DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.4752#0188
I78 GOVERNMENT AND OFFICIALS
thin, cadaverous-looking Turk, to tell you the
history of his eleven years' imprisonment, he
connects all his sufferings, beginning with his
unjust arrest in his seventeenth year, with the
Zaplielis ; and he declares that the Zaptielis took
bribes from the real culprit to charge the crime on
an innocent powerless poor man. If you hear one
of the American missionaries give evidence of the
way in which the headman of an Armenian village,
which had been raided and looted by Kurds, was
tortured to death in his own house for declaring
his inability to raise the usual amount of tax, and
persisting after due warning in tin's rebellious
declaration, it was the Zaptiehs who put a chain
round his waist, passed it over a beam in the roof,
and hauled the wretched man up and let him down
again, until the chain cut into him, and he died of
the treatment. In the country districts, when you
hear of ill-will between the Christian villages and
the Moslem, it is rarely, if ever, so far as my ex-
perience goes, a direct hatred against the hostile
village : it is mediated through the Zaptiehs or even
still higher officials, who are declared on the one
side to take bribes from the wealthier Christians
and let them off their fair taxation, and on the
other side to allow the Moslem villages, from
religious partiality, to be a year or two in arrears.
I do not give these instances as being either all
thin, cadaverous-looking Turk, to tell you the
history of his eleven years' imprisonment, he
connects all his sufferings, beginning with his
unjust arrest in his seventeenth year, with the
Zaplielis ; and he declares that the Zaptielis took
bribes from the real culprit to charge the crime on
an innocent powerless poor man. If you hear one
of the American missionaries give evidence of the
way in which the headman of an Armenian village,
which had been raided and looted by Kurds, was
tortured to death in his own house for declaring
his inability to raise the usual amount of tax, and
persisting after due warning in tin's rebellious
declaration, it was the Zaptiehs who put a chain
round his waist, passed it over a beam in the roof,
and hauled the wretched man up and let him down
again, until the chain cut into him, and he died of
the treatment. In the country districts, when you
hear of ill-will between the Christian villages and
the Moslem, it is rarely, if ever, so far as my ex-
perience goes, a direct hatred against the hostile
village : it is mediated through the Zaptiehs or even
still higher officials, who are declared on the one
side to take bribes from the wealthier Christians
and let them off their fair taxation, and on the
other side to allow the Moslem villages, from
religious partiality, to be a year or two in arrears.
I do not give these instances as being either all