Turks Torture Greek Refugees
The Los Angeles Times, December 31st 1922, page II9.
TURKS TORTURE GREEK REFUGEES
Frightful Situation Faced by Deportees
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American Relief Bright Spot in Scd Land
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Informant Tells of Massacre Where 4000 Fell
Pestilence, suicide and starvation are assailing the hundreds of thousands of Christian refugees from Asia Minor, others, still less fortunate, suffer the tortures of the Turk, while the few American relief workers wait, and pray that aid may come to them from the European delegates at the Lausanne conference, according to advices reaching Near East Relief executives in Los Angeles.
After weary tramping over sun-baked plains, eluding wholesale massacres, and nearly famishing, thousands of Greeks and Armenians daily are pouring into Grecian ports, there to find conditions unspeakable in disease and misery. Ships weighed down with loads of fleeing Christians ply between Eastern Europe ports and Turkish lands, flooding the camps with more mouths to feed, more bodies to clothe and more diseases to combat.
MILLION NEED HELP
The lives of nearly a million people depend upon the speed with which mercy-laden vessels from America cross the Atlantic. The coming winter, unless help is rushed, will drive from the world’s memory the pestilence of the war-sick Balkans and the catastrophe of Smyrna, to judge by the warnings flashed from the camps.
In Asia Minor there are still hosts of Christians striving to escape from their own lands and the overlordship of the Turk. Their experiences caused one American worker, who refuses to give out his name through fear of the Angora Government, to declare that there is being put in force a systematic extermination of the Christian races, orders to the effect having been given by the ruling Turks.
In a letter to Prof. Samuel Anderson, lecturer for the Near East Relief, this man, an American educator in Constantinople, relates the massacre of 4000 Armenians, the prosperous residents of a little city in the interior. Men, women and children, the entire colony was assembled one day for deportation to the seaboard. Turkish troops lined them up and they were marched into a little valley two miles from the town. There they were held under guard, while officers and troopers went down the quivering lines murdering the Christians with slashes from heavy swords. The entire 4000 were massacred.
TERRIBLE CONDITIONS
The same informant recites that conditions in Constantinople are terrible, and that the wave of refugees has swamped the powers of the relief workers. The established American schools on the Bosphorus have been forced to seek other quarters. It is intended to remove them to the European side. Whatever communication is being carried on with the interior is by means of secret post.
In Saloniki, where the Red Cross has a great camp, 70,000 are suffering from lack of food, clothing and medical supplies. Malaria is sweeping the camp, and the daily death rate is in the hundreds. Another 70,000 are housed in the surrounding country, affected by the same conditions.
At Epirus, Patras, Athens and the Ionian Islands 600,000 are being cared for. Every Greek city has its quota, with no adequate means for protecting them. The only hope of these poor people is pinned upon the generosity of the American nation and the American relief workers.