12 Jul 1915: Turks are Evicting Native Christians, New York Times

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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 trav-
elers coming from Turkey have given
such eyewitness accounts of the treat-
ment of the Christian population as
fully bear out the 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 sum-
marily 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 their Turkish neighbours or by im-
migrants 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 dirven off to die in the desert near
Konia or to Upper Mesopotamia or the
Iberian dessert. These fiigures do not in-
clude 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 massa-
cred. Apart from the hundred and
eighty thousand who last year were
driven out of their homes in Thrace
and the vilayet of Smyrna, a still great-
er number, since Turkey became in-
volved in the war, have been and are
still being dragged from their villages
throughout 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 thousands 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 [Brusa]
and this wholesale uprooting of the na-
tive 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 be-
ing kidnapped by the wholesale along
the route of those wretched exiles, to be
brought up as Moslems, and girls are
given in so-called marriages 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.