These societies, by blackmailing and preying upon the rich Armenian
financiers and traders of Europe and America, soon became wealthy
corporations. Hunted out of Russia, they sent their emissaries into
Kurdistan, where they renewed their nefarious campaign. Although
denounced and hated by the respectable resident Armenians and the
priests, whom they blackmailed and murdered as occasion offered, they
even tried to embroil the central government with the European Powers by
committing crimes, the responsibility for which they attempted by false
evidence to fix on the Missionary Colleges. They committed murders in
the streets of London. In New York the police unearthed a conspiracy of
blackmail, bomb outrages and murder, which completely terrorized the
rich Armenian bankers and merchants. A little over two years ago the
London Press reported the discovery by the New York police of a further
conspiracy of terrorism and assassination.
The advent of these revolutionary agents into Kurdistan had the
inevitable result of embittering the former good relations of the Turkish
Government and the resident Moslem population with the Christian, and
especially the Orthodox Armenian section of the inhabitants.
This was natural for the reason that in Turkey the people have a horror
of secret societies and plots, founded on the experience of their
own suffering at the hands of the Greek Hetairia and the Bulgarian
Komitadjis. The fears of the Turks and the Kurds were genuine. They
believed that the members of the once loyal “millet-i-sadika” no longer
merited that title, and that they were arming and preparing to massacre
the Moslems. The whole country became like a powder magazine, and Europe
had not long to wait for the inevitable spark which started what are
known as the Armenian massacres of 1894 and 1896.
IV.
We shall better understand the question of these massacres, if we first
study the Armenian character, at the same time noticing the aptitude and
fitness of the race for self-government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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