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Daily Express, 26 februari 1917
Bron: UKPressOnline
A Race Exterminated
ONLY 600,000 ARMENIANS LEFT OUT OF 1,800,000
The following message has been sent by Mr Balfour to the American Committee for Armenian Relief, and is placed at the disposal of the Press:—
The sufferings of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire are known, but it is doubtful if their true horror is realised.
Of the 1,800.000 Armenians who were in the Ottoman Empire two years ago 1,200,000 have been either massacred or deported. Those who were massacred died under abominable tortures but they escaped the longer agonies of the “deported”. Men, women, and children, without food or other provision for the journey, without protection from the climate, regardless of age or weakness or disease were driven from their homes and made to march as long as their strength lasted, or until those who drove them drowned or massacred them in batches.
Some died of exhaustion or fell by the way: some survived a journey of three months, and reached the desert and swamps along the middle Euphrates. There they have been abandoned, and are dying now of starvation, disease, and exposure. A recent report tells of a group of survivors at Abu Horrera mostly women, children, and a few old men, who had been without food for seven days.
A miserable remnant of the race left behind in the Ottoman Empire were plundered and oppressed: women and children were forcibly converted to Mahometanism. Some few less than one-tenth of the Armenians who were in the Ottoman Empire in April 1915, after sufferings and privations which caused a high mortality, fled across the frontier to Caucasia or Egypt.
This bare recital of facts reveals the hideous cruelty of which they have been the victims; no words are needed to colour or to heighten the description.
