“They desire to point out that Article I, of the Cyprus convention of June, 1878, and Articles LXI and LXII of the Treaty of Berlin, July, 1878, give this country a position of responsibility and authority upon this subject which it ought not to ignore.
“The committee believes that, though these engagements were made nearly fourteen years ago, it is not alleged that their performance has been even entered upon. On the contrary, great numbers of the Christian Armenians have been from time to time arbitrarily arrested, and are now in prison on charges strongly suspected of being false, whilst many of the proceedings in the courts of law are clearly a mere travesty of justice.”
The following is the part of the answer to the above memorial:
“Sir: I am directed by the Earl of Kimberley to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 17th instant (April, 1894), and the memorial. In reply I am to state that the information in the possession of Her Majesty’s government does not confirm the widely-spread belief that the arrest and imprisonment of the Armenians in Asiatic Turkey are attributable to their religious faith.”
The great “assassin” well might have congratulated himself that whether Her Majesty’s government believed it or not, at least, declared to the world that the Armenians were not persecuted on account of their faith.
An American wrote from Bitlis in the summer of 1893:—
“The Armenians are still found in goodly numbers, aggregating nearly one-third of some eighteen thousand inhabitants in the city (Moosh), constituting more than half in the region, if we include the 155 villages of this large plain. But so lamentably have they been subdued by the long oppression and misrule, that none of their old-time spirit remains.
“We might point to a village of more than 300 houses and 2,000 inhabitants, who live in constant terror from a little Kurdish village of desperadoes not one-tenth as large!”
It is no wonder that these poor and oppressed Armenians “live in constant terror.” The Turkish government, the author of all injustice and cruelty in Armenia, had decreed even the mere possession of arms a serious crime in the case of Christians, while the Kurds, the worst enemies of law and order were well equipped with all sorts of modern weapons, and were enlisted into His Majesty the Sultan’s army. They were, therefore, authorized to rob, steal, and kill the Armenians.