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TURKEY : THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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NUMBER DONE TO DEATH

    HOW many were massacred in Smyrna and its dependent towns and villages! It is impossible to make any estimate at all accurate, but the efforts to minimize the number must at first glance fail of credence.

    Official statistics give the Armenian inhabitants of Smyrna as twenty-five thousand and it is certain that the larger part of the men of this community were killed, besides many women and girls, also numerous Greeks. A dispatch to the "London Daily Chronicle" of September 18, 1922, says: "The lowest estimate of lives lost given by the refugees, places the total at one hundred and twenty thousand."

    Reuter’s Agency, in a dispatch of the same date, makes the following statement: "From none of the accounts is it possible to give the exact figures of the victims, but it is feared that in any case they will be over one hundred thousand."

    Mr. Roy Treloar, newspaper correspondent, wired as follows (September 20, 1922): "Nureddin Pasha commenced a systematic hunting down of Armenians, who were gathered in batches of one hundred, taken to the -Konak and murdered."

    The "London Times" correspondent telegraphed:

    "The killing was carried out systematically. Turkish regulars and irregulars are described as rounding up likely wealthy people in the streets and, after stripping them, killing them in batches. Many Christians who had taken refuge in the churches were burned to death in the buildings which had been set on fire."

    Mr. Otis Swift, correspondent of the "Chicago Tribune", visited the Greek islands on which refugees had been dumped by the rescue steamers and saw many of the victims of the tragedy, whose stories and the nature of whose wounds bore additional testimony to the ferocity of the Turks. Here is a short quotation from Mr. Swift’s report:

    "Hospitals of the Greek islands are crowded by people who had been beaten and attacked by the Turks. In a hospital at Chios I saw a child who still lived, although shot through the face by a soldier who had killed its father and violated its mother. In the same hospital there was a family of six orphan Armenians. A four-year-old baby of this family had been beaten with rifle butts because no money had been found sewn in its clothes."

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