So let me denounce genocide from the dock

This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France’s lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And within an hour, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk - only recently cleared by a Turkish court of insulting ‘Turkishness’ by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres - won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence - the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of ‘civil war’ - Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H, since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger.

Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes to save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in the Black Sea and the Euphrates river - mostly of women and children, so many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its course for up to half a mile. But Dadrian, who speaks and reads Turkish fluently, has now discovered that tens of thousands of Armenians were also burned alive in haylofts. He has produced an affidavit presented to the Turkish court martial that briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War, a document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army. He testified that when he visited the Armenian village of Chourig (it means ‘little water’ in Armenian) he found all the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that all were standing upright. ‘In all the history of Islam,’ General Vehip wrote, ‘it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery.’

The Armenian Holocaust, now so ‘unmentionable’ in Turkey, was no secret to the country’s population in 1918. Millions of Muslim Turks had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier - a few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and friends at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families - and on 19 October 1918 Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: ‘Let’s face it, we Turks savagely [vahshiane in Turkish] killed off the Armenians.’ Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued, Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for Armenian deportees; but a parallel set instructed Turkish officials to ‘proceed with your mission’ as soon as the deportee convoys were far enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to murder. As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on 19 November 1918: ‘The “mission” in the circular was: to attack the convoys and massacre the population . . . I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman Empire, these criminal people . . .’

How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths in 1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide of the Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of the great crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how much more extraordinary that their successors today maintain that all of this is a myth, that anyone who says in present-day Istanbul what the men of 1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution under the notorious Law 301 for ‘defaming’ Turkey.

I’m not sure that Holocaust deniers - of the anti-Armenian or anti-Semitic variety - should be taken to court for their rantings. David Irving is a particularly unpleasant ‘martyr’ for freedom of speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis’s one-franc fine by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity to an elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.

But it’s gratifying to find that French president Jacques Chirac and his interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey will have to recognise the Armenian deaths as genocide before it is allowed to join the European Union. True, France has a powerful half-million-strong Armenian community. And, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly commented that the new French bill, if passed by the senate in Paris, will ‘prohibit dialogue’ which is necessary for reconciliation between Turkey and modern-day Armenia. What is the subtext of this, I wonder? No more talk of the Jewish Holocaust lest we hinder ‘reconciliation’ between Germany and the Jews of Europe?

But, suddenly, last week, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes. Next month my Turkish publishers are producing my book, The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language, complete with its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled ‘The First Holocaust’. On Thursday, I received a fax from Agora Books in Istanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it ‘very likely that they will be sued under Law 301’ - which forbids the defaming of Turkey and which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk - but that, as a foreigner, I would be ‘out of reach’. However, if I wished, I could apply to the court to be included in any Turkish trial. Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned.

The Independent, 14 October 2006

You’re talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador

A letter from the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James arrived for me a few days ago, one of those missives that send a shudder through the human soul. ‘You allege that an Armenian “genocide” took place in Eastern Anatolia in 1915,’ His Excellency Mr Akin Alptuna told me. ‘I believe you have some misconceptions about those events . . .’

Oh indeedydoody, I have. I am under the totally mistaken conception that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were cruelly and deliberately done to death by their Turkish Ottoman masters in 1915, that the men were shot and knifed while their womenfolk were raped and eviscerated and cremated and starved on death marches and their children butchered. I have met a few of the survivors - liars to a man and woman, if the Turkish ambassador to Britain is to be believed - and I have seen the photographs taken of the victims by a brave German photographer called Armen Wegner whose pictures must now, I suppose, be consigned to the waste bins. So must the archives of all those diplomats who courageously catalogued the mass murders inflicted upon Turkey’s Christian population on the orders of the gang of nationalists who ran the Ottoman government in 1915.

What would have been our reaction if the ambassador of Germany had written a note to the same effect? ‘You allege that a “Jewish genocide” took place in Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 . . . I believe you have some misconceptions about those events . . .’ Of course, the moment such a letter became public, the ambassador of Germany would be condemned by the Foreign Office, our man in Berlin would - even the pusillanimous Blair might rise to the occasion - be withdrawn for consultations and the European Union would debate whether sanctions should be placed upon Germany.

