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

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

The Rev. Mr. Macallum, a missionary at Erzeroum said of the situation in and about that city in April 1894:

“The famine continues to increase in severity. Spring is opening up late. Very many of the farmers have no grain to sow; we wish we had enough money on hand to supply the Protestants of Khanoos with seed, but I am sorry to say that what has come to us is now exhausted, or practically so. We are feeding about seven hundred people a day in this city, who otherwise would have nothing to eat. Besides this, we have sent sufficient out to the country districts to keep life and courage in several hundred more.”

Over $2,000 had been sent to Mr. Macallum up to the middle of May but though spring had arrived and the agony of the cold was over, there was no work to be found, and over one-third of the sixty thousand inhabitants of Erzeroum had nothing to eat except the bread of charity. In the Passen and Khanoos district near by a similar famine was prevailing, and but for the help sent to them many of the people would have died of starvation.

Writing to the friends who had sent him aid Mr. Macallum said: “You may rest assured that there are hundreds of poor starving people who bless you and the givers night and day. We have sought to help only those who are most needy, and the testimony of all is that the help we have administered has saved many from a terrible death. ‘You have redeemed us.’ ‘You have bought our children’s blood.’ ‘May the Lord reward you a thousandfold for all you have done!’ These and other like expressions we hear every day. Some of those who get bread from us regard it as sacred, and eat it as they take the sacrament in church. We are giving bread regularly to over a thousand people a day in the city, Protestants, Greeks, Catholics, and Gregorians. We have given £50 to the governor here for the Turkish poor. This gift was comparatively small, but more gratitude was expressed by the Turkish authorities than by the Gregorians, to whom we had given the most.”

The summer of 1894 instead of bringing relief, brought increased burdens from the frequent raids of the wild Kurds, who during that single year drove out of the districts of Boolanyk and Moush alone more than ten thousand head of cattle and sheep. The result was the utter disappearance of wealth and the rapid spread of misery so intense, so hopeless, so distressing in its moral and physical effects as to have inspired some of its victims with that wild courage which is akin to despair.

To the depredations of the Kurds, were added the cruel extortions of the Zaptiehs, or official tax-gatherers. There was absolutely no redress for Christians who suffered in property, life or limb at the hands of Mohammedans.

The taxes levied upon Armenians were exorbitant; the bribes that invariably accompanied them, and were imposed by the Zaptiehs, swelled to any proportions, and assumed the most repugnant forms, while the methods employed to collect both constituted by themselves sufficient justification for the sweeping away of Ottoman rule in Armenia.

To give a fair instance of the different rates of taxation for Christians and Mohammedans in towns it will suffice to point out that in Erzeroum, where there are eight thousand Mohammedan houses, the Moslems paid only three hundred and ninety-five thousand piastres, whereas the Christians, whose houses number but two thousand, paid four hundred and thirty thousand piastres.

The barbarities and the enormities and savagery of the Sassoun massacres left those districts in a most deplorable condition. After decimating the population, the Kurds burned and utterly destroyed many villages and drove off all their cattle and sheep and left the plains as if swept by cyclone and wrecked by earthquake.

The fugitives returning after the Kurdish fiends had returned into the mountains had neither the means nor the opportunity to cultivate the soil which their forefathers had possessed for many generations. Their homes were wrecked, their farms destroyed, and their implements and cattle seized by the bandit mountaineers, and they themselves were compelled to seek such shelter as the woods and caves afforded.