The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon — John Shaqi
The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon
History
The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon
Armenian question; Armenians; World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Refugees
Perhaps the most terrible feature of all was the suffering of the women
with child, who were made to march with the convoys and gave birth to
their babies on the road. This is alluded to in Doc. 12 from a German
source, at second-hand, but in Docs. 129 and 137 we have the testimony
of neutral witnesses who actually succoured these victims, so far as the
extremity of their plight and the brutality of their escort made succour
possible. It should be mentioned that in Doc. 68 an Armenian exile
testifies to the kindness of an individual Turkish gendarme to one of
her fellow-victims who was in these straits.
(vi) The vast scale of these massacres and the pitiless cruelty with
which the deportations were carried out may seem to some readers to
throw doubt on the authenticity of the narratives. Can human beings (it
may be asked) have perpetrated such crimes on innocent women and
children? But a recollection of previous massacres will show that such
crimes are part of the long settled and often repeated policy of Turkish
rulers. In Chios, nearly a century ago, the Turks slaughtered almost the
whole Greek population of the island. In European Turkey in 1876 many
thousands of Bulgarians were killed on the suspicion of an intended
rising, and the outrages committed on women were, on a smaller scale, as
bad as those here recorded. In 1895 and 1896 more than a hundred
thousand Armenian Christians were put to death by Abd-ul-Hamid, many
thousands of whom died as martyrs to their Christian faith, by abjuring
which they could have saved their lives. All these massacres are
registered not only in the ordinary press records of current history but
in the reports of British diplomatic and consular officials written at
the time. They are as certain as anything else that has happened in our
day. There is, therefore, no antecedent improbability to be overcome
before the accounts here given can be accepted. All that happened in
1915 is in the regular line of Turkish policy. The only differences are
in the scale of the present crimes, and in the fact that the lingering
sufferings of deportations in which the deaths were as numerous as in
the massacres, and fell with special severity upon the women, have in
this latest instance been added.
The evidence is cumulative. Each part of it supports the rest because
each part is independent of the others. The main facts are the same, and
reveal the same plans and intentions at work. Even the varieties are
instructive because they show those diversities of temper and feeling
which appear in human nature everywhere.
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