There are two reasons why the Young Turks still continue their practice of barbarity and abominations: the first is that they are defended by the greatest military powers, the Teutonic arms; the second is the indifference of the neutral states. The United States was first “too proud to fight” for the suffering humanity. And again, “With the causes and issues of this war we have no concern.” Some American missionaries have died as the result of their ill-treatment by the Turks. American properties worth several millions were seized and occupied by the Turkish government and the missionaries compelled to leave the country. One of these missionaries writes:
“I have received the farewell kiss and parting embrace of men, cultured Christian gentlemen, some of whom held university degrees from our best American institutions in this country; men with whom I have co-operated, and at whose sides I have labored for ten years in the work of education in that land, while at their sides stood brutal gendarmes, sent there by the highest authorities of the Government to drive them with their wives and children away from their homes, from their work, and from all the associations which they held most dear, into exile or to death; some of them to a condition worse than either. We had no better friends in this world than those people. To part with them under such circumstances was harder than I can say, and yet but few tears were shed on either side. Our feelings were too deep for idle tears! I have often seen pictures of the early Christian martyrs crouching together in the arena of the Coliseum expecting any moment to be torn to pieces by the hungry lions which were being turned loose upon them, while the eager spectators were watching from their safe seats, and waiting to be amused by that spectacle. And I had supposed that such cruelties and such amusements were impossible in this twentieth Christian century; but I was mistaken. I have seen sixty-two Armenian women and girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, huddled together in the rooms of the principal of our American Girls’ School at ——, while outside were waiting men more cruel than beast, ready to carry them off; and who backed by the highest authorities of the Government, were demanding that we should deliver these defenseless girls into the hands of these brutal men to do with them what they would. I have supposed that there was no man in the world to-day who could be amused by such a spectacle as that. In this, too, I was mistaken; for when the wife of our American Ambassador at Constantinople made a personal appeal to Talaat Bey, the Minister of the Interior in the Turkish cabinet, the man who more than any one else has devised and executed this deportation of the Armenians, and who has boasted that he has been able to destroy more Armenians in thirty days than Abdul Hamid was able to destroy in thirty years—when she made an appeal to this Turkish Minister, begging him to stop this cruel persecution of Armenian women and girls, only answered, ‘All this amuses us.’”[176]
The absurdity of the Turkish excuses that the Armenians were preparing, or intending to revolt is plainly seen by the following instances: In places where the people knew the object of the government was to massacre them, they resisted the government and the authorities had no difficulty in subduing them. The Turks had indeed a better excuse for massacre and the people their choice of an immediate, instead of a lingering, death.
When the people of Shabin Karahussar, a town about 100 miles southwest of Trebizond, were ordered to prepare for deportation, they took up arms, and defended themselves against the Turkish troops from the middle of May to the end of June. Then the Turks, with more reinforcements and artillery, had no difficulty in overwhelming them. They massacred not only about 4000 people who had taken arms to defend themselves, but also the entire population of the country districts, “not excepting the bishop himself. Nothing could show better than this how little the Turkish government had to fear from the Armenians, and how eagerly it seized upon the quickest means to their extermination, as soon as an opportunity appeared.”
The reader will remember the Reubenian Dynasty in Cilicia which came to an end in 1375. From that time to the present many Armenians remained in Cilicia. The Armenians who lived in the Cilician mountains were a sort of semi-independent tribe. They were not rebellious, but they exerted their rights often by the force of arms. This year of crimes had included in its plans to crush this people also. The Turkish government “without waiting to summon them for deportation, at once attacked them nakedly with the sword.” It is, moreover, stated that “they were disarmed, by the promise that, if they submitted, their defenseless brethren in the lowland villages would be ransomed from destruction by their act. The Turkish promise was broken, of course, as soon as the Turkish object was secured; and taken at such a disadvantage, the heroic mountaineers inevitably succumbed.”
“The bloody curtain has fallen over Zeitoun, and the fighting stock of these brave mountaineers has been subdued in this memorable year of crime! As the faithful followers and remnants of the Reubenian dynasty, they had hitherto kept their homes intact and had successfully withstood the Turkish inroads. They have at last been overcome by heavy Turkish forces, and the stronghold of Zeitoun is now in the hands of the enemy....”[177]
It was begun on the 8th of April and finished about the end of May, 1915. The Turks massacred some of the inhabitants.... And the rest, with the old men and women, were deported to Mesopotamia.
The fate of the people of Sassoun was not quite known for some time. But the Turks and Kurds have finally completely exterminated them also.
Both in Constantinople and in the districts nearby, the Armenians have been thinned out, and in some towns they have been cleared out to make room for the Mohammedan refugees from Thrace and Macedonia.
“The Turks are continuing their work of exterminating the Armenians. From Constantinople they have deported the Armenian men. Ten thousand deported men have already been massacred in the mountains of Ismid.