Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 201, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 September 1917 — GERMANS RIVAL TURKS IN CRUELTY [ARTICLE]

GERMANS RIVAL TURKS IN CRUELTY

Armenian Reports Them More Merciless in Persecuting Educated of His Race. NOTHING SACRED TO THEM They Have Less Respect Than Turks for Religious and Racial Customs of Their Victims Worse Than Dantes’ Inferno. Bombay.—The following statement, given to the Associated Press by a British officer now in a hospital here, presents a vivid picture of the sufferings undergone by the Armenians, of which comparatively little first-hand information has hitherto been forthcoming :

“Before I got my wound in the fighting up beyond Bagdad I came into contact on several occasions wlth a highly educated Armenian, who had esthe Tnrks and was being employed by us as an interpreter. •The • stories he told of the inhumanities inflicted upon his compatriots were so appalling that I made notes of his conversations, and have attempted here to reproduce them in something like his own language so that you can get at the heart of the man and realize w’hat he and all educated Armenians feel. The interpreter was in Constantinople until the end of last year, when he was sent to the front with a party of Armenians,' several of whom escaped.” Worse Than Dante’s Inferno. The interpreter’s story follows: “What you have read and heard about Armenia is not a hundredth part of the truth. Dante’s Inferno was a heaven compared with the hell that the Turks have made of my country. Something of the awful reality of the last twelve months I have myself seen in passing through oh the way to the front. “At Aleppo there are four factories in which, under the supervision of deported Armenians, two thousand Armenian women are being employed under terrible conditions. The women are all deportees. Qne of them said to me: ‘On a halt during our deportations I saw a gendarme bury a sick woman alive.- Cold-blooded murders were an everyday Our

guards had orders to kill on the spot anyone who lagged a pace behind on the journey. Often several were killed at once, and there was no separate grave for them —the bodies were just thrown into a ditch together and covered. It was all horrible to behold, but our eyes eventually became hardened to the sight.’ “Bab, Messguene, and Zor are three places never to be forgotten by us Armenians. I have visited them. ( Do you know what happened there a few months since? By the order of the governor, Afif. nearly one hundred thousand of my brothers were murdered, massacred by armed Circassians. “At Bosanti I saw six railway trucks of little Armenian children being dispatched ‘to an unknown destination.’ What had these little innocents done to offend? • Was it the mere fact of being alive and being sons and daughters of our thrice unhappy race?

Worse Than the Turk*. “The German soldiers that one sees around the stations in Armenia are generally of a low type, and not far behind the Turks in their disregard for the rights of our people. Their cruelty is a little different from that of the Turks, but the difference is only one of kind. The Turk, for example, often respects certain things which we have learned to associate with our religious or racial beliefs; the German has no respect for.anything —nothing is too sacred for his profane hands. The Turk frequently used to show some respect and deference to the upper class Armenians, the educated people, regarding them as perhaps capable of being useful even in a Turkish dominion. The German, as soon as he arrived here, pointed out the educated Armenian as the most dangerous of all, and instigated the Turks into organizing a ruthless persecution of the intellectual classes of Armenians. One day they surrounded the offices of the conservative newspaper Asadamard, arrested all the staff and deported them, I know not whither. Will they ever return? Who knows? “One day I walked from a place •where thousands of jnnocent women, girls, and children were bivouacked, suffering nameless miseries. I walk-* ed away because I could not bear any more to gaze upon them, and I came to a hill where I saw a little child. I was in Turkish uniform. The child came near me and cried in Turkish: ‘Give me for God’s sake a piece of bread! For five days I have eaten nothing but this.’ He pointed to some melon skin that had been left lying by the road. I answered him in Armenian, and the poor boy jumped Into my arms, saying: ‘Art thou Armenian?’ He remained there for a minute, uttering no other word. But I fell, warm tears falling down on my cheek. "The waters of the Euphrates, the sands of the deserts of Mesopotamia, are the graves of the whole Armenian nation. I can no longer weep. My tears have frozen in my eyes.”