SUMMARY OF ABUSES.
“I. Unjust and corrupt assessments.
1. Villagers are compelled to give assessors presents of money to prevent them from over estimating the taxable persons and property.
2. Assessors, to secure additional bribes, signify their willingness to make an underestimate. This, in turn, affords opportunity for blackmail, which is used by succeeding officials.”
“II. Injustice and severity in collecting.
1. The collectors, like the assessors, have ways of extorting presents and bribes from the people.
2. The collectors, as a rule, go to the villages on Sunday, as on that day they find the people in the village. They frequently interrupt the Christian services, and show disrespect to their churches or places of prayer.
3. The collection of the taxes is accompanied with unnecessary abuse and reviling, sometimes even with wanton destruction of property.
4. Disregard of impoverished condition of people. Even after several failures of crops in succession, when famine was so severe that the people were many of them being fed by foreign charity, the taxes were collected in full and with severity.
Their food supply, beds, household utensils, and farming implements were seized by the collectors in lieu of taxes. Many were compelled to borrow money at enormous rates of interest, mortgaging their fields and future crops. Unscrupulous officials and other Kurds, in whose interests such opportunities are created, thus became possessed of Christian villages, the people of which henceforth becoming practically slaves to them.