Ask Aid For Removal of Turks' Slave Marks

1920

Armenian Girl Captives Are Disgraced by Tattooed Faces

PRINCETON, N. J., Jan. 1. — Many Armenian women and girls who were stolen by Turks, Kurds and Tartars were tattooed by their abductors on their cheeks and foreheads. These unhappy women must bear the signs of their disgrace to their graves unless a scientific method of removing the tattoo marks is furnished.

Dr. Wilfred M. Post, of Princeton, N. J., returned recently from Asia Minor, where he served with the Near East Relief. He says many of the women were driven into rivers to drown, the most beautiful girls were reserved for Turkish harems, from which some escaped and some were rescued.

The officials of the Near East Relief have asked physicians who specialize in affections of the skin to inform them of a safe way of removing tattoo marks. Several prominent scientists have offered their services, among them Dr. George H. Washburn of Harvard, who served in the Medical corps of the United States Army.


Weight Straightens His Neck

1920

Then Sight Is Restored to Youth Injured at Football

NORMAN, Okla., Jan. 1. — John H. Merkle, a student in the University of Oklahoma, is rapidly recovering from injury received in a football game here, which dislocated his cervical vertebra and temporarily blinded him, by carrying a 10-pound weight around his neck. Merkle's vision returned as soon as his neck became straightened by the weight. Merkle, who is now in a Shawnee hospital, lives at Maud, Oklahoma.

How to Deal With the Turks

1920

The Allied military demonstrations in Constantinople will be watched with keen attention, says the St. Louis Star, as it is a test, under extreme circumstances, of the theory that the Turks can best be controlled by leaving their capital in Europe. If the influence of the Allies in Constantinople restrains Turkish outrages in Asia Minor, the principal argument for leaving the Turks in their present capital will be justified. This, however, does not cover the situation.

Renewed outrages against the Armenians, coupled with defiance of the Allied police forces in Asia Minor, call for drastic restriction of Turkish power. The Turks should have no army and no armament. The covenant of the League of Nations provides for supervision by the league of sales of arms and munitions in "countries in which the control of this traffic is necessary in the common interest." Surely, Turkey, judged by its long record of massacres and unjustified wars, is such a country.

The one thought of the Allied powers, in settling with Turkey, should be to put an end, once for all, to the terrible conditions which have prevailed in the Near East since the Ottoman Turks broke out of their own Turnanian home nearly a thousand years ago. The Turks must be made impotent to carry on their policy of slavery and slaughter. The United States, while this problem is being settled, cannot legitimately stand aside and treat it as an affair of Europe. It is a world problem, and our concern.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, March 20, 1920, p. 6.

Novel Snow-Plows — Kurds Use Horses, Charge the Drifts

1878

Novel Snow-Plows

In his recent travels in Asia Minor Captain Burnaby on one occasion, between Erzeroum and Van, found his road blocked by a snow-drift. It was cleared in the following original fashion.

Ordering one of the Persians to make his camels retire about two hundred yards, the Kurd by which the captain was accompanied called twelve of the best mounted of the villagers to his side; then, striking his horse and shouting wildly, he galloped along the track and charged the drift.

"In a second or two," says our traveler, "nothing could be seen but the head on the rider; his steed was entirely hidden from our view. After a few struggles the man backed the animal out of the snow, having made a hole in it some twenty feet long by four wide. The next horseman rode at the place like his leader. Each Kurd followed in succession. They finally forced a passage. It was a wild sight to witness — these Kurds in their quaint head-dresses, and on strong, fine-looking steeds of Turkoman breed, many of them quite sixteen hands high, charging the snowdrift, yelling and invoking Allah; Persians, phlegmatic and still, seemingly not caring a straw about the matter; the lieutenant encouraging the Kurds by cries and gesticulations, but having too great regard for his own safety to gallop at the ridges, and the leading horseman now far in front, his horse apparently swimming through the snow as he slowly burst the barrier."