Читать книгу Betrayed Armenia - Apcar Diana Agabeg - Страница 1

In making a study of my race, I have found three marked characteristics Intelligence – Energy – Industry. Combined with these three characteristics is an intense Love of Nationality. We live in a complex world. In an independent people these characteristics and this sentiment are laudable Virtues. In a subject people they are Crimes.

After I had laid this bitter Truth to heart, I did not have to seek for the Why and Wherefore of the Armenian Massacres.

The Armenian Massacres stand without their parallel in history. The human mind staggers to contemplate the fiendish orgies of which they have been the victims, and no pen can describe their horrors: and this helpless christian people are to-day in the same deadly peril as they have been since the famous Treaty of Berlin consigned them bound hand and foot to the mercy of their executioners.

The Armenians may be led again “as sheep to the slaughter” and the work of extermination may be completed – Jesus Christ was crucified on Calvary and the servant is not greater than his Lord – but the work of their extermination can only be completed when the evil influences in the Turkish Empire have reached their culminating point. Hitherto the Powers of Europe have by their jealousies and rivalries cultivated these evil influences, they have watered them and made them grow, but when their culminating point is reached, they must re-act on Christendom and the natural consequence must follow. Those who sow the wind, must reap the whirlwind. It is in the natural order of things.

I will allow that Liberty, Justice, Equality, Fraternity are the watchwords of Young Turkey, but Young Turkey is only a small minority; the great majority of the Turkish nation are not Young Turks.

The question therefore resolves itself into this critical point: “What will Christendom do even now?”

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.