Diary of a Foreign Resident in the Town of B. on the Cilician
Plain. Communicated by a Swiss Gentleman of Geneva.
Sunday, 14th March, 1915.
This morning I had a long conversation with Mr.---- about events
at Zeitoun. He has managed to obtain some information regarding the
little Armenian town, although all direct communication with it has
been interrupted. Turkish troops have left Aleppo for Zeitoun--some
say 4,000, some 6,000, others 8,000. With what intention, one
wonders? Mr.----, who has been there himself during last summer and
this winter, assures me that the Armenians have no wish to revolt, and
are prepared to put up with anything the Government may do. Contrary
to the old-established custom, a levy was made at Zeitoun at the
time of the August mobilisation, and they did not offer the slightest
resistance. None the less, the Government has played them false. In
October, 1914, their leader, Nazaret Tchaoush, came to Marash with a
"safe conduct" to arrange some special points with the officials. In
spite of the "safe conduct," they imprisoned him, tortured him and
put him to death. Still the people of Zeitoun remained quiet. Bands
of zaptiehs (Turkish gendarmes), quartered in the town, have been
molesting the inhabitants, raiding shops, stealing, maltreating the
people and dishonouring their women. It is obvious that the Government
are trying to get a case against the Zeitounlis, so as to be able to
exterminate them at their pleasure and yet justify themselves in the
eyes of the world.
--th April, 1915.
Three Armenians from Dört Yöl were hanged last night in the
chief square of Adana. The Government declare that they had been
signalling to the British warship or warships stationed in the Gulf
of Alexandretta. This is untrue, for I know, though I dare not put
the source of my information on paper, that only one Armenian from
Dört Yöl has had any communication with the English.
--th April.
Two more Armenians from Dört Yöl have been hanged at Adana.
--th April.
Three Armenians have been hanged at Adana. We were out riding
to-day, and the train came into the station just as we reached the
railway. Imagine our indignation when we saw a cattle-truck filled
with Armenians from Zeitoun. Most of these mountaineers were in
rags, but a few were quite well dressed. They had been driven out
of their homes and were going to be transplanted, God knows where,
to some town in Asia Minor. It seems we have returned to the days
of the Assyrians, if whole populations can be exiled in this way,
and the sacred liberty of the individual so violated.
--th April (the next day).
We were able to see the unfortunate refugees, who are still here
to-day. These are the circumstances of their departure from Zeitoun,
or rather this is the tragedy which preceded their exile, though it
was not the cause of it.
The Turkish gendarmes outraged several girls in the town, and were
attacked in consequence by about twenty of the more hot-headed young
men. Several gendarmes were killed, though all the while the population
as a whole was opposed to bloodshed, and desired most earnestly to
avoid the least pretext for reprisals. The twenty rebels were driven
out of the town and took refuge in a monastery about three-quarters
of an hour's distance from the town. At this point the troops from
Aleppo arrived. The Zeitounlis gave them lodging, and it seemed that
all was going excellently between the populace and the 8,000 soldiers
under their German officers.
The Turks surrounded the monastery and attacked it for a whole day;
but the insurgents defended themselves, and, at the cost of one man
slightly wounded, they killed 300 of the regular troops. During the
night, moreover, they managed to escape.
Their escape was as yet unknown to the town when, about nine o'clock
on the following morning, the Turkish Commandant summoned about 300
of the principal inhabitants to present themselves immediately at
the military headquarters. They obeyed the summons without the least
suspicion, believing themselves to be on excellent terms with the
authorities. Some of them took a little money, others some clothing
or wraps, but the majority came in their working clothes and brought
nothing with them. Some of them had even left their flocks on the
mountains in the charge of children. When they reached the Turkish
camp, they were ordered to leave the town at once without returning to
their homes. They were completely stupefied. Leave? But for where? They
did not know.
They had been unable even yet to learn their destination, but it is
probable that they are being sent to the Vilayet of Konia. Some of
them have come in carriages and some on foot.
--th April.
