Having the example of Bosnia and Bulgaria always in mind, the sultan undoubtedly suspected that the Armenians were preparing for a struggle for freedom and determined to check it by extermination if necessary. His intentions soon became known. When an Armenian was murdered or robbed, his assailant was rewarded, and the more Christians the Kurdish chiefs could kill the more rapid was their promotion. The prisons were filled with innocent men, the schools were closed, the Armenian language was forbidden, Armenian books were seized and burned, and American missionaries were prohibited from teaching anything that suggested freedom. Their text-books and newspapers were censored and suppressed if they were found to contain a sentence or even a word that could be construed to reflect upon political conditions. One newspaper was suppressed because it mentioned the dog star in a scientific article on astronomy.
This was considered an insult to the sultan because Yildiz, the name of his palace, is the word for star. Everything that related to Armenia, Macedonia, and other Christian provinces was stricken out; hymn books and even Bibles were censored; two professors in the missionary college at Marsovan were accused of teaching treason and condemned to death, but were rescued by the British government at the very steps of the scaffold. All reference to the assassination of President McKinley was forbidden, lest it might suggest a similar fate for the sultan.
Armenians in other parts of the world organized revolutionary societies, published revolutionary documents, and held conventions to consider revolutionary expedients. This defiance of his authority exasperated the sultan and furnished the pretext for more violent persecutions and more slaughter. Being unable to reach the revolutionary organizers in other countries, he punished their relatives, friends, and former townsmen by imprisonment and death, and, finally, after many years of atrocious and barbarous treatment, he conceived a fiendish scheme of general massacre which was carried out by his officials with fanatical zeal under his directions. One of his ministers remarked to an European diplomatist in Constantinople that, “according to his majesty’s notion, the best way to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians.”
In order that they might do their work more thoroughly the half-savage, nomadic bands of Kurds were organized into companies by Turkish officers, equipped with modern weapons, and turned loose with orders to provoke the Armenians to resistance, and thus furnish an excuse for a general slaughter. Self-defence was always treated as rebellion. The butchers who hunted helpless men and women like wild beasts and killed them on the roadside or in the brush where they had taken refuge, who looted and burned their homes and butchered their wives and children, were promptly rewarded, and no one was ever punished. A succession of massacres occurred all over Armenia, in almost every case begun with a signal by a trumpet from military headquarters. The soldiers not only participated in the slaughter, but burned the homes of their victims after plundering them, and both civil and official representatives of the government directed the work of the mob. In many cases these men were afterward called to Constantinople and decorated by their sovereign for the energetic manner in which the work was done.
Kibitkas of the Nomadic tribes
Prominent men were offered their lives if they would renounce their religion, and some of them did so, but very few. The great mass of the Armenians who died in those massacres were martyrs to their faith. Special efforts were made to force priests to apostasy. An official investigation showed that 170 Armenian clergymen in a single province were tortured to death because they would not deny their Christ. In the province of Kars is a group of sixty towns and villages in which no Christian church was left standing and no Christian priest was left alive. Investigation showed that 568 churches were destroyed and 282 were transformed into mosques. No one will ever know the extent of the massacres, but, as accurately as can be ascertained, nearly 100,000 Armenian Christians suffered martyrdom during the reign of Abdul Hamid by his orders, and it is believed that as many more who fled to the mountains perished from exposure and starvation.
The massacres of Armenians in October, 1895, which horrified the world, began in Trebizond, and I asked Doctor Crawford, an American who has spent thirty years in that country, his opinion of the causes and motives.
“For centuries the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire have suffered continuous cruelties and persecutions,” said Doctor Crawford. “They have suffered from heavy taxation and unjust ways of collecting; there has been no safety for their property, no protection for their crops which were often stolen or destroyed, and their wives and daughters were never safe. Most of this persecution was due to the Kurds, their semi-civilized neighbours in Kurdistan, the adjoining province to Armenia on the east. Certain Kurdish chiefs levied blackmail upon Armenian villages for their protection. That is, they assessed tribute upon the inhabitants, in exchange for which they protected them against other Kurds. Those who paid this tribute were safe, those who did not were never secure, either in life or property or in their families.
“Fifty or sixty years ago the Armenians began to emigrate; thousands have gone to Constantinople and other cities; others to Europe and America; and there are many thousands in the United States. Those who had seen the world naturally realized the unfortunate situation in which their fellow countrymen were living, even more so than the latter themselves, and began to devise means for their relief. They organized societies; they collected funds; they published newspapers, denounced the iniquities of and conspired against the Turkish government.