ABDUL THE DAMNED’S REIGN OF TERROR

Manawatu Times, Volume 65, Issue 4, 5 January 1940, Page 4

ABDUL THE DAMNED’S REIGN OF TERROR

Mass Murder in the Harem

Recent dredging in the Bosphorus of the rule of Abdul the Damned. dredged deep in the Golden Horn last November, and when the work was finished those Turkish workers held in their trembling hands the hideous secret of a long unsolved mystery, Seventeen leather -sacks, heavily weighted, and inside each the skeleton of a young woman, her arms end legs seeured with great chains. Who were they? Who could they have been but members of the harem of Abdul Hamid .—“Abdul the Damned”? It was an old Turkish custom. Thirty years ago those seventeen young ‘ and lovely girls were alive when they were thrown screaming into the Bosphorus. Thirty years ago. . , . He was one of the most sinister and incredible men of modern times, this man who exterminated a nation, ruled for thirty-three years by unbelievable tyranny, bloodshed and cruelty, and finally, broken, reviled and spat upon, died miserably in a prison pell in 1918. Abdul Hamid, Sultan of Turkey, was not a pretty figure. Neither physically nor morally. In his appearance, ho was hardly kingly. Tall, pale, emaciated, with hollow sunken eyes above a fierce hooked nose, he suggested an oily old satyr, who filled even hi? courtiers and hirelings with loathing and disgust. They called him “Red Vulture’ behind his back. During his long and bloddy reign, intrigue and sensuality ascended to heights never surpassed and seldom, equalled. All Turkey, at the turn of the nineteenth century, groaned under his oppression; everywhere there were dark whispers, plotting and con* spiracies—every one of which was speedily uncovered by his unfaltering spy system. Official records reveal that he maintained an army of 20,000 spies, who watched everyone who had a part in the struggle for freedom. They watched and then struck—usually with a knife in the back. To increase his wealth he jrffered the extermination of the Armenian nation, 3,000,000 individuals, and it was almost carried out. And while all this was going on, while Turkey seethed and rumbled, leaders of the liberal parties were murdered or thrown into prison, and the helpless Armenians Hamid revelled day and night in his innumerable palaces dotting the were put to the sword, Sultan Abdul Bosphorus. No Nero or ancient Babylonian monarch carried debauchery to a greater height. Abdul Hamid turned it almost into a fine art. His wives were without limit; “countless as the sands of : the desert,” he once confided, but that was not all. Every province, every corner ot the Near East, was scoured for new and fairer women. Women from Turkestan, women from Arabia, women from Cyprus, women from Thessaly, women from Egypt, women from the Caucasus poured into his harem. And the shadow of this “Red Vulture,” dreaded and cursed, but still worshipped by the many millions of Mohammedans, was Achmed Bey, the Caliph’s executioner, He had his abode in the Island of Midia, opposite Brussa, and all alone, he lived there in Oriental luxury in a rapturously scented garden. pi the daytime, as the island bathed like a flower in the sparkling sunshine. Achmed lived the life of a prince, but with night he changed his garb to black, and in his black and white striped bark he paddled over to the Besik-Tas bridge, where he had to wait for the day’s cargo from the palace. And the cargo was made up of leather sacks, sometimes only ten or twenty, som'etimes as many as a hundred, and in each, sewn into it, was jl living man or woman. It was Achmed Bey’s sacred privilege to throw them into the steel-grey waters of the Bosphorus, Baron Vladimir Giesl, the AustroHungarian Ambassador to Turkey during the first decade of the twentieth century, wrote in his memoirs: “The night was chokingly hot, and

irought to light gruesome reminders ?he following story is from “Parade.” t© get some fresh air, I went strolling on the Besik-Tas bridge. It was midnight, and I saw standing all alone at the bridge-head Achmed Bey. I had met him once already at an official function in the Yildiz, so I started to talk with him. Suddenly ten oxcarts drew lip at the bridge-head. They were all laden with heavy leather sacks, and as Achmed Bey let them slip into the sea, one after the other, I counted how many there were. “And I did count more than a hundred. It was a plentiful day’s harvest, “Asking Achmed Bey what, were in the sacks, he told me with a diabolic grin: ‘Men and women who were superfluous. But I am telling this only

to you, Ambassador. If any other white man asked, I would say, scrapiron!’ ” That was life in the Turkey of Abdul Hamid, at the beginning of this century. With a new age dawning, no wonder the ground began to rumbl* in Turkey, too. The first feeble murmurs 1 grew into desperate outbursts The hostility to Abdul Hamid’s cruel rule and corruption began to coalesce; out of the many separatist movements, all desiring something different, but all agreeing in one common hatred of the Sultan, came the emergence of the Young Turks. They were young men, idealists with a Western outlook, but they, too, when the occasion warranted, could adopt the time-honoured weapons of the East. The famous “eyes and ear* of the Sultan” were of little use, for too Young Turks spied on the spies, whom they quickly dispatched. Abdul Hamid was now aging rapidly; time and his endless sensuality began to weigh on his physical and mental powers. His vaat spiderweb began to disintegrate. The news from Istanbul, telling the story pf the gruesome November find in the waters of the Golden Horn, speaks of seventeen young women, sewn in leather sack* and drowned thirty years ago. So it isn’t hard to guess the tale behind the news.