ARMENIAN MARTYRS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXV, Issue 8303, 23 November 1915, Page 3

ARMENIAN MARTYRS.

1,000,000 BUTCHERED OR EXILED

A LETTER FROM CONSTANTI-

NOPLE

" No Armenian is left to-day in the extensive territory from Samsun to Sort and l)iarbopir, JI says a. letter elated Constantinople, August 15, which :illeges systematic eiforts on the part of the 'furbish Government to exterminate by butchery and starvation 'the .-.Armenians .under Turkish.-rule:--.

Butchery, ravishment, *" and • other systematic horrors are recounted in the letter., which was made public in America recently by the American Armenian Relief Fund, an organisation of. which Bishop Grecr of this diocese, Charles W. Eliot, Bishop Rhinclander of Philadelphia, and.other noted Americans are active members.

Murder and kidnapping and. forcible expulsion, the letter continues, have in recent months caused the extermination of all Armenians throughout farspreading . villayets such as'.;Erzerum,' Trebizond,-.Sivas, Harput, Biths, and other regions. A population (of at least 1,000,000 has been exiled toward the south, the local Government carrying out the work of deporting systematically since last April. In every village and town, not only gendarmes but bandits and hordes of criminals released from prisons■ forced the Armenians >by tqrtureM/?; S 1™ UP. their arms. Leading members oi whole sections were thrown into prison. The slaughter and outrage were then: begun, great crowds of men against 1 whom no crimes had been charged being led outside of towns and murdered in droves.. Then the old men, the women andi children were-"'released to the Moslem! population, and • the Moslems " from the highest official to the lowest farmer each appropriated" for himself a, young f woman or a girl, forcing her to cm- 1 brace Mohammedanism. Many of the children also were appropriated, and the remainder forced to march onward, to be eventually murdered by bandits waiting on the highway or to die of starvation." Eyo-witnesaes quoted in the letter toll | of a caravan of women abandoned for days in the plains of Harput, where all"perished of starvation at the rate of 50 or 60 a day. Groups of women and children were" exhibited before Government offices in every town and village of vast sections so that Moslems might stop forward and take their choice of tho women and little onre. Travellers reaching Constantinople tell, the letter says, of passing .thousands of bodies of murdered Anppm.inß; For one day, ohq Moslem testified, on

his way from Malatia to Sivas ho passed through solid ■■ lines of dead bodies of men and women.

The male population of Baiburt hasbeen decimated and the women and children thrown into the Euphrates, the letter continues. -An Armenian who dares to travel must be disguised a,s a Turk. Even the Armenian troops of the Ottoman army were slaughtered.

"History," concludes the (letter, "does not record a, greater tragedy than this. The reign of Sultan Hamid, though red with blood, was a most happy period for the Armenians, compared with the. present."" : / ■'-.'■