STARVATION IN TRIPOLI.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 238, 6 April 1912, Page 2 (Supplement)

STARVATION IN TRIPOLI.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIGHTING

FOR HORSES FOOD.

(By Alan Ostler.) Azizia, January 17,

Famine has followed on the heels of war in the north of the province of Tripoli.

it is famine of the cruellist kind, for its victims are almost all women and children. The adult males of the population are one and all at war with Italy. They draw their rations and receive their ammunition, and even their horses ■must not go short. Food for the soldier and his mount has been doled out by the Turks from the beginning of the war. But Arab women are fighting for the grains that fall from the horses' nosebags, and babies that should be plump and brown are bony and yellow, with skin the hue of dried parchment stretched over rickety frameworks of bones.

This must have been going on for weeks, for the starving people who have come within the last few days to Azizia 'are the mothers and wives and children of the men from that belt of oases that fringes the coast from Zoura eastward nearly to the town of Tripoli itself. News of the Italian massacres of October, and the casual shell-fire from prowling cruisers, which have made a target of every mud-hut visible among the palms, drove these poor wretches from their homes early during the war.

Those in the neighborhood of Zouara I UVING ON LIZARDS, were gathered together by order of Muea Mehemet, the military commander of the district, and housed in the stone fortress in the oasis of Eigdalin, but it seems that hundreds from the scattered villages further east fled in disorganised crowds into the desert, and subsisting on roots and rats and lizards, have made their pitiful war and at last to the new headquarters of the Turkish troops at Azizia.

They did not dare go back to their et tslad aanmk edt othe also cmfwypcm homes because they know that women and children are the special prey of the Christians. Some of them joined their men in the outpost camps, and shared I their dole of rice and bariey. But even here they seem to have starved themselves, lest the men and horses, who are defending their country, should go short. I have said that Aralt women scramble for the barley-grains that fall from the horses' nosebags. Well, that is not meant merely as a figure of speech. It is literally and terribly true. At Senat Beni Adhem, the cavalry outpost near here, I caught a woman doing this very thing during the night, and thought at first she was robbing the horses. She wasn't, poor thing! She was simply gleaning after them, and I found her quite by accident. It happens that mvl own horse is vicious and apt to attack i any stranger who approaches him in his pickets. During the evening I heard him snorting and squealing with temper, and immediately afterwards heard a stifled scream. !

STEALING FOR THE CHILDREN. I ran out of the tent just in time to see a ragged figure pick itself up from under the animal's forefeet, and, on laying hold of it, found it to be an Arab woman, miserably thin, and apparently in pain.

Then I accused ficr of trying to steal barley from the horse's nosebag. She denied it, incoherently, and I meant at first to turn her over to the sentry; but she contrived to make me understand that all she had wanted was to pick up the scattered grains of barley that had fallen on the ground, and that while she was doing it the horse had attacked her and knocked her down.

"What do you want the barley for—to sell it?" I asked her.

"For my children to .eat, Sidi," was the incredible reply. I did not believe her; and when she began to lament the little store of grain which the horse had made her spill, I simply told her to go away, or I would fetch the sentry.

Afterwards, I was sorry. For on the vow lievt (lav T saw n woman crouched on the ground near where some sacks of grain had been, and she was picking up grain by grain with her fingers.

SKELETON WOMEN.

"To whom will you sell it?" I asked. "I shall eat it," she replied. "Surely you cannot live on horse's i food?" I said. And she answered that she and her children had eaten nothing else for many a day. Gradually I found out that even those women who, with their children, have come to hang on the outskirts of the army, are in a "state of half-starvation. They themselves say, "We must eat little, lest our fighting men go short." As for those who wander to and fro in the desert, shelterless, nearly naked, and with bones starting through their skin, how they live on, day after day, only those who know the endurance of the Arab can understand. During the last day or so crowds of them have gathered round the white building which marks the headquarters j here at Azizia.

It was the death of a pack-camel that brought them. Hitherto, save for a few bony children begging for scraps in the market place, and for the furtive shrouded women gleaning the crumbs that fall from the table of our four-footed beasts of burden, the famine stricken wanderers have hidden their misery rather than paraded it.

Perhaps—for even "niggers" have their patriotism, you know—they feel that in the time of their country's struggle for life their own hardships must he borne quietly. Anyhow, it was not until the death of the camel that they flocked in great force to beg for food. The camel, blundering in the nighttime about the courtyard, had snapped its ungainly leg across a waggon wheel. It filled the night with hideous groans, and was killed to put it out of pain. The news spread through the desert hollows, where the fugitive women and children hide, as the news of a camel's death always spreads through the hurgry wastes 'Of Africa.

They flocked to Azizia, a ghastly crew of scarecrows. I saw a baby—it could not have been four years old—with arms and limtw absolutely fleshless, and "cheek bones rising above jaws whose outline was as clearly marked as in a skeleton.

There were withered hags 'of sixteen and seventeen that should have been graceful maidens, and some of them carried on their hacks—the most dreadful sight of all—stunted, lethargic gnomes that might have heen the sun-dried shrivelled bodies of.little apes.

PATIENT SEMI-CIRCLE.

Like the chorus of "The Tragedy of Want," they sat in a patient semi-circle before the archway of the courtyard. They did not need anv pleading other than their looks. The' dead camel was cut up and distributed among them. When the lumps of meat were doled out, what wonder if there was fighting and screaming, and much pitiful trickery to get more than a fair share?

There was a legless, crippled man among them, who raved and shrieked and bit among the trampling feet of the crowd, until at last he was noticed, and his dole of camel-meat was given to him. Tie devoured it raw, eating in the dnst li'ke a starving dog. Since there has been a daily-giving out of food to the starving, and a new responsibility for the brave little Turkish army, the full tale of whose heroism must not he told until the war is over. But it is bitterly hard for the people

of this country that famine should have stricken them at tkis hour. For five years times have been hard and harvests bad. Things seemed to promise good crops for once las* autumn. Then came the war, and instead of prosperity, starvation.

It is too late now to hope that England or any other Power, will intervene to save Tripoli from Italy. In the circumstaneea of modern civilisation, it appears that humane feeling and (dare I add?) the teachings of Jesus Christ, must be sacrificed to international policy.

But if our wise and cautious statesmen cannot afford to offend a Power to whom England is bound by common ties of Christianity and civilisation, there is *o reason why English men and woman who may choose to do so should not help these starving women end children.^