H106: Analyses‏

New Statesman, UK Oct 12 2007 Time to recognise the Armenian genocide Vahe Gabrielyan Published 12 October 2007 The Armenian ambassador to Britain on why he believes, nearly a century on, Turkey should admit to a genocide Throughout the twentieth century to the present day there has not been any substantiated doubt about the character of the mass deportations, expropriation, abduction, torture, starvation and killings of millions of Armenians throughout Ottoman Turkey that started on a large scale in 1915 and carried onto 1923. Centrally planned by the government of the day and meticulously executed by the huge machine of the state bureaucracy, army, police, hired gangs and - specially released for that purpose - criminals from prisons, the campaign had one clear aim expressly stated by the government in secret directives: to rid Anatolia of its indigenous Armenian population and settle the so -called `Armenian question' for good. An entire nation and its Christian culture were eliminated to secure a homogenous Turkish state on territories where Armenians had lived for many centuries. Terms such as `genocide' or `ethnic cleansing' were not in circulation then, so Winston Churchill later referred to the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million Armenians as an `administrative holocaust'. The Turkish authorities made no secret of the aim once it was achieved and other governments and nations have known the truth since. One of the early accounts of Armenian Genocide was published in 1916 in Britain. The British Government at the time commissioned James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee to compile evidence on the events in Armenia. The subsequent report was printed in the British Parliamentary Blue Book series `The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916'. The report leaves no doubt about what was taking place. In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity. It is well acknowledged that Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide. Amidst huge international pressure, the Turkish Government succeeding the Young Turks had not only to recognize the scale and vehemence of the atrocities but also to try the perpetrators in military tribunals and sentence the leaders to death. However, the sentences were not carried out and with the passage of time moods changed not only in Turkey but also in some countries, such as the UK, where Turkey is nowadays seen as a key alley. Still, even in countries that have not yet for some reason recognized the Genocide scholars have no doubts about the character of the events: they point out that there is no scholarly issue, only one of political expediency. Armenians throughout the world insist that there be an international recognition and condemnation of what is often called the first genocide of the twentieth century. We are past the stage of scholarly discussion since a very few challenge the fact. To dispel any doubt, 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the "incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide" and urging western democracies to acknowledge it. In 2005 the International Association of Genocide Scholars addressed an open letter to Turkey's Prime Minister R. Erdogan calling upon him to recognize the truth. The evidence is so overwhelming that the only question remaining is how to help the two nations close that shameful page of the history, reconcile and move forward. However, despite the affirmation of the Armenian Genocide by the overwhelming majority of historians, academic institutions on Holocaust and Genocide Studies, increasingly more parliaments and governments around the world, and by more and more Turkish scholars and intellectuals, the Turkish government still actively denies the fact. So long as they do that, Armenians have no choice but to struggle for wider international recognition. This is however not an end in itself. It is important that Turkey recognizes the Genocide, apologizes and condemns it. When the Germans have apologized for the sufferings they had caused to the Jews, the British for slavery, the Americans for their treatment of native Americans etc, Turkey's continuing denial, moreover, increasing efforts and resources spent on the denial are alarming signs, aggravated by their insistence not to establish diplomatic relations with neighbouring Armenia and by maintaining a blockade on all ground communication. Armenia does not even set the recognition of the Genocide as a prerequisite for normalizing relations and calls for establishing diplomatic relations and opening of the border without any preconditions. As the killing this January of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor of the Agos bilingual periodical demonstrates, international community cannot stand aside and watch. Hrant was persecuted under the infamous 301 article for `insulting Turkish identity' and the hysteria around someone daring to speak the truth created the fertile soil for the hatred that killed him. His case was shamefully still open even after his assassination and in a demonstration of absolute absence of morality, Turkish courts yesterday sentenced Hrant's son, as well as another of Agos's current staff to a year of imprisonment under the same accusations, for simply daring to re-print Hrant's words. This is why the world should not yield to Turkish threats that are outright blackmailing. The resolutions in various legislatures across the world, and recently in the US House of Representative Foreign Relations Committee are not merely the result of Armenian Diaspora's - which by the way, was created in the first place because of the genocide in Turkey - influence. It is because there are more people who believe in values and in putting the wrongs right. A number of British MPs have tabled an EDM (Early Day Motion), to raise the awareness about the Armenian Genocide and calling on British Government to recognize it as such. Currently, around 170 MPs across the party lines have signed an EDM which reads `That this House believes that the killing of over a million Armenians in 1915 was an act of genocide; calls upon the UK Government to recognize it as such; and believes that it would be in Turkey's long-term interests to do the same.' Their number grows steadily. It is time the British Government followed many others and re-affirmed the UK's place among the standard-bearers of democracy and human rights. It is worth repeating that international recognition of the Genocide cannot do harm to Turkish-Armenian relations since they simply do not exist. It does not prevent a dialogue, on the contrary, creates the necessary conditions to start a frank one. By recognizing the historic truth and helping open the last closed border in Europe, the international community can facilitate long-lasting stability and prosperity in our region. And it is also probably time to show that the human race's evolution into the 21st century is evolution of ideals, principles and a code of behaviour that should take precedence over political expediency or sheer commercial interest. Vahe Gabrielyan Armenia's Ambassador to the Court of St. James's Vahe Gabrielyan is the Armenian ambassador to Britain. Born in 1965 he was educated in Armenia, Austria and the United States. He was awarded a PHD in the Theory of Linguistics in 1994 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect The Independent Published: 12 October 2007 The story of the last century's first Holocaust - Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews - is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population - as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe - the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear. On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience." These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941. Taner Akcam, a prominent - and extremely brave - Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed. Ottoman Turkey's attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the Middle East - the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 - is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen. In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey's Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians - including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at Gallipoli - have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called "merciless fury". Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people - their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for me. There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appear to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern Armenia - the present-day state of Armenia. Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia - in what is now Turkey - lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their lands.