The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
January 31, 2015 Saturday
Lest we remember
BOOKS Reviews
REVIEW BY JENNIFER BALINT
Book: An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians? by
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON, VINTAGE
April 24, 1915, marks both the eve of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli,
Australia’s “coming of age”, and the night in which Armenian
political, intellectual and community leaders were rounded up in
Constantinople and throughout the Ottoman state, imprisoned, and
mostly executed. The 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing comes
one day after the 100th anniversary of a mostly unrecognised genocide,
the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman state under
cover of the First World War.
In An Inconvenient Genocide, international human-rights barrister
Geoffrey Robertson makes the case for the atrocities perpetrated
against the Armenian population to be categorised, legally, as
genocide. He is insistent that it is a matter of law, not history nor
morality.
The significance of this book is that since the establishment of
modern-day Turkey, the genocide has been denied. The systematic denial
has left the Armenian community in a state of unrecognised mourning.
As Robertson outlines, Turkey spends millions of dollars promoting its
justification of the massacres as “strategically necessary in a civil
war”, and has made denial a condition of diplomatic relations. In
showing that this is a matter of law, not history, Robertson engages
directly with Turkey’s denialist stance that it be “left to
historians”.
The crime was always known. At the end of the war, Ottoman newspapers
wrote editorials denouncing the massacres, and parliamentarians
decried the actions of the Young Turks; one railed “we inherited a
country turned into a huge slaughterhouse”. The Allies had promised an
international tribunal, describing the crimes – with the term used for
the first time, as Robertson notes – as a “crime against humanity”. No
international tribunal eventuated. The Ottoman state set up its own
tribunal, which was shut down with the rise of the Kemalist party and
the establishment of the modern Turkish state.
Robertson’s book is an important contribution. Its strength lies in
its systematic presentation of the evidence, that he then applies to
the law of genocide – graphic eyewitness accounts by missionaries, aid
workers, army officers, business people, consuls and ambassadors, part
of which was collated by the British government in 1916, two
commissioned US reports in 1919, the evidence presented at the Ottoman
courts-martial, cables sent by key political leaders clearly outlining
genocidal intent, even of the laws passed at the time that gave
authority to the state to obtain the “abandoned” homes and property of
deportees.
He also includes diary entries found at the Australian National
Archives from Australian diggers who as prisoners of war were
witnesses to the slaughter of Armenians and the horrific deportations
they were subject to that resulted in death, rape and abduction.
Diaries from British servicemen are witness to the complicity of
Germany, a complicity that extended to assisting the key political
leaders to escape.
Robertson’s conclusion, in relation to the deportations authorised by
the Ottoman state, is that “those political leaders who gave the
orders intended that a substantial part of the Armenian population
would be exterminated in consequence. There is no other inference that
is ‘reasonable’.”
And if Turkey finds it so hard to recognise it as a genocide, he
maintains, then it should at least know that it is clearly a “crime
against humanity” for which it should apologise and make reparations.
“If these same events occurred today,” he argues, “there can be no
doubt that prosecutions before the International Criminal Court of
Talaat [Pasha] and other CUP [Committee of Union and Progress]
officials for genocide, for persecution and for other crimes against
humanity would succeed.”
The larger question in this book is what can be done when there is no
possibility of criminal legal accountability now that all the main
perpetrators are dead. Here, Robertson argues for the pursuit of legal
means as well as non-legal, including an apology and the gift of Mount
Ararat to Armenia. He cautions against genocide denial laws, although
his argument for “freedom of speech” neglects the harm that genocide
denial causes. And he illustrates what he terms “genocide
equivocators” through his own Freedom of Information requests that
reveal how the British government was advised not to recognise the
genocide.
When the term “genocide” was coined, it was with the memory of the
Ottoman massacres. The Holocaust led to its becoming law, but it was
the Armenian genocide that motivated its development, a story Robinson
tells in the book.
While he dismisses historians, arguing that it is lawyers who make
judgments on whether or not an act can be characterised as genocide,
using the law to make the case is necessary in the face of Turkey’s
continued denial. What Robertson clearly shows, as historians and
social scientists have said for decades, and victims and their
descendants have known, what the Ottoman state did, was, in fact and
in law, a genocide.
Jennifer Balint teaches in the school of social and political sciences
at the University of Melbourne.