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Newspaper Page Text
THE INDIAN ADVOCATE 377 ' y u people of Constaatinople. As a result of their campaign many representatives of the Liberal Party were murdered: officers in the array, deputies in Parliament and notable members of the Union and Progress Committee. At the same time broke up the massacres in Adana, which city contained a large Ar menian population. The details of those bloody attacks wherein thousands of Christians lost their lives show an im mediate connection with what took place at Constantinople. The warmest sympathizers with the Union and Progress move ment were the Armenians, who, being more numerous in A dana, and further enthused since July 21 '08 by some high spirited Protestant missionaries, openly challenged the Mu sulmans and thus afforded a pretext for reprisals. It was an easy matter for Musulmans to let the weight of responsibilities fall back on their ruthlessly murdered victims. But how could such a concurrence be explained which brought hordes of fanatic Kurds in Adana on that very day when a war of extermination was declared against Union and Progress sympathizers in Constantinople, unless the order in either case came from Yildiz Kiosk? It is now certain that not only Armenians but all the Christians in Asiatic Turkey were to have been slaughtered or expelled, had the old Turks been successful in crushing the liberal Party. To carry on this desperate struggle and revive his despotic regime Abdul Ha mid relied on the rivalry of European nations ever ready to turn a deaf ear to the cries of persecuted Christians except so far as they could secure for themselves pecuniary advantages. For the past thirty years the Oriental question seems to have been, not whether Christianity had suffered at the hands of the Turks, but rather what European power was going to obtain the greatest commercial concessions. Christians in Asia Minor may well ask themselves whether it was not as a price for the impunity allowed to their persecutors that Western nations have been so successful in obtaining railroad, mining and many other concessions, the clearest profit of which went to further the financial development of private companies from Paris, London and Berlin. Among the numberless valuable papers lately discovered in the secret vaults at Yildiz were fifteen thousand shares which Abdul Hatnid held in the Bag-