GENOCIDE: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
By Gary Kamiya

Salon
Oct 16 2007

The Armenian genocide bill has been attacked by both the right and
the left — and it may make matters worse. But it’s necessary.

President Bush urges Congress to reject a bill on Armenian genocide
Oct. 10, 2007.

It was the first holocaust, one of the worst crimes of the 20th
century. In 1915, during World War I, the ruling political party
under the Ottoman regime ordered the extermination of its Armenian
subjects. At least 800,000 and as many as 1.5 million men, women and
children were murdered or died of disease, starvation and exposure.

The details of the genocide, as laid out in books like Robert Fisk’s
"The Great War for Civilization" and Peter Balakian’s "The Burning
Tigris," are harrowing. Lines of men, women and children were roped
together by the edge of a river, so that shooting the first person
caused all the rest to drown. Women were routinely raped, killed
and genitally mutilated. Some were crucified. Children were taken on
boats into rivers and thrown off.

The genocide was not carried out by the Republic of Turkey, which
did not exist yet, but by the ruling party in the final years of the
collapsing Ottoman regime. To this day the Turkish government has never
acknowledged that what transpired was a monstrous and intentional
crime against humanity. Instead, it claims that the Armenians were
simply unfortunate victims of a chaotic civil war, that only 300,000
to 600,000 died, that Turks actually died in greater numbers, and
that the Armenians brought their fate on themselves by collaborating
with the Russians.

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