TIME TO RECOGNIZE THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Vahe Gabrielyan, Armenia’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s

AZG Armenian Daily
16/10/2007

The Armenian ambassador to Britain on why he believes, nearly a
century on, Turkey should admit to a genocide

Throughout the twentieth century to the present day there has not been
any substantiated doubt about the character of the mass deportations,
expropriation, abduction, torture, starvation and killings of millions
of Armenians throughout Ottoman Turkey that started on a large scale
in 1915 and carried onto 1923.

Centrally planned by the government of the day and meticulously
executed by the huge machine of the state bureaucracy, army, police,
hired gangs and – specially released for that purpose – criminals
from prisons, the campaign had one clear aim expressly stated by the
government in secret directives: to rid Anatolia of its indigenous
Armenian population and settle the so – called ‘Armenian question’
for good.

An entire nation and its Christian culture were eliminated to secure
a homogenous Turkish state on territories where Armenians had lived
for many centuries.

Terms such as "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" were not in circulation
then, so Winston Churchill later referred to the 1915 massacre of
1.5 million Armenians as an "administrative holocaust".

The Turkish authorities made no secret of the aim once it was achieved
and other governments and nations have known the truth since. One
of the early accounts of Armenian Genocide was published in 1916
in Britain.

The British Government at the time commissioned James Bryce and Arnold
Toynbee to compile evidence on the events in Armenia. The subsequent
report was printed in the British Parliamentary Blue Book series
"The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916". The
report leaves no doubt about what was taking place.

In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted,
the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as
a crime against humanity. It is well acknowledged that Polish jurist
Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the
Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of
the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.

Amidst huge international pressure, the Turkish Government succeeding
the Young Turks had not only to recognize the scale and vehemence of
the atrocities but also to try the perpetrators in military tribunals
and sentence the leaders to death.

However, the sentences were not carried out and with the passage of
time moods changed not only in Turkey but also in some countries, such
as the UK, where Turkey is nowadays seen as a key alley. Still, even
in countries that have not yet for some reason recognized the Genocide
scholars have no doubts about the character of the events: they point
out that there is no scholarly issue, only one of political expediency.

Armenians throughout the world insist that there be an international
recognition and condemnation of what is often called the first genocide
of the twentieth century. We are past the stage of scholarly discussion
since a very few challenge the fact. To dispel any doubt, 126 leading
scholars of the Holocaust placed a statement in the New York Times in
June 2000 declaring the "incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide"
and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.

In 2005 the International Association of Genocide Scholars addressed
an open letter to Turkey’s Prime Minister R. Erdogan calling upon him
to recognize the truth. The evidence is so overwhelming that the only
question remaining is how to help the two nations close that shameful
page of the history, reconcile and move forward.

However, despite the affirmation of the Armenian Genocide by the
overwhelming majority of historians, academic institutions on
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, increasingly more parliaments and
governments around the world, and by more and more Turkish scholars
and intellectuals, the Turkish government still actively denies
the fact. So long as they do that, Armenians have no choice but to
struggle for wider international recognition.

This is however not an end in itself. It is important that Turkey
recognizes the Genocide, apologizes and condemns it. When the
Germans have apologized for the sufferings they had caused to the
Jews, the British for slavery, the Americans for their treatment
of native Americans etc, Turkey’s continuing denial, moreover,
increasing efforts and resources spent on the denial are alarming
signs, aggravated by their insistence not to establish diplomatic
relations with neighboring Armenia and by maintaining a blockade on
all ground communication. Armenia does not even set the recognition of
the Genocide as a prerequisite for normalizing relations and calls for
establishing diplomatic relations and opening of the border without
any preconditions.

As the killing this January of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian
editor of the Agos bilingual periodical demonstrates, international
community cannot stand aside and watch. Hrant was persecuted under the
infamous 301 article for "insulting Turkish identity" and the hysteria
around someone daring to speak the truth created the fertile soil for
the hatred that killed him. His case was shamefully still open even
after his assassination and in a demonstration of absolute absence of
morality, Turkish courts yesterday sentenced Hrant’s son, as well as
another of Agos’s current staff to a year of imprisonment under the
same accusations, for simply daring to re-print Hrant’s words.

This is why the world should not yield to Turkish threats that are
outright blackmailing. The resolutions in various legislatures across
the world, and recently in the US House of Representative Foreign
Relations Committee are not merely the result of Armenian Diaspora’s
– which by the way, was created in the first place because of the
genocide in Turkey – influence. It is because there are more people
who believe in values and in putting the wrongs right.

A number of British MPs have tabled an EDM (Early Day Motion),
to raise the awareness about the Armenian Genocide and calling on
British Government to recognize it as such. Currently, around 170 MPs
across the party lines have signed an EDM which reads "That this House
believes that the killing of over a million Armenians in 1915 was an
act of genocide; calls upon the UK Government to recognize it as such;
and believes that it would be in Turkey’s long-term interests to do
the same."

Their number grows steadily. It is time the British Government followed
many others and re-affirmed the UK’s place among the standard-bearers
of democracy and human rights.

It is worth repeating that international recognition of the Genocide
cannot do harm to Turkish-Armenian relations since they simply do
not exist. It does not prevent a dialogue, on the contrary, creates
the necessary conditions to start a frank one. By recognizing the
historic truth and helping open the last closed border in Europe,
the international community can facilitate long-lasting stability and
prosperity in our region. And it is also probably time to show that the
human race’s evolution into the 21st century is evolution of ideals,
principles and a code of behavior that should take precedence over
political expediency or sheer commercial interest.