Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 7

peaceful
Christian people, and it was against them that Abdul Hamid directed
the policy which he had tested in Europe. The instruments he employed
to put it in force were the Kurds, a turbulent shepherd race marching
with and mixed up among the Armenians. By this means he had the
excuse ready that these massacres were local disturbances among
remote and insubordinate tribes, one of whom, however, the Kurds, he
armed with modern rifles and caused to be instructed in some
elementary military training. Their task was to murder Armenians, their
pay was the privilege to rape their girls and their women, and to rob the
houses of the men they had killed. The Armenians resisted with at first
some small success, upon which Abdul Hamid reinforced the Kurds
with regular troops, and caused it to be proclaimed that this was a war
of Moslems against the infidel, a Holy War. Moslem fanaticism, ever
smouldering and ready to burst into flames, blazed high, and a fury of
massacres broke forth against all Armenians, east and west, north and
south. The streets of Constantinople ran with their blood, and before
Abdul Hamid was obliged by foreign civilised Powers to stop those
holocausts, he had so decimated the race that not for at least a
generation would they conceivably be a menace again even to that
zealous guardian of the supremacy in its own dominions of the
Ottoman power. Very unwillingly, when obliged to do so, he whistled
off his bands of Kurds, and dismissed them: unwillingly, too, he gave
orders that the Armenian hunts which had so pleasantly diverted the
sportsmen of Constantinople, must be abandoned: then was decreed a
'close time' for Armenians, the shooting season was over. There is no
exaggeration in this: eye-witnesses have recorded how at the close of
the business day in Constantinople, shooting parties used literally to go
out, and beat the coverts of tenement houses for Armenians, of whom
there were at that time in Constantinople some 150,000. But when
Abdul Hamid had finished his sport, I do not think more than 80,000 at
the most survived. These were saved by the protests of Europe, and
perhaps by the knowledge that if all the Armenians were killed, there

could never be any more shooting. The Kurds also had lost a
considerable number of men, and that was far from displeasing to the
yellow-faced butcher of Yildiz. A little blood-letting among those
turbulent Kurds was not at all a bad thing.
Here, then, we see defined and at work the new Ottoman policy with
regard to its peoples. Hitherto, it had been sufficient to take from them
its fill of man-power, and leave the tribe in question to its own devices.
There was no objection whatever to its developing the resources of its
territory, to its increasing in prosperity and in population. Indeed the
central Power was quite pleased that it should do so, for when next the
gathering of taxes and youths came round the collectors would find a
creditable harvest awaiting them. Such a tribe received no
encouragement or help from the Government; that would have been too
much to expect, but as long as it kept quiet and obedient it might,
without interference, prosper as well as it could. But now, in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, all that was changed; instead of a
policy of neglect there was substituted a policy of murder. The state no
longer considered itself secure when in various parts of its dominions
its subjects showed themselves progressive and industrious. They had
to be kept down, and clearly the most efficient way of keeping people
down was killing them. Let it not be supposed for a moment that either
the first massacre, or any that followed, was the result of local
disturbances and fanaticism. It was nothing of the sort: each was
arranged and planned at Constantinople, as the official means, invented
by the arch-butcher, Abdul Hamid, of maintaining in power the most
devilish despotism that has ever disgraced the world. Something had to
be done to prevent the alien tribes in Asia slipping out of the noose of
Ottoman strangulation, even as the European tribes had done, and
forming themselves into separate and independent states. A ruler with
progressive ideas, one who had any perception of the internal
prosperity which alone can render an empire stable, would have made
the attempt to weld his loose and wavering domination together by
encouraging and working for the prosperity of its component peoples,
so that he might, though late in the day, give birth to a Turkey that was
strong, because its citizens were prosperous and content. Not so did
Abdul Hamid; the Turkey that he sought to establish was merely to be

strong because he had battered into