Fact #240, 125 days to go: Days of Tragedy in Armenia - Personal experiences in Harpoot, 1915-1917 By Henry H. Riggs The Martyr Host The energy of the police in seeking out the able-bodied men among the Harpoot Armenians was rewarded by a large number of men herded into the prisons in Harpoot and Mezireh. No explanation was given of this action, which was absolutely contrary to the solemn assurances of the Vali. He had definitely promised that not one man should be sent away without his family, but that all should be released so that they might help their families on the journey. The police, on the contrary, set themselves to the task of seeing to it that not one man should be allowed to travel with his family. As soon as the Mezireh prison was full to capacity of these men-none of whom, it should be remembered, had had any form of trial, nor even an accusation of any sort- it was necessary to empty it. Suddenly, without warning and without giving the men any opportunity to prepare for the journey, the men were started out into exile. There were eight hundred men in prison at that time, and they included the choicest of the Armenians of Harpoot and vicinity. Bound, with their hands tied behind them, and many of them roped together in bunches of three or four, they were hurried out of the prison early one morning and marched along the road toward Malatia. They followed the highway for about ten miles, and then were turned off toward the right, and marched up into the mountains. Soon after passing the crest of the ridge, they were marched down into a deep ravine, where they were ordered to sit on the ground. When they were all seated, bound as they were, their guards, with their rifles and bayonets, fell upon them and commenced a butchery that the imagination refuses to picture. So huge was the task of slaughter that three or four men succeeded in escaping from the ravine while the gendarmes were busy with the horrid labor. These fugitives scattered and hid, but were pursued and hunted out by the relentless guards, who found and butchered them in their hiding places only one escaping, so far as known. This young man, whose name I dare not reveal as he is still living in Turkey, succeeded in evading his pursuers and hiding till nightfall. Then he started out to try to return to some place of safety but lost his way in the dark and wandered all night long, not knowing which way he was going. At last, as dawn began to break, he found his bearings again, and in the gray light, stole in to the American hospital and to safety. He it was, who brought the first authentic report of the fate of the eight hundred. He could not explain how he had escaped from that charnel house. He suddenly found himself free and ran for his life. He thought that a bullet must have cut the rope with which he was tied, though it is of course conceivable that the sudden terror gave him the supernatural strength to snap the ropes in two. The horror of the experience had almost unhinged his mind. The sudden onslaught of the gendarmes, the shots and blows, the sight of his companions dropping in death agony, and their screams and struggles, all made a picture that he could not recall without breaking down. He was barefoot and footsore when he arrived and thought he must have been obliged to take off his shoes before the massacre began-a bit of fiendish forethought on the part of the butchers! Though his story was so confused, there is no reason to doubt its incredible details, for not only was he himself a young man of unimpeachable integrity, but the details of the horrid story were fully verified by the testimony of Kurds who had seen some of the other fugitives before they were overtaken and butchered by the pursuing gendarmes. Not one of those seven hundred and ninety-nine was ever heard of again. A few days after this party of eight hundred had met their fate, renewed activity on the part of the police filled the prisons again. This time old men and young boys were not spared as they had been at first. It was a day of horror when these survivors, infirm old men, cripples, and bedridden young boys in their early teens, gathered in by the vigor of the police, were marched off down the hill to the prison in Mezireh, whence the others had been sent out to death. I watched from my window as the party marched by, two or three hundred men and boys, tied as were the others, and guarded by fifty gendarmes, each with his rifle and fixed bayonet. The men marched along as briskly as they could under the circumstances, though many among them were so infirm that they could hardly keep up the pace that the gendarmes demanded. Near the head of the column, at the right hand side, staggered an old man, evidently too weak to walk. He was one of my dearest friends, a man of rare character, one of the noblest and sweetest Christian gentlemen whom it has been my privilege to know. A man universally respected and loved, who during his long life had made many most devoted friends among Moslems as well as Christians. He had been sick in bed for some time, quite unfit to be on his feet, but when the police visited his [house] to arrest him, they showed absolutely no mercy, and he was dragged from his bed and forced to walk to the prison. And that day, as he staggered along, I saw the gendarme prodding him with his bayonet to make his walk more briskly, till, in his feebleness, the old gentleman tottered out of line and nearly fell. I saw his brutal driver strike him with butt of his rifle, to strike him back into line. So beaten and terrorized, these men and boys, many of them refined and educated gentlemen, all of them altogether innocent of any suspicion of crime, not even a pretense of an accusation having been brought against any one of them, were driven along like sheep to the slaughter. #ArmenianGenocide #100yearsofdenial #RecognizeGenocide #Turkeyfailed #Obamafailed #Countdown #365facts #Armenian #ReturnChurches #ReturnLands
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 06:44:02 +0000
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