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ARMENIA IN MODERN TIMES 289
show his loyalty to the Government by first killing the
Christians who have lived on terms of friendship with him."
Everything worked with the most satisfactory precision.
The orders wrere sent out by the general commanding in
Anatolia from his headquarters at Erzinjan. " The work "
began on a prearranged signal by trumpet-call, and ceased
on another fixed signal being given. The discipline was
everywhere so good that even during the wildest orgies of
wholesale murder extreme care was tåken to avoid killing
any foreigners, for that, the Sultan knew, might be serious,
and really bring about the intervention of the Powers.
According to the information collected by all the embassies
in Constantinople and sent to the Sultan on February 4, 1896,
from 70,000 to 90,000 people were massacred between August
1895 and February 1896, while many more died of starvation
and destitution. After the massacres many of the Christians
were forced to become converts to Islam, and there were
public circumcisions, although thousands preferred to die
rather than give up their faith, and whole villages which had
been allowed time to think the matter over went to death
headed by their priests. Thousands of refugees escaped
over the frontiers to Persian and Caucasian towns ; numbers
of them assembled in camps around Echmiadzin, where the
splendid Katholikos Mekertich Khrimean looked after them,
assisted by townspeople and peasants. He it was who had
helped the patriarch Nerses to plead the Armenian cause at
the Berlin Conference in 1878, and had got the all-important
paragraph 61 adopted. And now he saw his people massacred
and scattered, betrayed by the Christian Powers of Europe
in whom he and his people had put their faith.
The many warm-hearted friends of Armenia sent help to
ameliorate the suffering ; but even now the Governments of
Europe did nothing to speak of. Great Britain apparently
would have done something, but stood alone, for there was
trouble with the French about Africa, and France’s hands
were tied by the alliance with Russia. While Armenian blood
was being poured out in streams, Rostovski, the Russian
Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared that Russia would on no
account use force against Turkey, and that the Tsar would
T
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