THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1915. THE EXTERMINATION OF A RACE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16546, 20 November 1915, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1915. THE EXTERMINATION OF A RACE.

One of the aims of Germany in waging the present war is the extension of that remarkable national product which she terms her "culture." We would expect this so-called culture to manifest itself in countries over which Germany has established a strong dominating influence—Turkey, for example. The expectation finds realisation in a manner that has had its parallel in German " frightfulness" in Belgium and France and elsewhere. All the tragedy of war in half a dozen different theatres has not paled the horrors of the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks as these have recently been revealed. Germany has even been charged with being directly responsible for the attacks on the Armenians, on the ground that it is undesirable to allow a large alien population to inhabit parts of the Ottoman Empire that are exposed to Russian attack. Count Reventlow, it will be remembered, has defended the Turkish policy in Armenia. He has rebuked the meddlesomeness of Americans who make a habit of interfering in '' questions of this kind," and has assured the Turks that '' the public opinion of the German Empire holds that this matter concerns the Turkish Empire alone." The inference is sufficiently obvious. If Germany did not prompt the massacres in Asia Minor, it suited her to condone them. There can be little doubt that she had but to raise her hand in Constantinople in order to prevent or to stay these recent massacres. So far as can be judged, nothing which the unfortunate Armenian people has suffered in its past history has been quite so bad as its latest experience. Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan, was credited with having included among his abominations the extermination, not all at one sitting, of a million of his Armenian subjects. But Talaat Bey and Enver Pasha, worthy representatives of a sadly misnamed organisation, seem to have found the Committee of. Union and Progress quite in the mood to revert to a policy of mere savagery against an unoffending race among their fellow-sub-jects. Like Abdul Hamid, they have acted on the conviction that bhe way to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians. They chose their opportunity well, and in their campaign of organised outrage appear to have established a new precedent. A correspondent draws in a recent issue of The Times a harrowing picture in considerable detail of the whole Armenian tragedy. Any on the part of the Turks to be sxperts in the business of race extirpation would probably bq, readily admitted. Their method would appear to show little variation. It has been asserted in their defence that the decision to deport the Eastern Armenians was arrived at only after the discovery of an Armenian plot at Constantinople, and after the Ar-

menians had taken up arms in the ' Van district, prior to the entry into ! Van in May of a Russian army which included many Armenians. • Doubtless the defeat of Sary Kamish, inflicted by such an army, had infuriated Enver Pasha's ruthi less temper. But the Armenians who were executed at Constanti- ' nople in April for plotting had been ; in prison for over a year, and the ■ deportation or massacre of Arme--1 nians had begun at many places before the Armenians at Van were criminal enough to help themselves. The story of the massacres is neces- , sarily as yet very incomplete and disconnected. Eastern Anatolia, Cicilia, and the Anti-Ta/urus region seem to have been the scene of the . worst cruelties on the part of the authorities and the population. At Marsovan, where there is an important American college, the authorities early in June ordered the Armenians to meet outside the town. They surrounded them there, and the police and an armed mob killed, according to the Americans, 1200 of the younger and more active Armenians, while the older and richer were allowed to avoid death by conversion to Islam, for which privilege they paid heavily. The poorer were mostly killed or exiled, the younger women were distributed among the rabble, while the rest of the community were driven across country to Northern Mesopotamia. At Bitlis and Mush a large number—according to some accounts 12,000 Armenians, many of them women—are reported to have been shot or drowned. There were many executions, and several Armenian villages were wiped completely out. At Mosul the unhappy Armenians who were brought from the north in gangs were set upon by the mob. •Many were killed, and Turks and Kurds came from as far north as the Persian border to buy the women. The procedure generally adopted seems to have been that the ablebodied Armenians were set apart and either drafted into labour battalions or murdered then and there. The women, children, and old men were driven into exile—masses of them into the desert. The sufferings of these victims have been described by German missionaries among others. A German lady who met parties of them on the march ha-s told how, without bread and without water, under the burning sun, numbers of them saw their children perish. They were exposed to the greed and lust of their escort. Lord Bryce is the authority for the statement that women were stripped naked and forced to continue their journey in that state.'" Some went mad and threw away their infants. Others plunged into the Euphrates: According to the testimony of the Italian Consul, the whole Armenian population of Trebizond, 8000 or 10,000 in number, was destroyed by drowning in a single afternoon. Reuter's Dardanelles correspondent recently cabled: '' The Armenian horrors are fully confirmed. .An eyewitness in one instance saw a hundred human wolves plunge among a thousand defenceless beings, tearing them to, pieces with their bayonets." Episodes such as we have quoted could be multiplied almost indefinitely in the tale of horrors. Protest has been raised and the light of publicity has been cast on these doings in Asia Minor to an extent that even the Turkish Government will not relish. Already, however, the tragedy has been enacted. As the correspondent of The Times has observed: " One cannot unfortunately imagine the Turkish Chamber of Deputies refusing to vote the fullest confidence in Talaat Bey and En vet Pasha. Massacres will probably cease, and the Armenians be left to starve quietly."