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Armenia Solidarity/ Nor Serount Cultural Association Press Release
c/p The Temple of Peace,King Edward viii Ave, Cathays Park, Cardiff
Tel: 07718982732 [email protected]
Both UK government spokespersons on Turkey/Armenia have recognised the
Genocide
For the first time since 1918, the spokespersons for the British
government on issues relating to Armenia and Turkey are people who have
commited themselves to recognising the truth of the 1915 Genocide of
Armenians. Both of these parliamentarians are Welsh, and of course the
Prime Minister would be hard put to find any Welsh politician who still
adhere to the past government line of denial. Chris Bryant MP, who since
last week speaks on this issue for the government in the House of
Commons, signed the Early Day Motion on the Armenian Genocide put by
Bob Spink MP in 2007. Baroness Kinnock speaks on these matters in the
House of Lords and her voting record when she was a Member of the
European Parliament was consistent, supporting that Parliament’s
Recognition.
It will be impossible for them to argue against their own public
convictions on the issue. We call on Armenians worldwide to e-mail
[email protected] and [email protected] to thank them for
their previous recognition of the Genocide and to ask them , when they
next answer questions on the issue in Parliament, not to read
parrot-fashon the answers which will be given them to read by the
Eastern Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.It is clear
that it is the civil servants of the FCO who dictated the policy of
denial in the Past; the Ministers for Europe were people who stayed in
post usually for twelve months only, repeating that "historians are
divided on the issue" when we know that they had never consulted any
reputable historian, genocide scholar or legal opinion. The worst
culprits of these former ministers for Europe were Geoff Hoon, Dennis
Macshane, Doug Alexander, Baroness Ramsey Baroness Scotland , Lord
Treisman and Lord Malloch-Brown
It is interesting that the policy of Brazen Denial in the British
Parliament only originated in 1998, after the election of Tony Blair as
Prime Minister. No questions on the Genocide were put previously. One
person who must beart a heavy responsibility for this policy is Jack
Straw, now Justice Minister, but for many years Foreign Secretary.
Armenia Solidarity intends to actively campaign for his removal or
impeachment for the years of false information put to parliament . Also
Britain’s Pledges to the Armenian nation (as revealed below in the 1921
debate) will be sent again to parliamentarians for them to consider if
Reparations are in order
CHRISTIAN POPULATION IN ASIA MINOR.
House of Commons Debate 19 December 1921 vol 149 cc419-29
Lord ROBERT CECIL (who was British Under-Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs during the Genocide )
I beg to move, That this House deeply sympathises with the sufferings
of the Christian population in Asia Minor, and urges the Government to
take every possible means to assist them. I move this Motion in the hope
of getting from the Government before the Session ends some statement as
to the probable position in Armenia. Perhaps the House will allow me to
remind them how the present position has arisen. In the course of the
War the Turkish Government made an appeal to the Armenian nation to
assist them, and promised them autonomy if they would do so. The
Armenian nation declined to do so, because they felt themselves bound to
the Allies. It was very largely in consequence of the refusal of the
Armenians that the horrifying massacres took place in 1915 by the orders
of Tallat Pasha and his accomplices. No such crime of a national
character has ever been committed as the crime then committed. Hundreds
of thousands, at least, were slaughtered under conditions of the
greatest possible atrocity, to the accompaniment of every conceivable
torture. The lowest estimate I have ever seen puts the total at 600,000,
and there are many estimates much higher than that. In the course of the
War we gave more than once the most absolute pledges that in the Peace
one of the terms Armenia would receive would he her independence. It
fell to me, speaking for the Government on more than one occasion in
this House, to give those pledges, but they were given much more
formally and precisely by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on 5th
January, 1918, when, to the Trade Union Congress, he stated the terms of
peace which could be offered. We have had it from the Prime Minister in
this House that that statement was made with a view to induce Turkey to
make peace, if possible. It was therefore regarded as the very minimum
of what the Allies intended to ask for. The Prime Minister said, on the
date I have mentioned: Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine
are, in our judgment, entitled to a recognition of their separate
national conditions.It would be impossible to restore to their former
sovereignty the territories to which I have already referred. Therefore
there was an absolute statement that the policy of the Government, on
which the Armenians were entitled to rely, as they did rely, was that
they should receive their independence. In addition to that, our Ally,
the French Government, induced the Armenians to enter the Allied Forces,
and some battalions at any rate of Armenians were enlisted by the French
on the distinct understanding-so the Armenians assert-that they should
receive independence and autonomy at the end of the War. I do not
believe that any Minister of the Crown would deny-I should be very much
surprised if they did so-that the Armenians were led to believe that
they would receive independence and autonomy, and that in consequence of
these undertakings they did assist us, that they thus increased the
dangers which they ran with the Turks, and that their present sufferings
are in part due to what they did then. When it came to the Armistice the
matter was not forgotten. I do not make any criticism, for I was a
Member of the Government at the time. Looking back on it, I regret now
that more stringent provisions were not put into the Armistice. Still,
some provisions were put in, and we thought at the time that they would
be sufficient to enable us to interfere on behalf of the Armenians if
they were threatened with danger………………………….
Mr. Aneurin. WILLIAMS
I beg to second the Motion.
I do not know whether I understood the Leader of the House to
challenge the suggestion that pledges were given to the Armenians during
the War. I hope I did not rightly understand that, because it has never
yet been denied; on the contrary, those pledges and promises have been
reasserted over and over again, notably by the Foreign Secretary in the
House of Lords, and I say that, much as I feel the sufferings of these
people, who, after all, are aliens to us, I feel even more the question
of British honour, and I very earnestly ask this House to consider
whether anybody in any future emergency is going to trust to British
pledges and British promises if afterwards there is a danger of them
being told that it was an expression of intention and was not a pledge.
