Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1894 — AWFUL MASSACRE. [ARTICLE]

AWFUL MASSACRE.

Unparalleled A t rocities by Mohammedan Fanatics. Nrnrly 10,000 Armenian Christian* Butchered and a Score ot Villages Destroyed. The chairman of the American Patriotic Association, G. Hagopian, in London, has sent a letter to the Earl of Kimberly, Sc“cretary of Foreign Affairs, that was re(••ived recently from an American in Armenia, which gives details of one of the most atrocious massacres known to hisThe letter is dated Bitlis. Ort. 9, End states that in the beginning of the trouble the Kurds carried off Armenian i xco and refused satisfaction. A fight i.l jllo-.vcd. Two Kurds were killed, The I i?~? the Governor, declaring that the /-raieiiian soldiers had overrun the land, Idllingand plundering Kurds. This furpished a pretext for massing the troops •.om far and near. The troops W'i’e coui- ; a ruled by a pasha and a marshal, and ; re hurried to the district. The pasha I said to have hung from his breast,after j-cading it to his soldiers, an order from i mstantinople to cut the Armenians up, | >ot and branch, and adjuring them to do | if they loved their king and government. ’■Jhe carnageTliSVTi>Hdwed is Tioyonff de-" i ription. Six to ten thousand persons L'l.'t such a fate as overt the darkest ages > darkened Africa hardly witnessed, for {Acre women- and- tender babes might at | ast have had a chance of a life of slavt -y, while here womanhood and innocence >.-ere but a mockery before the cruel lust I rat ended its debauch by stabbing women i > death with the bayonet, while tender I ibes were impaled witli thesame weapon j i their dead mother’s breast or perhaps I ized by tho hair to have their heads | pped off with tho sword. In one 'place | iree hundred or four hundred women, i hey being forced to serve vile purposes by I ie 'merciless soldiery, wore hacked to i ieces by sword and bayonet in the. valley below. In another place, some two hnn- > red weeping and wailing women bcggcil | or compassion, falling at the commander’s ! *et, but tho bloodthirsty wretch, after > rdering their violation, directed hts solJ iers to dispatch them in a similar way. ; n anot her place some sixty young lirides >nd tho more attractive girls wore j-rowded into a church and. after viola’ion, were slaughtered, and human gore was seen flowing from the church door. ’ ' Another letter says that some of tho regular soldiers themselves admit that i hey killed one hundred persons each in a ■iendish manner, and that rape was followed by tho bayonet. Twenty or thirty Artneifiah villagesTdFAvonld seem, have been wholly destroyed, and some persons ivero burned to death with kerosene in jheir own houses.