The question therefore resolves itself into this critical point: “What
will Christendom do even now?”
[Illustration: SCENE OF THE MASSACRES IN ASIA MINOR.
The trouble began in Adana. An armed mob strengthened and augmented
by soldiers fell in overwhelming numbers upon the unarmed Christians.
The Armenian population of Antioch and vicinity were practically wiped
out and the Armenian villages in the Alexandretta district destroyed
with immense loss of life. Hadjim, Kessab and the neighbouring villages
were burned. The Armenian quarter in Tarsus was ruined and ill-omened
Marash stained again with the blood of thousands of Armenians. Zeitoon
was desolated. The entire population of Kirikon between Aleppo and
Alexandretta were massacred to the last babe. The mob and the soldiers
burned what they could not carry away, so that the material loss has
been enormous. In place of the former abundance and thriving industries
there are instead desolated provinces and the charred and blackened
remains of pillaged and ruined homes, and the residue of those who
escaped massacre are reduced to homelessness and starvation.]
DISINTERESTED EVIDENCE.
I have thought it advisable to insert a few extracts from accounts of
the Massacres of April, 1909, given by disinterested witnesses.
[Illustration: IN THIS HOUSE 115 WOMEN AND CHILDREN WERE ROASTED ALIVE.
History repeats itself. In 1895 Turkish soldiers fell upon seventy
to eighty young women and girls in a church, where they had fled for
refuge, and after hideously outraging them, barricaded them in, setting
fire to the building at the same time, and derisively shouting to their
victims as they were being roasted alive, to call upon their Christ to
save them now.]
“We are having a perfectly hideous time here. Thousands have
been murdered--25,000 in this province they say; but the
number is probably greater, for every Christian village was
wiped out. In Adana about 5000 have perished. After Turks and
Armenians had made peace, the Turks came in the night with hose
and kerosene, and set fire to what remained of the Armenian
quarter. Next day the French and Armenian schools were fired.
Nearly everyone in the Armenian school perished, anybody trying
to escape being shot down by the soldiers.”
“The Turkish Authorities do nothing except arrest unoffending
Armenians, from whom by torture they extort the most fanciful
confessions. Even the wounded are not safe from their
injustice. A man was being carried in to me yesterday when he
was seized and taken off to gaol. I dare not think what his
fate may be.”
“For fiends incarnate commend me to the Turks. Nobody is safe
from them. They murder babies in front of their mothers; they
half murder men, and violate the wives while the husbands are
lying there dying in pools of blood.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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