Letters received from persons engaged in relief work among the Armenians, gave the following carefully prepared statistics concerning the recent massacres by the Turks under the tolerance of Christian powers in the year of our Lord, 1895–6. These statistics were given in detail for the several villages in Harpoot province.
“Killed, thirty thousand six hundred and one; burned to death, one thousand four hundred and thirty-six; preachers and priests killed, fifty-one; died from starvation, two thousand four hundred and sixty-one; died unprotected in the fields, four thousand three hundred and forty; died from fear, six hundred and sixty; wounded, eight thousand; houses burned, twenty-eight thousand five hundred and forty-two; forcible conversions, fifteen thousand and sixty-six; women and girls abducted, five thousand five hundred and forty-six: forcible marriages, one thousand five hundred and fifty-one; churches burned, two hundred and twenty-seven; destitute and starving, ninety-four thousand seven hundred and fifty.” The account does not add the number of English and American cannon with the cobwebs left over their mouths. The Turks said that they killed too few the last time, and would kill more in the next massacre.
When the Kurds were expelled from Diarbekir and the gates closed against them, they turned their attention to the villages. These, one after another, were taken, plundered, and in many instances, burned—massacre being generally in proportion to the degree of resistance made by the villagers. A district about ninety miles long and fifty broad, east of Diarbekir, and up to the boarders of Syert, in the vilayet of Bitlis, was swept by this hurricane of destruction, wherever Christian villages nestled among the billows of this rolling country. The first intimation that the wave of wanton wreckage was moving southward was given in the attack upon Tel-Ermin. This Armenian town of two hundred houses and sixty shops, five hours west of Mardin, was taken, plundered and burned. The next day Gorli, a Syrian village south of Mardin, and only two hours away, shared the same fate. About the same time the village of Abrahamiyeh fell into the hands of the Kurds and only Monsoruyeh, twenty miles north of the city remained intact. This they tried to capture, but were driven back. Serious attempts were made by the Kurds to enter the city in the hope that they would be aided from within. In this they were disappointed and obliged to draw off with severe loss. The Kurds persistently asserted that a firman for the slaughter of Christians had been given, but that the Christians of Mardin had bribed the government to conceal it and defend them. When the Kurds realized that the government and city garrison were a unit for the common defence, they drew off and the tide of attack swept further east taking Nisibin, and some twenty Christian villages in its way. Thousands of refugees collected near Mardin. In the village of Kulleth, three hundred refugees from the Diarbekir plain were begging food and clothing. The entire Christian population remaining in Syert was stripped of everything.
Fully three thousand Armenians were massacred at Arabkir, and the widows and orphans of those killed were left in terrible distress from cold and hunger.
The Armenians of Sivas and Cæsarea were in daily fear of massacre, and soon their fears were terribly realized, for the Kurds and Turks thoroughly performed their inhuman work of butchery and plunder, the former taking the booty as their pay, according to the permission granted from Constantinople.
In the district between Gemerek and Cæsarea twenty-seven Armenian villages were pillaged and burned. The thirteen villages this side of Gemerek, and five or six hours distant, such as Burhan, Dendil, Tekmen, etc., were also pillaged and ruined. Burhan was ravaged five times and Tekmen seven times. The raiders carried plunder from Dendil for three days continuously; they carried away even the old mats and wooden spoons from the houses. No clothing, no bedding, no utensils, and no food was left to the survivors in those villages. The people lived on herbs gathered from the hillsides, and cooked in the petroleum tins which the raiders had brought along full of petroleum to fire the houses with. In the district of Tounnouz the Armenian villages, especially Hantavos, Kazmakara and Patsin were pillaged and destroyed, the male inhabitants were butchered, and the young women were carried off. Some of the villages were so utterly destroyed that now there is no sign that such places existed.
At Gemerek the Turks joined the Armenians and drove away the raiders, who however carried away one thousand sheep and cattle and about one hundred horse loads of wheat and flour from the neighboring mills.
The reader can understand the ferocity of the attack upon the Christians in this city from the fact that the wife of a captain in the Turkish army watched the horrors from her window. She was so affected by what she saw that she has since that event become insane.
Another terrible massacre occurred in Palu, a district not far from Harpoot. An Armenian lady of Palu, writing to her son in New York, thus told the story:
“You are my comfort in God. My only joy is that you are safe; but we are in great distress. My hands are trembling; I cannot write from hunger. The Turks have burned forty-one villages, destroying everything. They take the beautiful women to their homes and use them badly. They kill the old men, and the old women and children are entirely naked. Their bed is now the snow. They go begging at Turkish doors for a piece of bread, and instead of bread they get mulberry and husks. After six days of plundering and burning those villages, our enemies returned to the city. Ten thousand Kurds with the Mohammedans of the city, attacked the houses and killed one thousand seven hundred and thirty-two grown-up men and many children and women who would not accept Mohammedism.