ARMENIA.

Taranaki Daily News, 29 November 1915, Page 5

ARMENIA.

CRIMES UNSPEAKABLE. LORD BRYCE'S REPORT. THE WORK OF DEVILS. Received Nov. 28, 5.5 p.m. London, Nov. 27. Lord Bryce, in a letter to the newspapers, says that the latest evidence of the atrocities in northern and eastern Anatolia confirms the dreadful certainty of a horrible story. The civilised world is powerless to intervene at present, but it must bear these unspeakable crimes In constant memory against the final day of reckoning. A careful estimate of the loss of life up to August 15 is .over half a million. The Turkish police are constantly using whips and clubs, and many women are black and blue from their usage. A correspondent at Tiflis states that "at Djakova they expelled the van, and many fled southward. Eight thousand aoldiers, whom he called "butcher battalions," massacred most of the Christians at lairt, ordering the soldiers to burn two Armenian bishops in the public square. FEARFUL TORTURES. The Turks at Mush (a town on the Euphrates, 80 miles s.e. of Erzerum, of 30,000 inhabitants), early in July, disarmed the Armenians. In order to secure large ransoms, notables of the town and the headmen of the villages were subjected to revolting tortures. Their finger nail 3 and then their toe nails were forcibly extracted, and their teeth knocked out. In some cases their noses were whittled, the victims dying in lingering agonies. The Armenians at Mush then entrenched themselves in churches and stonebuilt houses and fought for four days, but the Turkish artillery, manned by German officers, broke down the positions and every man was killed. WOMEN AND CHILDREN ROASTED. The Moslems' rabble then descended upon the Amenian women and children and drove them into large camps. A ghastly scene, almost incredible, but eonfirmed beyond doubt, followed. The Turks fired large wooden sheds in Aliejan, Mosgrakom, Uhaskegh, and other villages, roasting the helpless women and children to death. Many of the women threw their children away, while some knelt down and prayed amid the flames. Others shrieked for help, but the executioners wero unmoved, and in unparalleled -savagery grasped infants by one leg and hurled them into the fire, calling out to the burning mothers, "Here are your cubs." A WHOLESALE MASSACRE. Thirty thousand Turks and Kurds surrounded fifteen hundred Armenians in the hill country near Sahun. The mountaineers put up a desperate struggle. Men, women, and children fought with knives and scythes, and rolled blocks of stone down the steep slopes. During the final hand-to-hand combat women were seen thrusting knives into the throats of the Turks and when every man was killed several young women, some with infants in their arms, threw themselves from the rocks to avoid capture.