteous appeal to the people of England, wrote:—
“Year by year, month by month, day by day, innocent men, women and children have been shot down, stabbed, or clubbed to death in their houses and their fields, tortured in strange fiendish ways in fetid prison cells, or left to rot in exile under the scorching sun of Arabia. During that long and horrible tragedy no voice was raised for mercy, no hand extended to help us. * * * Is European sympathy destined to take the form of a cross over our graves.”