Geoffrey Robertson puts the case against Turkey for 1915 Armenian genocide
January 4, 2015
By LOUIS NOWRA –
The Australian – ON April 24, 1915, the day before the Anzacs landed
at Gallipoli, the Turkish government in Constantinople rounded up
hundreds of Armenian artists, intellectuals, academics, priests and
community leaders and killed most of them.
At the time there were 15 million Turkish Muslims and about two
million Christian Arm-enians in Turkey (or Anatolia as it was then).
The Armenians were better educated and wealthier than most Turks and
because of that were envied and hated, so much so that the government
instituted a program of ethnic cleansing. The Turks had had practice
runs before. Between 1894 and 1896, 200,000 Armenians were massacred
by soldiers and armed mobs.
>From May to September 1915, up to two million Armenians were killed or
expelled from the Ottoman Empire. The adult men were massacred or sent
to death camps, while their families were sent on death marches
through the desert. They were murdered, raped, drowned, burned alive
and left to die of hunger and thirst. Churches, monasteries and
schools were destroyed. All material goods were confiscated. Girls
were made sex slaves and forced to convert. Up to 1.5 million died.
Since then Turkish apologists have protested that only 600,000 died
and that the deportations and massacres were merely unfortunate
incidents in a civil war. In An Inconvenient Genocide, Australian
lawyer Geoffrey Robertson sifts the evidence and details the reasons
he considers the Turkish elimination of the Armenians a crime against
humanity, a genocide.
He doesn’t spend much time on the history but presents witness
accounts by diplomats, missionaries, journalists, doctors and
soldiers. Some of the compelling accounts are by Australian prisoners
of war. Even Turkey’s German allies, especially diplomats, were
horrified by what was happening and sent voluminous reports back to
Berlin.
Turkish law sanctions citizens who ”insult Turkishness” by referring
to the treatment of Armenians as genocide. Nobel prize-winning writer
Orhan Pamuk was charged but his international fame kept him out of
jail. This national-istic hypersensitivity cannot be over-estimated.
In 2010, the BBC recorded a play I wrote based on the memoirs of a US
vice-consul, Leslie Davis, who witnessed deportations, death marches
and atrocities. Because Turkish actors were afraid news of their
participation would travel back home, they dropped out or acted under
assumed names.
Robertson makes it clear that genocide is a matter for judges, not
historians. He takes as his guide the International Court of Justice
decree that genocide means acts committed with an intent to destroy,
in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. In
practice this means disrupting social cohesion (murdering leaders and
intellectuals), destroying cultural institutions and prohibiting
cultural activities, shifting wealth from the persecuted group to
privileged nationals, depopulating areas inhabited by a group,
interfering with the activities of churches catering to the persecuted
group and reducing its numbers by starvation or murder.
This book is a prosecutor’s brief: brilliant, forensic and
irrefutable, and on all counts Robertson finds the 1915 Turkish
government guilty of genocide. The subtitle, Who Remembers the
Armenians?, is a paraphrase of Hitler’s remarks to his generals in
1939, ordering them to show no mercy to the Poles: “Who, after all,
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Robertson is part of a growing global movement to have the Armenian
genocide classed as a crime against humanity. Governments in Canada,
France, Russia, Sweden and Poland have recognised the genocide, as
have 43 of the 50 US states. The British and US governments have
refused to do so; Turkey’s pro-Western stance makes it an important
ally.
Led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a cynical populist, Turkey is
doing all within its power not to confront its own past and also to
stop the truth from being heard. This is of course not unusual
(witness Japan’s refusal to acknowledge its horrific crimes in World
War II and Australia’s deliberate amnesia about its treatment of
Aborigines) but the evidence of the genocide is so overwhelming that
the Turkish denial of what happened is breathtaking in its immaturity
and lack of pity.
In Australia’s case, the NSW parliament recognised the genocide in
2013, but the federal government has not done so. Foreign Minister
Julie Bishop has gone so far as to deny it happened. Why is this?
Well, the answer is quite simple: blackmail. She is afraid the Turkish
government will stop Australians from visiting Gallipoli. She has good
reasons for this, given the Turks have banned any member of the NSW
parliament from attending this year’s centenary memorial service at
Anzac Cove.
An Inconvenient Genocide should be compulsory reading for anyone who
knows nothing about the Armenian genocide. It’s also a vivid reminder
that we must never forget such crimes against humanity. Very few books
are necessary, but this is one.
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