CHAPTER VII

THE ARMENIANS AND THEIR PERSECUTION

Armenia is perhaps the oldest of all the Christian countries in the world. It was a powerful nation at the advent of Christ, although at different periods in its history it was occupied by the Persians under Cyrus, the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, and the Romans under the Cæsars. One of the kings of Armenia, Tigranes II, made a treaty with Pompey under which he submitted to a protectorate from Rome, but after his death his son and successor, Artavasdes III, rebelled, was severely chastised by Marc Antony, and taken prisoner to Alexandria, where he was beheaded in the year 30 B.C. by order of Cleopatra.

There is a legend that one of the immediate successors of Tigranes, having heard of the teachings of Jesus and His persecution by the Jews, sent Him a letter by a distinguished envoy offering Him the hospitality of Armenia and the widest freedom in carrying on His work. Jesus, the tradition continues, replied that His duty lay among His own people, but sent a representative in the person of His disciple, Thaddeus, who was warmly received and preached the new Gospel throughout the kingdom until the entire population accepted the Christian faith. Some clever fabricator several years ago pretended to discover the original manuscript of this correspondence among the archives of one of the ancient Armenian monasteries, and the announcement created a decided sensation.

It is a matter of regret that this legend cannot be sustained, but it is an actual fact that Tiridates, king of Armenia, was converted to Christianity in the year 259 A.D. by St. Gregory, “the Enlightener,” and was therefore the first sovereign in the world to accept the new faith and to adopt it as the religion of his nation. The Emperor Constantine did not accept Christianity until thirty years or more afterward. Armenia is therefore the oldest of Christian countries, and the monastery of Etchmiadzin, twelve miles from Erivan, is still, as it has been from the third century, the ecclesiastical headquarters of the Armenian church. The word in English means “the only begotten.”

But the Armenians have had a stormy time in defence of their religion ever since. Theological controversies began early among them, and persecution has been relentless. The Armenian clergy refused to accept the decree of the council of Chalcedon, and in 491 A.D. seceded from the Church of Rome. Later they separated from the orthodox Greeks, and although frequent attempts have been made to bring about a reunion with the Church of Russia, which is a branch of the Greek Church, the Armenians have remained an independent ecclesiastical body, with a pope or patriarch called a _katholikos_ as its administrative head, with the monastery of Etchmiadzin as his metropolis. He is elected for life by delegates from the various Armenian communities throughout the world, who come there for that purpose when a vacancy occurs, and he is the spiritual head of believers in the Armenian creed in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The authority of the Armenian _katholikos_ does not extend to theological questions. The creed of that faith cannot be altered except by a vote of the house of bishops, and he does not claim to be infallible. His jurisdiction is executive and judicial, and he is protected by the czar of Russia, who enforces his edicts.

No people have suffered so much for their religion, not even the children of Israel, as the Armenians, and the atrocities committed upon them during the thirty years of the reign of Abdul Hamid, the late sultan of Turkey, were the most barbarous that modern history has ever recorded. I do not remember that ever before, at least in modern times, the sovereign of a country deliberately set about to exterminate by massacre the subjects of his authority. There is no longer any question that “The great assassin, the unspeakable Turk,” as Mr. Gladstone called him, gave the instructions that led to the slaughter of nearly 100,000 innocent inhabitants of his province of Armenia, the destruction of their homes, the plundering of their property, and the violation of their wives and daughters. Even if there had been any previous doubt of his guilt, documents found in the Yildiz Kiosk after he was deposed, established the fact that he had a deliberate intention to depopulate Armenia by the torch and the sword in a systematic and thorough manner.

It has long been conceded that a Mohammedan cannot govern believers in other religions with justice, but how far Abdul Hamid was actuated by fanaticism, how far he applied religious prejudices for political purposes, or whether he was afraid that the Armenians would ultimately succeed in throwing off his yoke, are conjectures upon which students of Turkish affairs will never agree. He knew from the events of the past that he could never convert the Christian inhabitants of his empire to Islam by the sword, because the persecution which the Armenians had suffered for centuries only strengthened their faith, but no sultan since Selim the Inflexible ever did more to stimulate religious intolerance and encourage his Mussulman subjects to persecute his Christian subjects, than Abdul Hamid in Bulgaria and other parts of his empire as well as Armenia.