I heard to-day that the whole population of Dört Yöl has been taken
away to work on the roads. They continue to hang Armenians at Adana. It
is a point worth remembering that Zeitoun and Dört Yöl are the two
Armenian towns which held their own during the Adana massacres of 1909.
--th May.
A new batch of Zeitounlis has just arrived. I saw them marching along
the road, an interminable file under the Turkish whips. It is really
the most miserable and pitiable thing in the world. Weak and scarcely
clothed, they rather drag themselves along than walk. Old women fall
down, and struggle to their feet again when the zaptieh approaches with
lifted stick. Others are driven along like donkeys. I saw one young
woman drop down exhausted. The Turk gave her two or three blows with
his stick and she raised herself painfully. Her husband was walking
in front with a baby two or three days old in his arms.
Further on an old woman had stumbled, and slipped down into the
mud. The gendarme touched her two or three times with his whip,
but she did not stir; then he gave her several kicks with his foot;
still she did not move; then he kicked her harder, and she rolled
over into the ditch; I hope that she was already dead.
These people have now arrived in the town. They have had nothing
to eat for two days. The Turks forbade them to bring anything with
them from Zeitoun, except, in some cases, a few blankets, a donkey,
a mule, or a goat. But even these things they are selling here for
practically nothing--a goat for one medjidia (3s. 2d.), a mule for
half a lira (nine shillings). This is because the Turks steal them
on the road. One young woman who had only been a mother eight days,
had her donkey stolen the first night of the journey. What a way
of starting out! The German and Turkish officers made the Armenians
leave all their property behind, so that the mouhadjirs (refugees)
from Thrace might enter into possession. There are five families in
----'s house! The town and the surrounding villages (about 25,000
inhabitants) are entirely destroyed.
Between fifteen and sixteen thousand exiles have been sent towards
Aleppo, but they are going to be taken further. Perhaps into
Arabia? Can the real object be to starve them to death? Those who
have passed through our town were going to the Vilayet of Konia;
there too there are deserts.
--th May.
Letters have come which confirm my fears. It is not to Aleppo that the
Zeitounlis are being sent, but to Der-el-Zor, in Arabia, between Aleppo
and Babylonia. And those we saw the other day are going to Kara-Pounar,
between Konia and Eregli, in the most arid part of Asia Minor.
Certain ladies here have given blankets and shoes to some of the
poorest. The local Christians, too, have shown themselves wonderfully
self-sacrificing. But what can one do? It is a little drop of charity
in the ocean of their suffering.
--th May.
News has come from Konia. Ninety Armenians have been taken to
Kara-Pounar. The Zeitounlis have arrived at Konia. Their sufferings
have been increased by their having had to wait--some of them 8,
some 15, some 20 days--at Bozanti (the terminus of the Anatolian
Railway in the Taurus, 2,400 feet above sea level). This delay was
caused by the enormous masses of troops passing continually through
the Cilician Gates; it is the army of Syria which is being recalled
for the defence of the Dardanelles.
When the exiles reached Konia, they had eaten nothing, according to
our news, for three days. The Greeks and Armenians at once collected
money and food for their relief, but the Vali of Konia would not
allow anything of any kind to be given to the exiles. They therefore
remained another three days without food, at the end of which time
the Vali removed the prohibition and allowed food to be served out
to them under the supervision of the zaptiehs.
My informant tells me that, after the departure of the Armenians from
Konia for Kara-Pounar, he saw an Armenian woman throw her new-born
baby into a well; another is said to have thrown hers out of the
window of the train.
--th May.
A letter has come from Kara-Pounar. I know the writer of it, and can
have no doubt of his truthfulness. He says that the 6,000 or 8,000
Armenians from Zeitoun are dying there from starvation at the rate of
150 to 200 a day. So from 15,000 to 19,000 Zeitounlis must have been
sent into Arabia, the total population of the town and the outlying
villages having been about 25,000.
--th May.
The whole garrison of ---- and of Adana have left for the
Dardanelles. There are no troops left to defend the district if it
should be attacked from outside.
--th May (the next day).
New troops have arrived, but they are untrained.
--th May.