But Mr Alptuna need have no such worries. His country is not a member of the European Union - it merely wishes to be - and it was Mr Blair’s craven administration that for many months tried to prevent Armenian participation in Britain’s Holocaust Day. Amid this chicanery, there are a few shining bright lights and I should say at once that Mr Alptuna’s letter is a grotesque representation of the views of a growing number of Turkish citizens, a few of whom I have the honour to know, who are convinced that the story of the great evil visited upon the Armenians must be told in their country. So why, oh why, I ask myself, are Mr Alptuna and his colleagues in Paris and Beirut and other cities still peddling this nonsense?

In Lebanon, for example, the Turkish embassy has sent a ‘communiqué’ to the local French-language L’Orient-Le Jour newspaper, referring to the ‘soi-disant [so-called] Armenian genocide’ and asking why the modern state of Armenia will not respond to the Turkish call for a joint historical study to ‘examine the events’ of 1915. In fact, the Armenian president, Robert Kotcharian, will not respond to such an invitation for the same reason that the world’s Jewish community would not respond to the call for a similar examination of the Jewish Holocaust from the Iranian president - because an unprecedented international crime was committed, the mere questioning of which would be an insult to the millions of victims who perished.

But the Turkish appeals are artfully concocted. In Beirut, they recall the Allied catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915 when British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops suffered massive casualties at the hands of the Turkish army. In all - including Turkish soldiers - up to a quarter of a million men perished in the Dardanelles. The Turkish embassy in Beirut rightly states that the belligerent nations of Gallipoli have transformed these hostilities into gestures of reconciliation, friendship and mutual respect. A good try. But the bloodbath of Gallipoli did not involve the planned murder of hundreds of thousands of British, French, Australian, New Zealand - and Turkish - women and children.

But now for the bright lights. A group of ‘righteous Turks’ are challenging their government’s dishonest account of the 1915 genocide: Ahmet Insel, Baskin Oran, Halil Berktay, Hrant Dink,¹¹ Ragip Zarakolu and others claim that the ‘democratic process’ in Turkey will ‘chip away at the darkness’ and they seek help from Armenians in doing so. Yet even they will refer only to the 1915 ‘disaster’, the ‘tragedy’ and the ‘agony’ of the Armenians. Dr Fatma Goçek of the university of Michigan is among the bravest of those Turkish-born academics who are fighting to confront the Ottoman Empire’s terror against the Armenians. Yet she, too, objects to the use of the word genocide - though she acknowledges its accuracy - on the grounds that it has become ‘politicised’ and thus hinders research.

I have some sympathy with this argument. Why make the job of honest Turks more difficult when these good men and women are taking on the might of Turkish nationalism? The problem is that other, more disreputable folk are demanding the same deletion. Mr Alptuna writes to me - with awesome disingenuousness - that Armenians ‘have failed to submit any irrefutable evidence to support their allegations of genocide’. And he goes on to say that ‘genocide, as you are well aware, has a quite specific legal definition’ in the UN’s 1948 Convention. But Mr Alptuna is himself well aware - though he does not say so, of course - that the definition of genocide was set out by Raphael Lemkin, a Jew, in specific reference to the wholesale mass slaughter of the Armenians.

And all the while, new diplomatic archives are opening in the West which reveal the smell of death - Armenian death - in their pages. I quote here, for example, from the newly discovered account of Denmark’s minister in Turkey during the First World War. ‘The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate the Armenian people,’ Carl Wandel wrote on 3 July 1915. The bishop of Karput was ordered to leave Aleppo within forty-eight hours ‘and it has later been learned that this Bishop and all the clergy that accompanied him have been killed between Diyarbekir and Urfa at a place where approximately 1,700 Armenian families have suffered the same fate . . . In Angora . . . approximately 6,000 men . . . have been shot on the road. Even here in Constantinople [Istanbul], Armenians are being abducted and sent to Asia . . .’

There is much, much more. Yet now here is Mr Alptuna in his letter to me: ‘In fact, the Armenians living outside Eastern Armenia including Istanbul . . . were excluded from deportation.’ Somebody here is not telling the truth. The late Mr Wandel of Copenhagen? Or the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James?

The Independent, 20 May 2006