100 years ago in The Record
Sunday, Aug. 5, 1917
The Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire is responsible for more than 1,000,000 deaths of men, women and children since the outbreak of the great European war, a missionary formerly based in Turkey tells a Troy audience today.
Rev. Charles T. Riggs was a Princeton classmate of Second Presbyterian Church pastor Rev. Paul R. Hickok. Until recently he was an instructor at Robert College, an American-run private school in Constantinople, the Turkish capital, where Riggs was born to a missionary family. He speaks at Second Presbyterian today on current conditions in Turkey.
The U.S. is not at war with Turkey despite declaring war on the Ottomans’ German allies last April. Turkey has cut off diplomatic relations with the U.S., however, and most Americans have left the empire since then.
According to Riggs, “several American women nurses are working singly in hospitals many miles apart, amid disease of every description. One of them is so devoted to her work that it was said it would require force to remove her from the hospital.”
Turkish atrocities against the empire’s Armenia population have received considerable publicity in the last two years. Riggs recounts at least one atrocity, or the aftermath of one.
“His description of the Turks placing the little Armenian children in small boats, of their being taken out to sea, the return of the small boats, and a few days later the bodies of the children being washed ashore was very pathetic,” The Record reports. Riggs reminds the congregation that the Turks have also committed atrocities against Syrians, Greeks and their own people. The Ottoman regime has only made matters worse by refusing to let Americans continue their extensive charitable work inside the empire, the educator claims. “The present rulers gained their position by intrigue and murder,” Riggs says, “and would stop at nothing to hold power in their hands….Indeed, the rulers of Turkey were just as heartless to their own fellow countrymen if a voice was raised against the government as they had been to other nationalities.” The word “genocide” doesn’t exist in 1917, but Riggs accuses the Ottoman rulers of “a desire to take the present opportunity of destroying these peoples” in Armenia and Syria. Turkey will change for the better once the U.S. and its allies win the war, Riggs predicts. He expects the Armenians and Syrians to “begin life anew after years of persecution” and claims that “Many Mohammedans [i.e. Muslims] will embrace Christianity.” Increased Bible sales just before the war and general mockery of an Ottoman declaration of holy war lead Riggs to believe that Islam’s influence in Turkey is declining.