There was no possible excuse for such barbarities to be poured upon the Armenians. Had there been any excuse the German, American, and Swiss missionaries, and the consuls of the neutral nations who witnessed these atrocities would have pointed it out. In fact, the whole civilized world stood “with shuddering horror pale, and eyes aghast” at the unparalleled savagery of the Turks, except those who were intoxicated with Prussian militarism, the advocates and defenders of the booty-loving and obscene Mohammedan fiends.
“It is hardly possible to imagine to oneself the implication of such a decree [of deportation]. These [Armenians] were not savages, like the Red Indians who retired before the White man across the American continent. They were not nomadic shepherds like their barbarous neighbors the Kurds. They were people living the same life as ourselves, townspeople established in the town for generations and the chief authors of its local prosperity. They were sedentary people, doctors and lawyers and teachers, business men and artisans and shopkeepers, and they had raised solid monuments to their intelligence and industry. Costly churches and well-appointed schools. Their women were as delicate, as refined, as unused to hardships and brutality as women in Europe or the United States. In fact, they were in the closest personal touch with Western civilization, for many of the Armenian centers upon which the crime was perpetrated had been served by the American missions and colleges for at least fifty years, and were familiar with the fine men and women who directed them.”[169]
The government’s determination to exterminate the Armenian race was not a sudden impulse. It was a deliberate scheme of long standing. After the overthrow of the Hamidian despotism, the Young Turks encouraged the Armenians to organize societies and even permitted them to possess firearms. Their diabolical purpose was not suspected by the trusting Armenians. But when war broke out, the Turks joined the Teutons in hopes to share the rich booty of the war. When this was not forthcoming, they bethought that the opportune moment had come to loot the Armenians, and carry out the plan of annihilation. They had not much difficulty in making out a case against these societies, saying that they were of a revolutionary character; and their possession of firearms was taken as a proof of the same.
Dr. Gibbons gives in his excellent little book, “The Blackest Page of Modern History,” the following statement which was made by the Turkish Consul General in New York: “‘However much to be deplored may be these harrowing events, in the last analysis we can but say the Armenians have only themselves to blame.’ Djelal Munif Bey went on to explain that the Armenians had been planning a revolution, and were killed by the Turkish soldiers only after they had been caught ‘red-handed with arms in their hands, resisting lawful authority.’”
In Adabazar 500 leading Armenians were arrested and imprisoned in the Armenian church. They had their daily tortures and beatings to induce them to implicate one another, and to deliver their arms. Whether they were all the members of a society or not it did not matter. For ten days these men have been tortured, and the whole population of the Armenians—some 20,000 or more—were terrorized and paralysed. Towards the end of this time, the head of the society who had been an exile suddenly returned. At the trial—or rather at the Inquisition—he boldly answered: “Why do you punish these men? If there is any fault it is mine, and yet I also am guiltless. This society was organized with the permission of the Government. You allowed us to obtain firearms.”
The eye-witness further states that soon after this the whole Armenian population of Adabazar was “turned into the streets to wait their turn to go. There they waited, with their baggage, for days by the roadside near the station. As soon as they vacated their houses, refugees (Mohammedans) from Macedonia took possession of them.”
“The people who had any money went to Konia by freight cars, being allowed to take only a few possessions with them. They were told to leave their possessions in the churches and they would be safeguarded, but the same promise had been made in Sabandja, and the church had been looted almost before the people were out of the city; so nobody trusted this promise. The exiles were crowded on top of their possessions, sixty to eighty people in a car marked forty people.
“From Konia they were to go by foot or carriage to a desert place called Mosul (province) in Mesopotamia. Those who had no money must take the entire journey (about 1000 miles) by foot.”
Here is a portion of the description of an eye-witness:
“Not a single person with an Armenian name, whether rich or poor, old or young, sick or well, male or female, was to be left in the city. They were to have three days to prepare to go.... The promise of three days was not kept. The very next morning the local police with gendarmes well armed with Mauser rifles began to enter the Armenian houses and drive the women and children into the streets and lock the doors of their houses behind them and sealed them with the government’s seal, thus dispossessing them of all their worldly possessions. They then assigned four or five persons to each of the ox-carts which they had brought with them with which to send the people away. But the carts were not intended to carry the people. They had to walk beside them. The carts were for carrying a pillow and a single bed covering for each person. When they had gotten from 500 to 1000 persons ready in this manner they were set moving, a doleful procession, driven by gendarmes along the roads toward the east. Morning after morning, during the month of July (1915) we saw groups of this kind pass by the college compound, the women carrying their babies in their arms and leading their little children by the hand, without anything left in this world, starting on a hopeless journey of a thousand miles into the wilderness, to miserably die or to be captured by Turks. By the end of July, the city was emptied in this manner of its 12,000 Armenian population.”