The Young Turks and the truth about the holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor

[notjustarmenian]

The Young Turks and the truth about the holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor during April, 1909:

[Joseph]

http://www.armeniapedia.org/images/1/1f/183adana.gif

[Joseph]

http://www.ourararat.com/eng/e_adana.htm

[Joseph]

New York Times: July 11, 1915

TURKS ARE EVICTING NATIVE CHRISTIANS

Greeks and Armenians Driven From Homes and Converted by the Sword, Assert Americans.

Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES

ATHENS, July 11. (Dispatch to the London Morning Post) - American travelers coming from Turkey have given such eyewitness accounts of the treatment of the Christian population as fully bear out reports received here from native sources to the effect that the Christians in the Ottoman Empire have never been in such stress and peril since the Turk first invaded the Byzantine Empire.

Both Armenians and Greeks, the two native Christian races of Turkey, are being systematically uprooted from their homes en masse and driven forth summarily to distant provinces, where they are scattered in small groups among Turkish Villages and given the choice between immediate acceptance of Islam or death by the sword or starvation. Their homes and property meanwhile are being immediately taken possession of by immigrants from Macedonia.

Throughout the vilayets of Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Diarbekir, Harput, Sivas, and Adana the Armenians have been pitilessly evicted by tens of thousands and driven off to die in the desert near Konia or to Upper Mesopotamia or the Iberian desert. These figures do not include thousands massacred by the Kurds or hanged without trial by the Turkish authorities all over Armenia.

The Greeks are faring little better, except that they are not being massacred. Apart from the hundred and eighty thousand who last year were driven out of their homes in Thrace and Asia Minor and deported to purely Turkish districts without being allowed to take with them more than clothes on their backs. Fifty-six thousand thus have been evicted from the Gallipoli Peninsula and both shores of the Dardanelles, fifteen thousand from Pinkipo Islands, forty-two thousand from Thrace up to the suburbs of Constantinople, nineteen thousand from Ismid Province, sixty thousand from the vilayet of Bremussa and this wholesale uprooting of the native population is increasing in extent and ferocity.

Able-bodied men are being drafted into the Turkish Army, and the rest broken up into little groups and distributed among Turkish villages of Asia Minor, care being taken to break up families and separate women and girls from their friends and relatives. Children are being kidnapped by the wholesale along the route of those wretched exiles, to be brought up as Moslems, and girls are given in so-called marriage to Turkish peasants.

The remaining adults have to choose between death and apostasy.

It is safe to say that unless Turkey is beaten to its knees very speedily there will soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman Empire.