- Project Runeberg -  Armenia and the Near East /
300

(1928) [MARC] Author: Fridtjof Nansen - Tema: Russia
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ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
300
The persecution of the Armenian population concentrated
first on Zeitun in Cilicia, which had remained comparatively
independent and had escaped Abdul Hamid’s massacres.
Under pretext of trying to capture a robber band in the
neighbourhood, which had been joined by several deserters,
four thousand men were sent against Zeitun in March 191 5,
and the whole Armenian population of between ten and twenty
thousand people was deported to the marshy country in the
vilayet of Konja and to the Arabian desert region of Der es
Zor near the Euphrates. In similar fashion the men of the
village of Dortjol, on the coast of Cilicia—who had success
fully defended themselves during the massacres in 1909—
were deported to Aleppo to do forced labour on the roads,
on the pretext that there had been some espionage in the
town, which in any case was of trifling importance. The
inhabitants of the village of Suedije, which had also escaped
in the massacres of 1909, were to have been deported like
wise, but made their escape to a cliff on the coast, where they
defended themselves for several weeks with feeble weapons
(even flint-locks !) against a superior force of Turks until
a French warship rescued the whole number—4,058 men,
women, and children. In East Anatolia the Armenians—
mostly women and children, because the men had been tåken
to do military service—were grossly maltreated and expelled,
and the distress and misery among these homeless people
was terrible.
Then came the so-called " rebellion " in Van, which the
Turks have tried to exploit as the best proof of Armenian
treachery. The American and German missionaries who
went through it all have now furnished authentic accounts
of what actually happened. 1 In February 191 5 Jevdet Bey,
Enver’s brother-in-law, who was the vali of Van, declared at
a meeting of Turks that " We have cleared out the Armenians
and Syrians in Azerbaijan, and we must do the same with
the Armenians in Van." On the pretext of making requisi
tions for the army the Armenians were plundered in the most
scandalous fashion, the peasants in the villages being robbed
with brutal violence by Kurds and gendarmes. After some
Cf. J. Lepsius, op. eit., pp. xiii ff., 471 ff., 1919.

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