The following description was written from Malatia:
“Boys under ten and girls under fourteen are accepted here as orphans (by the Mohammedans). More than 800, practically all from Sivas province, are here.... Many have become sick, and they are dying off pretty rapidly. It is evident that many will die on the way....”
Another report says that the dervishes, the fanatical Moslem devotees, met the caravans of the deported Armenians on their road and carried off children, shrieking with terror, to bring them up as Moslems in their savage fraternity. Here another: “Many of the boys appear to have been sent to another district, to be distributed among the farmers. The best looking of the older girls are kept in houses for the pleasure of members of the gang who seem to rule affairs here....”
The Armenian journal Horizon, of Tiflis, reported in its issue of Aug. 22d (old style), that:
“A telegram from Bukarest states that the Turks have sent from Anatolia (Asia Minor) four railway-vans full of Armenian orphans from the interior of the country, to distribute them among Moslem families.
“Some were sold into shame before the march began. ‘One Moslem reported that gendarmes had offered to sell him two girls for a medjikieh (about eighty cents).’ They sold the youngest and most handsome at every village where they passed the night; and these girls have been trafficked in hundreds through the brothels of the Ottoman Empire. Abundant news has come from Constantinople itself of their being sold for a few shillings in the open markets of the capital; and one piece of evidence in Lord Bryce’s possession comes from a girl no more than ten years old, who was carried with this object from a town of North Eastern Anatolia to the shores of Bosphorus. These were Christian women, as civilized and refined as the women of Western Europe, and they were enslaved into degradation.”[171]
It was estimated that the exiles from three viliayets alone numbered about 600,000.
“We believe there is imminent danger for the Sivas, Erzroom and Harpoot viliayets to be 600,000 will starve to death on the road. They took food for a few days, but did not dare take much money with them, as, if they did so, it is doubtful whether they would be allowed to keep it.”
We must now follow the exiles on the way to death and destruction. In the following case the officers seem to think it not worth their while to drive so few away; and they may have been very poor:
“Forty-five men and women were taken a short distance. The women were first outraged by the officers of the gendarmerie, and then turned over to the gendarmes to dispose of. According to this witness, a child was killed by having its brains beaten out on a rock. The men were all killed, and not a single person survived out of this group of forty-five.