Published in the "Dunstable Borough Gazette", March 10, 1897

"This excerpt concentrates on the Armenian massacres. If you wish to read the full article, please click ‘HERE’ to download a PDF version."

n Monday evening there was a crowded attendance at the lecture hall of the Luton Liberal Club, where MR G.W.E. RUSSELL delivered an impassioned and eloquent address upon the Cretan crisis. Mr H.C. Middle occupied the chair, and there were also on the platform, the Deputy-Mayor (Mr B Oakley), Mr B Blundell, Mr H Warren, Mr T Cain, MR H. Rayner, Mr D Moon, and others. A number of prominent Dunstablians were amongst the large audience.

.......about three years ago Englishmen began to be dimly aware that things were going on in the East [Turkey] in their old bad course, and that the prophesies that were made twenty years ago to the effect that the Sultan could not be trusted were being fulfilled. Then there happened that which always happens when any tale of injustice, wrong, or tyranny comes to our knowledge from a foreign country; they were told it was all newspaper lies, (laughter), travellers tales, and that the Turk was not such a bad creature after all; and that the Armenians were a sorry lot, and that the Turk was only exercising the severity which England would use to any of her subjects who chose to become rebels and traitors; that all talk to the contrary was mere sentimentalism and hysterical romantic what-not those who had read the newspapers during the last two years knew well enough how to pile up that sort of trash (applause). It was greatly to the discredit of the Government - a discredit shared also by the Foreign Secretary of the last Liberal Government - that all official information on the question was withheld, although he would not say that it was withheld from a bad motive. He had had opportunities of discussing that matter with those who had withheld the official information, and it was their conscientious opinion that if the Consular Reports which they received from week to week were made known there would have been such an outburst of horror that the English people would have insisted upon at once on going to war with the Sultan (loud cheers). Whether that would have so he would not undertake to say, but that was the motive that led them to withhold the information. But at last the truth had come out (loud cheers), in black and white printed reports sent by the Consuls as a matter of official business to the English Foreign Office and submitted to Parliament, and then it appeared that instead of being exaggerated the tenth part of the truth had not been told. He was extremely averse to reading long quotations while speaking in public but there were cases when, to make extracts from what one read would lay oneself open to the charge of perverting the truth, and in those cases it was the duty of the public speaker to read the whole unabridged quotation.

Mr Russell proceeded to read several long reports from the British Consuls giving harrowing details of Armenian massacres and atrocities. The first report giving an account of the Sassoun massacres, which commenced in August 1894 stated that altogether 25 villages had been destroyed. The Turkish troops had showed themselves in the district saying they were there to protect the villagers. The villagers let them lodge with them for the night in the villages and during the night the troops arose slaughtered all the people, men, women and children. In another place a large number of leading men, headed by the priest, went out to meet the Turkish commanding officer, taking their taxes in their hands as proof of their loyalty and begging for mercy, they were surrounded and killed to a man. A number of young men! were seized, bound hand and foot, laid out in a row, had brushwood piled upon them and were burnt to death. The people of another village had fled to a secret grotto, where they remained until the weaker died of hunger. The remainder were later discovered by the Turkish soldiers and put to the bayonet. Sixty young women and girls were driven into a church, and then the soldiers were ordered to do as they liked with them and afterwards kill them. Some of the prettier women were invited to accept Islam and marry Turks; they refused and were killed. Many of the terrified inhabitants hid themselves in deep wells and when they were discovered, the soldiers fired down upon them, then getting tired of that means of extermination they saturated matting with kerosene and ignited it, then threw it down the wells. Ripping open women and tearing children to pieces by main force were among the barbarities recorded. A letter from Sir P. Currie, the British Ambassador at Constantinople, at a moderate estimate put the total loss of life at 30,000, and stated the survivors were in a state of absolute destitution.
 

Soon after the perpetration of these outrages, the German Emperor caused his portrait to be painted and presented as a complimentary gift to the Sultan (hisses and groans). But the worst was yet to come, and in August last there were 5000 others murdered, not in the outlying districts and villages, but in Constantinople, and for that bloody massacre six of the resident ambassadors had put their names to a declaration that the Sultan himself was responsible (loud hisses). He (Mr Russell) had told them these things to make it absolutely clear about the state of affairs by giving them not his own words, but the language of official memoranda forwarded to the Foreign Office, the condition of horror to which, by his infamous tyranny the Turk had reduced his Christian subjects in the East. That was not a matter of party politics; it was a matter in which all Liberals, humanitarians, and Christians no two ways of duty (applause). They all know what has recently happened in Crete, how there they rose in self-defence in a way that did not seem to have been in the power of the poor Armenians........

Compilation copyright
James Kennedy