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

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

The English people however were roused to such indignation by these massacres and by the course of the government, that under the lead of Mr. Gladstone they very soon made their Ministers understand that they were not at liberty to sustain Turkey in such acts of oppression or to alienate the friendship of Russia.

Great men like John Bright, always the friend of Russia, Gladstone, Freeman and others publicly denounced England as the accomplice of the Turks in their deeds of horror by the moral and material support she had so freely given them in recent years.

We need not trace the details of these horrors here but quote the eloquent and stirring language of the greatest statesman of the age:—

“There has been perpetrated,” said Gladstone, “under the authority of a Government to which all the time we have been giving the strongest moral support and for part of the time material support, crimes and outrages so vast in scale as to exceed all modern examples and so unutterably vile as well as fierce in character that it passes the power of heart to conceive and of tongue and pen adequately to describe them. These are the Bulgarian horrors. There is not a criminal in a European jail; there is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the recital of that which has been done, which has been too late examined but which remains unavenged—which has left behind the fierce passions that produced it and which may spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil reeked with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race that did them; that a door should be left open for their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the whole.”

Grand and noble words and yet the hand of the English Government not only left that door open but fastened it open and kept it open till again in Armenia the Bulgarian horrors were reproduced on a vaster and more terrible scale if the Turk ever can be worse than the history of centuries has so often declared and revealed him.

The Turkish government made some feeble attempts to disavow the Bulgarian atrocities. But the Turk is an unmitigated liar. Freeman, the historian does not hesitate to say that the Ring at Constantinople worked with a deliberate policy to oppress and if possible to destroy the whole Bulgarian people. The first means they took was to plant large colonies of savage Circassians in Bulgaria who were allowed to commit any kind of outrage on their defenceless Christian neighbors without redress. They could drive the Christians from their homes, rob their houses, destroy their crops, ravish their women, and if any dared to resist their violence they were killed without hesitation. If any dared to complain against the Circassians they were summarily punished. But worse than this was the quartering of Turkish troops upon the peasants and the landholders whose dastardly outrages upon the wives and daughters of the Bulgarians were fiendish and constant. Neither woman’s honor nor human life was safe where they were.

When flesh and blood could bear no more there was some slight uprising of an unarmed people and then the fury of Circassian and of Bashi-Bazouk was let loose upon them.

Freeman says again, “there can be no doubt that the massacre was deliberately ordered by the Ring at Constantinople, the Highnesses and the Excellencies of polite diplomacy. This is proved by the fact that they honored and decorated the chief doers of the massacre, while they neglected and sometimes punished those Turkish officers who acted at all in a humane way. To this day (April, 1877) in defiance of all remonstrances from the European powers, the chief doers of the massacres remain unpunished, while we still hear of Bulgarians being punished for their share in the attempt to free their country.”

For a true statement of some of the facts in the case, for the full truth can never be told, the world is indebted to the Government of the United States, which sent a special commission of inquiry to Bulgaria, and History will owe them a debt of gratitude for having furnished reliable documents on this matter in which every European State was more or less exposed to an imputation of bias. As Mr. Gladstone observed: “America had neither alliances with Turkey nor grudges against her nor purposes to gain by her destruction. She entered into this matter simply on the ground of its broad human character and moment. She had no ‘American interests’ to tempt her from her integrity and to vitiate her aims.”

Mr. Eugene Schuyler, American Secretary of Legation at Constantinople, who visited the ruined villages in July and August, 1876, made his report to the United States Minister Plenipotentiary November 20th. In that report he says that “in the districts he visited at least nine thousand houses were burned, seventy-two thousand persons were left without roof or shelter and ten thousand nine hundred and eighty-four persons were numbered as killed. Many more were killed in the roads, in the fields, in the mountains; so that he numbers the slain at about fifteen thousand,—but adds many more died subsequently from disease, exposure and in prison.” He says that he could only find proof of the death of one hundred and fifteen Mussulmans. “Neither Turkish women nor Turkish children were killed in cold blood. No Mussulman women were violated. No Mussulman was tortured. No purely Turkish village (with one exception) was attacked or burned. No Mussulman house was pillaged. No mosque was desecrated.”