The Independent (London)
October 14, 2006 Saturday
First Edition
Let me denounce genocide from the dock
ROBERT FISK
This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about
those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million
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 for insulting "Turkishness" (sic) 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 rivers – 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 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 presentday 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 French President Jacques Chirac and his
interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey
will have to recognise the Armenian death as genocide before it is
allowed to join the European Union. True, France has a powerful
half-million-strong Armenian community.
But, 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
Kamel Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned.