Page 27 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 65

annals of mankind. For surely it is true that never before have
nearly a million human beings been mercilessly slaughtered
wholesale at one time.

Take, for instance, some fragment of a letter sent by four mem-
bers of the German Missions Sta? in Turkey to the Minister of
Foreign A?airs at Berlin, asking “if it is really beyond the power
of the German Government to mitigate the brutality of the
treatment which the exiled women and children of the massacred
Armenians are receiving. In face of the scenes of horror which are
being unfolded daily before our eyes in the neighbourhood of our
school our educational activity becomes a mockery of humanity.”
“Out of 2,000 to 3,000 peasant women from the Armenian Pla-
teau who were brought here in good health, only forty or ?fty
skeletons are left”: emaciated living skeletons, the writers mean,
while “Europeans are forbidden to distribute bread to the starv-
ing.” “The German scutcheon is in danger of being smirched for
ever in the memory of the Near Eastern peoples.” “The responsi-
ble authorities fear the light, but have no intention of putting an
end to scenes which are a disgrace to humanity.”

Now the Turks themselves do not deny the facts. Indeed, they
attempt to justify them. And the attempted justi?cation is: ?rst,
that the Armenians took up arms and joined the Russians; sec-
ondly, that there was a general conspiracy of Armenians through-
out the empire to bring about an in internal revolution, at the
very moment when all the Ottoman military forces were engaged
on the frontiers, and so deliver the country into the hands of the
Allies; thirdly, it was a justi?able act of retaliation and revenge.

These three contentions are all denied by competent witnesses.
But even if they were all true they can never justify the wholesale
extermination indiscriminately of the guilty and innocent in cir-
cumstances of unutterable barbarity.

And if it were possible to make things worse, here is what a Turk-
ish leader openly contended. “He laid all the fault of it on the
ancestors of the modern Turks, who, in spite of their being victo-
rious and defying all Europe – nay, all the world – had not been
far-sighted enough to cleanse all the country they ruled of the

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