I venture to say that they were very express pledges. Moreover, they
were acted upon. The Armenians provided a large number of volunteers and
suffered very greatly on the strength of those pledges. They were not
only extended to the Armenians but to other races, and the other
Christian races in the East also suffered very severely because of their
known sympathy with the Entente Powers.
When this matter was being discussed the other day, I asserted that a
large number of those in Cilicia, who were now in terror of being
exterminated by the returning Turks, were sent back there by the action
of the British and French Governments. I have evidence that the French
Government induced 200,000 Christian and other refugees to return to
Cilicia. It is not, however, so much a question of what the French
Government did as what the British Government did, and I will read to
the House part of a letter, dated 1st March, 1920, sent to me from the
War Office. It is not marked personal, private, or confidential, and
there is nothing about it to prevent my making this use of it. In the
course of the letter, it is said: It may help you if I explain the
circumstances. I had written to ask whether the people who had lost
their lives about that time were among those who had been sent back
there by the British Government- Towards the end of last September,
Field-Marshal Lord Allenby reported that on our withdrawal from Cilicia
and Syria it was feared that a large number of Armenians, at Urfa,
Marash, Aintab, Aleppo, etc., might start streaming south in the wake of
our troops, when it would be impossible to look after them. He suggested
that by agreement with the French these Armenians, particularly those
whom we were protecting at Aleppo (to whom I presume you chiefly refer)
should be repatriated to Cilicia, a country which would be under French
protection, and in which Armenians already formed a large proportion of
the population. Therefore there is perfectly clear evidence that these
people were repatriated by us and the French back to Cilicia from
Aleppo, a place of less safety, and were told that they would there have
French protection. The French undoubtedly promised us, when they went
into Cilicia, that they would give that protection. The question is,
what is to be done by the French Government in carrying out that
promise? It is not only a question of the French Government. Quite apart
from what the French Government may choose to do, our promises stand,
and our promises create an obligation upon us. I am not asking this
country to go crusading about the world taking up this and that case of
suffering and trying to put it right, but we have certain duties, and I
am confining my claim entirely to the duties which we have in regard to
this suffering population. Again and again we have intervened in this
Matter. The whole course of what we have done ever since the Crimean War
constitutes a great obligation, and, more than that, the pledges which
we gave in the last War, confirmed by the letter which I have just read
and a thousand other pieces of evidence which I could give, fetter upon
us and fix upon us an absolute obligation as great as the obligation
upon a man to pay his debts. If we do not keep these pledges, who is
going to trust us in any future emergency? ……….
Mr. CHAMBERLAIN (Leader of the House)
If I rise to intervene, it is only because I do not wish to be thought
discourteous by those who gave notice of this Motion, but they might
otherwise think I was deliberately waiting with my eye on the clock for
the time when all of us are to be sent into space. I find my views on
this subject are not very well illustrated in the speeches which have
been made on either side. I am not, I hope, lacking in sympathy with our
Mohammedan fellow-subjects in India, either in what concerns their
Government in the Indian Empire, or in their outlook on the world. On
the other hand, I cannot think without something like horror and dismay
of the abominable barbarities which have been practised in Armenia, and
if I condemn Turkish rule in Armenia it is not because it is Mohammedan
rule over Christian people, but because it is a barbarous and brutal
rule, which would disgrace whatever Government in which it originated. I
deprecate the tendency of my Noble Friend the Mover of the Motion to
view his own country in such gloomy colours, and the tendency both of my
Noble Friend and of the hon. Baronet the Member for East Nottingham (Sir
J. D. Rees) to interpret as a pledge to some particular party who would
have the right to call for its execution at any moment and in any
circumstances, every statement of intention or of policy offered by a
British Minister in either of the Houses of Parliament, or in speaking
to a British audience. Take what was alluded to by my Noble Friend-the
statament made by the British Government or by the Prime Minister as to
the terms on which at a given moment, when War was still in progress,
we should have been ready to make peace with Turkey. In that statement
the Prime Minister, among the conditions which he would exact from
Turkey as the price of peace at that time, mentioned the freedom of
Armenia or the autonomy of Armenia.
Mr. BARTLEY DENNISS
To recognise the independence of Armenia.
Mr. CHAMBERLAIN
I do not profess to be quoting the exact words. My Noble Friend speaks
of that as a pledge to the Armenian people in respect of what they had
incurred in the War.
Lord R. CECIL
There is another phrase in that same speech which secured
Constantinople to the Turks, and that was publicly stated by the Prime
Minister to be a pledge on which we could not go back. What was a pledge
to the Turks should equally be a pledge to the Armenians.
Mr. CHAMBERLAIN
I am afraid I have not all the utterances of my right hon. Friend the
Prime Minister so close to my hand as the Noble Lord, who, think,
studies them merely in order to repudiate or condemn. I do, however,
deprecate the argument that any Minister who stands at this Box, or
speaks in another place to his own people merely to expound the views
and intentions of His Majesty’s Government, cannot do so without being
pledged thereby, and without giving the right to some party or people
outside this country to claim that these are pledges binding on the
Government upon which they have a right to insist.
Mr. A. WILLIAMS
The Prime Minister in the House of Commons on the 29th April, 1920,
said: But I assure my hon. Friends that we cannot dissociate ourselves
from the responsibility that is cast upon us by our pledges in respect
of the Armenians."-[OFFICIAL REPORT, 29th April, 1920; col. 1520, Vol.
128.] Those are the words of the Prime Minister.
Mr. CHAMBERLAIN
I think the hon. Member has taken up all the remaining time.