Armenians In Peril.

New York Times 100 years ago today, June 21, 1913:
Miss Blackwell Urges Their Protection by the Powers.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
    Among the startling changes going on to-day in the Orient many Americans are hoping that something of benefit to the Armenians may come out of the bubbling caldron. Hope is now given to other oppressed peoples. The Armenians have suffered still longer and more severely. Now, while a door of deliverance is opening for others, they are threatened with fresh massacres.
    Disquieting news has come to the Armenian Patriarchate at Constantinople from Van, Moush, Bitlis, Seghert, Diarbekir, Erzingan, and Cilicia. Everywhere the conditions are bad and continuous oppression is reported. Bands of Kurds and Bashibazouks are killing Armenians and plundering and burning Armenian villages. The Turkish Government has lost its prestige, Moslem fanaticism is rising, and everywhere there are threats of a general massacre. In the Province of Van the Kurdish tribes have refused to pay their taxes and are trying to start an independent Kurdish kingdom. With this aim, their chiefs have formed a league, under the protection, it is said, of the Russian Government, in the Caucasus. After settling the Balkan question, it looks as if Turkey would be faced at once by a Kurdish question and a Syrian question. Though for many years the Turkish Government has shown marked favoritism to the wild Kurds, Albanians, and Arabs, inciting them against their Christian neighbors and letting them plunder and kill with impunity, yet now, when the Government is in straits, they are the first to secede and seek independence.
    The Armenians, so long oppressed and so often massacred in the past, rendered their military service faithfully in the last war. But while they were fighting side by side with the Turks, their families were left unprotected, at the mercy of the Kurds; and many Armenian soldiers returned home to find that their sisters or wives had been carried off by Kurds or Turks, and that the Turkish Government had made no effort to prevent it. For generations that Government has shown itself chronically ungrateful, persecuting, torturing, and massacring the most steady and industrious element of the population. The Ottoman Empire has long been sowing the wind. It looks now as though it were about to reap the whirlwind.
    At present Turkey is obliged to listen to the voice of Europe. In the fresh adjustment now being made of the Eastern question, definite provision should be made to improve the condition of the Armenians, and to put them under some efficient European protection.
            ALICE STONE BLACKWELL.
            Dorchester, Mass., June 19, 1913.