IF I LIE, THEN PUT ME IN THE DOCK
By Robert Fisk

Gulf Times, Qatar
The Independent
Oct 16 2006

THIS has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about
those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5mn 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 October 19 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 November 19 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 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 Britain’s
Tony Blair, 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.