The Armenians who inhabit the northern part of Asia Minor along the southern coast of the Black Sea are a simple, quiet, primitive people of agricultural and pastoral pursuits. They live in small villages, and are devoted to their families and their religion. For centuries they have suffered from the depredations of the Kurds, migratory, half-civilized tribes who haunt the mountains during the summer but in winter come down to the plains and either quarter themselves upon the Armenian peasants or plunder them. Some villages pay regular blackmail, as the Scottish farmers used to do to protect themselves from troublesome Highland clans. Sometimes the Armenians defended themselves, but while they have not lacked courage, as their records show, very few had arms and those who did purchase guns and ammunition were in constant peril of arrest for conspiracy. Occasionally when they resisted the invasions of the Kurds, their villages were entirely destroyed and the inhabitants put to the sword, men, women, and children alike, with a ferocious brutality in which Turkish soldiers invariably joined with enthusiasm.

While a large majority of the Armenian population lived pastoral lives, caring nothing for the rest of the world, without any ideas of constitutional freedom or national independence, many of the young men drifted to the cities, where they prospered and became prominent and influential. They are thrifty and shrewd in trade. It is a common saying that it takes two Jews to cheat one Greek, and two Greeks to cheat one Armenian; but as a rule the members of that race have a high reputation for integrity as well as sagacity, and the late sultan, himself their bitterest enemy, trusted his finances to Armenians, as he trusted his life to Albanians in preference to Turks.

Gradually the mercantile affairs, the manufacturing, the banking, and other lines of business in the principal cities of Turkey have become absorbed by Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, for the Turk is no trader, and the Armenians are the most enterprising and successful of all.

There was no act of disloyalty until they recognized the significance of the persecution of their people at home. They accepted their long years of agony and despair as the penalty of their religion, but when American missionaries planted schools and colleges in Turkey and began to educate the young people, a new spirit of national pride and hope gradually developed. Thousands of Armenians, and among them some of the ablest leaders and most influential thinkers, received their first impulses and aspirations for civil and religious liberty at Robert College, an American institution on the Bosphorus, and in other colleges of the American Board of Foreign Missions in different parts of Asia Minor. This racial pride and spirit first found its expression in attempts to improve the intellectual condition of their own families, in the emancipation of their women, in a revival of the use of the Armenian language, which had been very largely superseded by the Turkish, and the enlightenment of the common people as to the rights and privileges to which all human beings are entitled.

Having the example of Bosnia and Bulgaria always in mind, the sultan undoubtedly suspected that the Armenians were preparing for a struggle for freedom and determined to check it by extermination if necessary. His intentions soon became known. When an Armenian was murdered or robbed, his assailant was rewarded, and the more Christians the Kurdish chiefs could kill the more rapid was their promotion. The prisons were filled with innocent men, the schools were closed, the Armenian language was forbidden, Armenian books were seized and burned, and American missionaries were prohibited from teaching anything that suggested freedom. Their text-books and newspapers were censored and suppressed if they were found to contain a sentence or even a word that could be construed to reflect upon political conditions. One newspaper was suppressed because it mentioned the dog star in a scientific article on astronomy.

This was considered an insult to the sultan because Yildiz, the name of his palace, is the word for star. Everything that related to Armenia, Macedonia, and other Christian provinces was stricken out; hymn books and even Bibles were censored; two professors in the missionary college at Marsovan were accused of teaching treason and condemned to death, but were rescued by the British government at the very steps of the scaffold. All reference to the assassination of President McKinley was forbidden, lest it might suggest a similar fate for the sultan.

Armenians in other parts of the world organized revolutionary societies, published revolutionary documents, and held conventions to consider revolutionary expedients. This defiance of his authority exasperated the sultan and furnished the pretext for more violent persecutions and more slaughter. Being unable to reach the revolutionary organizers in other countries, he punished their relatives, friends, and former townsmen by imprisonment and death, and, finally, after many years of atrocious and barbarous treatment, he conceived a fiendish scheme of general massacre which was carried out by his officials with fanatical zeal under his directions. One of his ministers remarked to an European diplomatist in Constantinople that, “according to his majesty’s notion, the best way to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians.”

In order that they might do their work more thoroughly the half-savage, nomadic bands of Kurds were organized into companies by Turkish officers, equipped with modern weapons, and turned loose with orders to provoke the Armenians to resistance, and thus furnish an excuse for a general slaughter. Self-defence was always treated as rebellion. The butchers who hunted helpless men and women like wild beasts and killed them on the roadside or in the brush where they had taken refuge, who looted and burned their homes and butchered their wives and children, were promptly rewarded, and no one was ever punished. A succession of massacres occurred all over Armenia, in almost every case begun with a signal by a trumpet from military headquarters. The soldiers not only participated in the slaughter, but burned the homes of their victims after plundering them, and both civil and official representatives of the government directed the work of the mob. In many cases these men were afterward called to Constantinople and decorated by their sovereign for the energetic manner in which the work was done.

Prominent men were offered their lives if they would renounce their religion, and some of them did so, but very few. The great mass of the Armenians who died in those massacres were martyrs to their faith. Special efforts were made to force priests to apostasy. An official investigation showed that 170 Armenian clergymen in a single province were tortured to death because they would not deny their Christ. In the province of Kars is a group of sixty towns and villages in which no Christian church was left standing and no Christian priest was left alive. Investigation showed that 568 churches were destroyed and 282 were transformed into mosques. No one will ever know the extent of the massacres, but, as accurately as can be ascertained, nearly 100,000 Armenian Christians suffered martyrdom during the reign of Abdul Hamid by his orders, and it is believed that as many more who fled to the mountains perished from exposure and starvation.

The massacres of Armenians in October, 1895, which horrified the world, began in Trebizond, and I asked Doctor Crawford, an American who has spent thirty years in that country, his opinion of the causes and motives.

“For centuries the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire have suffered continuous cruelties and persecutions,” said Doctor Crawford. “They have suffered from heavy taxation and unjust ways of collecting; there has been no safety for their property, no protection for their crops which were often stolen or destroyed, and their wives and daughters were never safe. Most of this persecution was due to the Kurds, their semi-civilized neighbours in Kurdistan, the adjoining province to Armenia on the east. Certain Kurdish chiefs levied blackmail upon Armenian villages for their protection. That is, they assessed tribute upon the inhabitants, in exchange for which they protected them against other Kurds. Those who paid this tribute were safe, those who did not were never secure, either in life or property or in their families.

“Fifty or sixty years ago the Armenians began to emigrate; thousands have gone to Constantinople and other cities; others to Europe and America; and there are many thousands in the United States. Those who had seen the world naturally realized the unfortunate situation in which their fellow countrymen were living, even more so than the latter themselves, and began to devise means for their relief. They organized societies; they collected funds; they published newspapers, denounced the iniquities of and conspired against the Turkish government.

“As soon as the government learned of this movement, instead of relieving the oppression, it bore down on the Armenians more heavily than before. The situation was very much aggravated because the Turks had discovered a pretext for their cruelty in the patriotic movements. All mail matter was opened; everything that related to Armenia was suppressed and destroyed; even the Bible was mutilated by tearing out the leaves that bore the name of Macedonia, and every geography and atlas had the name Armenia obliterated”--and Doctor Crawford showed me a copy of an English classical dictionary in which the text under the word Armenia had been cut out. “It was proclaimed that the Turkish government intended to wipe Armenia from the map of the world. The very name was accursed to the Turks,” he continued.

“But the innocent people at home were compelled to suffer for the offences of the Armenians abroad. Whenever any man received a letter or a newspaper containing sentiments unfriendly to the Turkish government he was cast into prison and often his property was confiscated.

“This was going on for many years until on September 7 1895, a society of young Armenians of Constantinople marched in procession to the Sublime Porte--which, you know, is the seat of government in that city--and presented a petition begging for justice and protection for their people at home. The Turkish government chose to interpret this exercise of the right of petition as insurrection. The soldiers attacked the procession. Several Armenians were killed, many were wounded, others were thrown into prison, and every one who could be seized was maltreated. This incident was followed by many murders and raids in Armenian towns and villages and hundreds of innocent people were slaughtered on the pretext that they were involved in a conspiracy against the government.

“About thirty days later a government official who had been notorious for his cruelties was shot at near Erzeroom, and, of course, the Armenians were charged with the responsibility. Retaliation was ordered and the governor of Trebizond received instructions from Constantinople to turn the rabble loose upon the Armenian population of that city. At 11 o’clock on the morning of Oct. 8, 1895, a bugle was blown at the barracks. This was the signal for slaughter, and every Armenian that could be reached was murdered in cold blood. Six hundred bodies were carried off in garbage carts and buried in a ditch outside this city. At 3 o’clock that afternoon the bugle blew again, and at that signal the mob began to loot the houses and shops of Armenians and did not stop until dark.

