Armenia, a martyr nation / A historical sketch of the Armenian people from traditional times to the present tragic days

by Mugurdich Chojhauji Gabrielian

“Four districts have been cleared of Armenians: Bosnian Mouhadjirs (refugees) replace the Armenians thus exiled....

“More than 20,000 Armenians that have been forced to emigrate from a certain province, are being thrown into the deserts amid nomadic tribes, leaving their houses, gardens and tilled lands to the Turkish mouhadjirs....

“As soon as the Armenian refugees left their houses, mouhadjirs from Thrace took possession of them. The former had been forbidden to take anything with them, and they themselves saw all their goods pass into other hands. There must be about 20,000 to 25,000 in this town now, and the name of the town seems to have been changed to a Turkish one.”[178]

Four thousand and two hundred Armenians were almost miraculously saved in the following manner: When the orders came to about half a dozen villages near Antioch for them to prepare for deportation the inhabitants, knowing the purpose of the government, held a meeting and decided to resist the orders. One pastor dissented and with his flock of about sixty families was deported; nothing has been heard from that party since. The rest hastened to gather all available provisions, ammunition and arms and drove their herds and cattle into the mountain west of Antioch on the Mediterranean shore. Here they had the sea behind them for protection. On the land side, they protected every possible approach to the mountain, and with some modern weapons and old flintlocks, they were ready to defend themselves. They had some good swimmers on the shore watching for some friendly ship which they could petition for help. They also set up two large white flags, one with a red cross in the center, and the other with these words, “Christians in distress—Rescue!” They were surrounded on the land side by 3000 regular soldiers of then Turkish army, and about 15,000 Turkish mobs of Aleppo and Antioch slums. They had a very slim chance of escaping annihilation, and this chance was in their heroic defense. On the 53d day of their siege, when their food and ammunition was almost exhausted, the French cruiser Guicher sighted the cross and drew near; the swimmers hastened and bore the message to it. Other ships were called by wireless, and the whole refugees were taken off and transported to Port Said, Egypt. They thus saved their lives by their bravery, and saved also the Turks from some more shame and sin.

The Young Turks’ plan to exterminate the Armenian race was cunningly complete from the beginning to the end. The three different stages or steps by which they hoped to finish the work are now clear. In the first stage, knowing that the able-bodied men would survive the horrors of deportation, or at least most of them would, so in order to hasten the end, they were massacred; in the second stage, they were sure that delicate women and children could not stand the horrors of deportation on foot over the rugged mountains and deep valleys under the burning sun, half naked, and without food and water, so they consigned the largest number of the Armenians to such a process of death and destruction. This procedure, moreover, would give to their representatives, whether German or Turkish, at the courts of the neutral powers, the right to say that the Turks are not killing the women and children. Yet they were not unmindful of the possibility of their disappointment by the survival of some even from this process of death. Thus we have the third stage for the unfortunate survivors. These survivors, mostly women and children, make up the “agricultural colonies.”

The annihilation of the Armenian race being the aim of the government, we must surely expect the selection of such places as will accomplish their purpose. We, unfortunately, do not fail in this expectation. One such called Sultanieh, in the province of Konia, is a veritable desert, south of Tuz Gul (Salt Lake). At this place, “a thousand families of Armenian townspeople, assembled by weary marches from every quarter, were given a taste of the wilderness, a thousand families, and only fifty grown men among them to provide for the needs of this helpless flock of women, children and invalids flung thus suddenly upon their own resources, in an environment as abnormal to them as it would be to the middle-class population of any town in England or France.” Having established this “agricultural colony” on the waste, the government was content, and troubled itself about its colonies no more.

“But Sultanieh was by no means the worst of the charnel-house to which the remnant of the Armenian race was consigned.” The most of the refugees were sent to Aleppo (Halep), the seat of Northern Syria. The Armenians who were living in Asia Minor and Armenia were used to a temperate climate, but the climate in lower Mesopotamia and Syria is semi-tropical, and the places to which the survivors of the deportation have been consigned are considered “some of the most sultry regions on the face of the earth.” A day’s journey from Aleppo southeastward the traveler reaches a swampy region. “These swamps were allotted to the first comers; but they did not suffice for so great a company, and the later batches were forwarded five days’ journey, on to the town of Der-el-Zor, the capital of the next province down the course of the Euphrates, where the river takes its way towards the Persian Gulf through the scorching steppes of the Arabian amphitheater.

“This amphitheater has witnessed many ghastly dramas in its day, but none, perhaps, more ghastly than the tragedy that is being enacted in it now, when its torrid climate is being inflicted as a sentence of death upon the Armenians deported thither from their temperate homes in the north.”

There is one more thing to be noted, namely, that these survivors of the deportation have not only a torrid climate as “a sentence of death” to suffer and die thereby, but they have also a new set of tormentors, the Arabs, who are more wicked and fanatical than the Turks and Kurds, because they are, besides being Mohammed’s followers, akin to him in blood and race. Moreover, these poor refugees are not even left at Der-el-Zor. The latest information comes from there that the refugees have to move further southeast. “The misery among the people is not to be described. All are making things ready for the journey; all are breaking up the tents; Der-el-Zor is as destroyed, by the general upheaval. They say we will be sent to the bank of the river Chebar. I pray God that—like he did for Ezekiel—so now He make this place a blessing. Our joy will be to do His will.”

It may be sufficient to reproduce a few extracts from the reports of eye-witnesses of the scenes in the refugee camps. In regard to the condition of the refugees at Sultanieh, we have very little information, the reason for this having been thus stated: “A sum of money has been sent from Constantinople to the Catholikos of Cilicia who is now at Aleppo, witnessing the misery and agony of his flock. Here at least, authorities allow the distribution of succor to those unfortunates. At Sultanieh it has so far proved impossible to bring help within their reach, for the government refuses permission, in spite the efforts of the American embassy.”