The last batch of Zeitounlis passed through our town to-day, and I was
able to speak to some of them in the han where they had been put. I
saw one poor little girl who had been walking, barefoot, for more than
a week; her only clothing was a torn pinafore; she was shivering with
cold and hunger, and her bones were literally pushing through her skin.
About a dozen children had to be left on the road because they could
not walk any further. Have they died of hunger? Probably, but no one
will ever know for certain. I also saw two poor old women without any
hair left, or with hardly any. When the Turks drove them out of Zeitoun
they had been rich, but they could not take anything with them beyond
the clothes they were wearing. They managed somehow to hide five or six
gold pieces in their hair, but, unfortunately for them, the sun glinted
on the metal as they marched along and the glitter attracted the notice
of a zaptieh. He did not waste any time in picking out the pieces of
gold, but found it much quicker to tear the hair out by the roots.
I came across another very characteristic case. A citizen of Zeitoun,
formerly a rich man, was leading two donkeys, the last remnants of
his fortune. A gendarme came along and seized their bridles; the
Armenian implored him to leave them, saying that he was already on
the verge of starvation. The only answer he received from the Turk
was a shower of blows, repeated till he rolled over in the dust;
even then the Turk continued beating him, till the dust was turned
into a blood-soaked mud; then he gave a final kick and went off with
the donkeys. Several Turks stood by watching; they did not appear to
be at all surprised, nor did any of them attempt to intervene.
--th May.
The authorities have sent a number of people from Dört Yöl to be
hanged in the various towns of Adana Vilayet.
--th May.
There is a rumour of a partial exodus from Marash. It is going to be
our town next.
Dört Yöl has also been evacuated and the inhabitants sent into
Arabia. Hadjin is threatened with the same fate. There has been a
partial clearing out of Adana; Tarsus and Mersina are threatened too,
and also Aintab.
8. Information regarding Events in Armenia, published in the
"Sonnenaufgang" (Organ of the "German League for the Promotion of
Christian Charitable Work in the East"), October, 1915; and in the
"Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift," November, 1915.
This testimony is especially significant because it comes from a
German source, and because the German Censor made a strenuous attempt
to suppress it.
The same issue of the "Sonnenaufgang" contains the following editorial
note:--
"In our preceding issue we published an account by one of our sisters
(Schwester Möhring) of her experiences on a journey, but we have to
abstain from giving to the public the new details that are reaching
us in abundance. It costs us much to do so, as our friends will
understand; but the political situation of our country demands it."
In the case of the "Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift," the Censor
was not content with putting pressure on the editor. On the 10th
November, he forbade the reproduction of the present article in the
German press, and did his best to confiscate the whole current issue
of the magazine. Copies of both publications, however, found their
way across the frontier.
Both the incriminating articles are drawn from common sources, but
the extracts they make from them do not entirely coincide, so that,
by putting them together, a fuller version of these sources can
be compiled.
In the text printed below, the unbracketed paragraphs are those
which appear both in the "Sonnenaufgang" and in the "Allgemeine
Missions-Zeitschrift"; while paragraphs included in angular brackets
[< >] appear only in the "Sonnenaufgang," and those in square brackets
([ ]) only in the "Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift."
Between the 10th and the 30th May, 1,200 of the most prominent
Armenians and other Christians, without distinction of confession,
were arrested in the Vilayets of Diyarbekir and Mamouret-ul-Aziz.
<It is said that they were to be taken to Mosul, but nothing more
has been heard of them.>
[On the 30th May, 674 of them were embarked on thirteen Tigris barges,
under the pretext that they were to be taken to Mosul. The Vali's
aide-de-camp, assisted by fifty gendarmes, was in charge of the
convoy. Half the gendarmes started off on the barges, while the other
half rode along the bank. A short time after the start the Armenians
were stripped of all their money (about £6,000 Turkish) and then
of their clothes; after that they were thrown into the river. The
gendarmes on the bank were ordered to let none escape. The clothes
of these victims were sold in the market of Diyarbekir.]