“This massacre was repeated in all the towns and villages of Armenia, and it is estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered simply because they were Christians, and because some of their fellow countrymen had attempted to organize a conspiracy against the government with the hope of relieving their distress and protecting them from persecution. There is no way of telling how many were killed, but we know that 40,000 children were left orphans. More than 6,000 fatherless and motherless little ones were gathered into our own American orphanages. Altogether, $1,000,000 from England and America was distributed for the relief of the sufferers.”

“Is the hatred of the Turk for the Armenians due exclusively to religious fanaticism?” I asked.

“By no means,” said Doctor Crawford. “The Armenian is a very keen business man, and the Turk is not. The Armenian is thrifty and gets ahead, or at least he would do so if the government would permit him. He is charged with usury. When he loans money he collects his interest and his principal and is usually very strict about it, which makes him unpopular. Baron Rothschild once said that if all the Jews and all the Armenians were put upon a desert island together, the Armenians would have all the money of both before they were rescued. But they are equally successful in the professions, and are eminent as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and especially gifted in oratory. Successful men are often compelled to suffer from the jealousy of those who are unsuccessful, and that is one of the chief causes of the persecution of the Armenians in Turkey, as it has been of the persecution of the Jews in Russia.”

“What is the present situation?”

“Comparatively speaking, it is very favourable. There has been a great improvement in the character and the conduct of the Turkish officials since the adoption of the constitution; there is comparatively little oppression; there is less corruption and blackmail; the lives and property of all citizens are comparatively safe; and there have been several cases of justice being granted to Armenians in the courts against their Turkish oppressors, something that was never dreamed of until within the last two years. A few Armenians have been appointed to office, which is another extraordinary thing; all political prisoners have been released; the spy system has been practically abolished; and people are no longer afraid to express their opinions. There are many newspapers and they are printed with the greatest freedom, but as a rule the social and moral conditions are worse than they were under the despotism. What they call liberty we call license, because they do not know any better. They construe the word liberty to mean the privilege of doing whatever they please, and many who have suffered horribly from oppression are now retaliating because in a way there is no means of preventing it. There is more drunkenness, more disorder, more crime, more stealing, more begging than ever before. People seem to lose their self-respect as well as their self-control when the restraint is withdrawn. One of our Armenian pastors said in apology:

“‘We must not expect fruit from a tree that has just been set out.’

“What they need here more than anything else is good men, and that is the work which the American schools are doing.

“Formerly every man professing the Christian faith, from the date of his birth to the date of his death, had to pay $2.50 tax a year in lieu of military service, because none but Moslems were admitted to the army. That rule has been abolished and members of all religious faiths, Jews and Gentiles, are now eligible for military service and are compelled to serve three years in the army when they become of age. Hence the increased emigration, which is becoming very large. Some of our most promising young men among the Armenians and Greeks are going to America. Three of our own native teachers left recently, among others, to work in shirt and collar factories of Troy, N. Y. Others have gone to the shoe factories of Massachusetts, to work in restaurants, and to engage in other business in the United States where their friends have gone before them and have found positions for them. During the last few months sixty promising young men from our little Protestant congregation have left for the United States, and thus our schools and churches are educating future American citizens.

“This emigration is not entirely due to a desire to avoid military service, but very largely to improve their condition. If there was a common foe, if Turkey was at war with some foreign power, the Christian young men would be perfectly willing to go into the army, but they are afraid of being sent to Arabia to suppress uprisings of Mohammedans, a duty from which no soldier ever returns, or to Macedonia to put down insurrections of their co-religionists in that province.

“The Turkish government is trying to make the military service more attractive for Christian young men and has commissioned several of the most intelligent young fellows as officers. It is providing military schools for the education of Christian as well as Turkish cadets, and as soon as they are competent gives them posts in the gendarmes.

“The cost of living in Armenia has been increasing gradually for several years,” continued Doctor Crawford, “which is a serious matter for teachers as well as for the pastors of the Greek and Armenian churches, who are very poorly paid and receive barely enough to buy their food. The pastor of our Protestant church is being urged by friends to go to Dakota, where there are several prosperous Armenian colonies. We have a neat little Protestant church here. Services in the Armenian language are held Sunday morning, in the Greek language in the afternoon, and in Turkish in the evening. Many Turks attend our evening service--some from curiosity and some from interest. A thoughtful Turk is usually fair-minded. He is willing to hear what you have to say, although he is not easily convinced. Indeed, there is a great deal that is good in a Turk. He is charitable and hospitable; he is industrious and reasonably honest; and we can get along with him very easily if his religious prejudices are not excited and he is given a good government.”