Armenian Massacre of 1894-1895

Jean Longuet

Overshadowing all other events of 1895 was the decrepit and infamous Turkish government's methodical massacre of the Armenian element of its people — an appalling course of wholesale murder, rapine, and destruction — prosecuted in security owing to the disgraceful deadlock in the international politics of Europe. The year 1894 closed with the world slowly waking to a realizing sense of the horrors that had been going on in the plains and mountains of Armenia, far removed from the ordinary viewpoints whence Europe looks for signs of danger. With the opening of 1895 came tidings that forced open the eyes of sleeping Europe to see that the Eastern Question would not down. 

Details were received early in January 1895 of terrible massacres in the district of Sassoun, where forty villages were destroyed and sixteen thousand persons, first accounts said, perished in the massacres, in which Turkish regulars participated. This latter circumstance was the more important because of the charitable interpretation put upon the previous atrocities by some commentators that they were the work of wild Kurds whom the Turkish government was too weak to restrain.

Massacre followed massacre in terrible succession; at Egin, January 2, at Harzan, February 12, and at Kara-Hissar, in March. In these slaughters hundreds, if not thousands, perished, and a long trail of desolation was left in provinces whose inhabitants were guilty of no crime, unless professing the Christian faith be such. There was a pause in the atrocities that lasted for so many weeks that Europe began to think that the Armenian question could be brushed aside as something whose interest had died under Turkish swords. In August the work of massacre was resumed, and at Posekan and Segurkan, near Tiflis, on the 14th of that month, the Kurds, ever foremost in rapine, whether acting on their own inclination or incited by higher authorities, worked their cruel will on the unarmed villagers. Several hundreds of Armenians were killed or plundered. 

September 27 the Moslem fanaticism which had inspired the massacres in Armenia manifested itself in Syria, and ten persons were killed and many wounded in a Christian church in Antioch. September 30 Constantinople itself became the scene of fierce fighting, which raged for several days. The Armenians of the city attempted to present a petition for redress of grievances to the sultan. The procession of petitioners was attacked by Softas, or Mohammedan students, and later by the police, and more than two hundred were killed. These scenes went on until the remonstrances of the foreign ambassadors procured a cessation of them.

Massacres at Sivas, Van, and Bitlis, in Armenia, followed the signal set at Constantinople, while four hundred Armenians perished at Trebizond on the 9th of October. Throughout Armenia October was a month of blood and horrors. Late in the month the people of the district of Zeitoun, a race of hardy mouutaineers who had managed to save arms or to procure them, rose in revolt against the Turks, and Turkish troops were sent against them. The Armenians generally were without arms, having been disarmed long previous even to the earlier massacres of 1893, atrocities of which the world heard little, and which have been dwarfed into insignificance by the slaughter of 1895.

Early in November 1895 it was estimated that in the series of massacres that immediately followed the outbreak in Constantinople not less than 10,000 Armenians perished, 1,500 at Balboort alone. All through November 1895 Turkish cruelty raged, and it is said that at Trebizoud, December 12, a second massacre took place, and that the Armenian bishop and five other ecclesiastics were burned alive. The Anglo-Armenian Association stated, on November 18, that 100,000 Armenians were then dying of starvation.

Jean Longuet 1903