<About the same time 700 young Armenian men were conscribed, and were
then sent to build the Karabaghtché-Habashi road. There is no news
of these 700 men either.
It is said that in Diyarbekir five or six priests were stripped naked
one day, smeared with tar, and dragged through the streets.
In the Vilayet of Aleppo they have evicted the inhabitants of Hadjin,
Shar, Albustan, Göksoun, Tasholouk, Zeitoun, all the villages of
Alabash, Geben, Shivilgi, Furnus and the surrounding villages,
Fundadjak, Hassan-Beyli, Harni, Lappashli, Dört Yöl and others.>
[They have marched them off in convoys into the desert on the pretext
of settling them there. In the village of Tel-Armen (along the line of
the Bagdad Railway, near Mosul) and in the neighbouring villages about
5,000 people were massacred, leaving only a few women and children. The
people were thrown alive down wells or into the fire. They pretend
that the Armenians are to be employed in colonising land situated
at a distance of twenty-four to thirty kilometres from the Bagdad
Railway. But as it is only the women and children who are sent into
exile, since all the men, with the exception of the very old, are at
the war, this means nothing less than the wholesale murder of the
families, since they have neither the labour nor the capital for
clearing the country.]
A German met a Christian soldier of his acquaintance, who was on
furlough from Jerusalem. The man was wandering up and down along
the banks of the Euphrates searching for his wife and children, who
were supposed to have been transferred to that neighbourhood. Such
unfortunates are often to be met with in Aleppo, because they believe
that there they will learn something about the whereabouts of their
relations. It has often happened that when a member of a family
has been absent, he discovers on his return that all his family are
gone--evicted from their homes.
[For a whole month corpses were observed floating down the River
Euphrates nearly every day, often in batches of from two to six corpses
bound together. The male corpses are in many cases hideously mutilated
(sexual organs cut off, and so on), the female corpses are ripped
open. The Turkish military authority in control of the Euphrates, the
Kaimakam of Djerablous, refuses to allow the burial of these corpses,
on the ground that he finds it impossible to establish whether they
belong to Moslems or to Christians. He adds that no one has given
him any orders on the subject. The corpses stranded on the bank are
devoured by dogs and vultures. To this fact there are many German
eye-witnesses. An employee of the Bagdad Railway has brought the
information that the prisons at Biredjik are filled regularly every
day and emptied every night--into the Euphrates. Between Diyarbekir
and Ourfa a German cavalry captain saw innumerable corpses lying
unburied all along the road.]
<The following telegram was sent to Aleppo from Diyarbekir:--"We have
accepted the True Religion. Now we are all right." The inhabitants of a
village near Anderoum went over to Islam and were allowed to stay. At
Hadjin six families wanted to become Mohammedans. They were told:
"Nothing under one hundred families will be accepted."
Aleppo and Ourfa are the assembling-places for the convoy of
exiles. There were about 5,000 of them in Aleppo during June and July,
while during the whole period from April to July many more than 50,000
must have passed through the city. The girls were abducted almost
without exception by the soldiers and their Arab hangers-on. One
father, on the verge of despair, besought me to take with me at least
his fifteen-year-old daughter, as he could no longer protect her from
the persecutions inflicted upon her. The children left behind by the
Armenians on their journey are past counting.
Women whose pains came upon them on the way had to continue their
journey without respite. A woman bore twins in the neighbourhood
of Aintab; next morning she had to go on again. She very soon had
to leave the children under a bush, and a little while after she
collapsed herself. Another, whose pains came upon her during the
march, was compelled to go on at once and fell down dead almost
immediately. There were several more incidents of the same kind
between Marash and Aleppo. [18]
The villagers of Shar were permitted to carry all their household
effects with them. On the road they were suddenly told: "An order
has come for us to leave the high road and travel across the
mountains." Everything--waggons, oxen and belongings--had to be
left behind on the road, and then they went on over the mountains on
foot. This year the heat has been exceptionally severe, and many women
and children naturally succumbed to it even in these early stages of
their journey.
There are about 30,000 exiles of whom we have no news at all, as they
have arrived neither at Aleppo nor at Ourfa.>