ROBERT FISK: TO CONTINUE TO DENY THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IS CLOSE TO A CRIMINAL LIE

13:01, 20 Apr 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan

Robert Fisk
The Independent

At seven o’clock on Thursday evening, a group of very brave men
and women will gather in Taksim Square, in the centre of Istanbul,
to stage an unprecedented and moving commemoration. The men and
women will be both Turkish and Armenian, and they will be gathering
together to remember the 1.5 million Christian Armenian men, women and
children slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks in the 1915 genocide. That
Armenian Holocaust – the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust –
began 100 years ago this Thursday, only half a mile from Taksim,
when the government of the time rounded up hundreds of Armenian
intellectuals and writers from their homes and prepared them for
death and the annihilation of their people.

The Pope has already annoyed the Turks by calling this wicked act –
the most terrible massacre of the First World War – a genocide, which
it was: the deliberate and planned attempt to liquidate a race of
people. The Turkish government – but, thank God, not all the Turkish
people – have maintained their petulant and childish denial of this
fact of history on the grounds that the Armenians were not killed
according to a plan (the old “chaos of war” nonsense), and that the
word “genocide” was anyway coined only after the Second World War and
thus cannot apply to them. On that basis, the First World War wasn’t
the First World War because it wasn’t called the First World War at
the time!

Two thoughts come to mind, then, on this centenary of the butchery,
mass rape and child killing of 1915. The first is that for a powerful
government of a strong – and courageous – European and Nato nation
such as Turkey to continue to deny the truth of this mass human
cruelty is close to a criminal lie. More than 100,000 Turks have
discovered that they have Armenian grandmothers or great-grandmothers –
the very women kidnapped, enslaved, raped or converted on the death
marches from Anatolia into the northern Syrian desert – and Turkish
historians themselves (alas, not enough of them) are now producing
the most detailed documentary evidence of the sinister Talat Pasha’s
extermination orders issued from what was then Constantinople.

Yet anyone who opposes the government’s denial of genocide is still
vilified. For almost a quarter of a century, I have been receiving
mail from Turks about my own writing on the genocide. It started
when I dug the bones and skulls of massacred Armenians out of the
Syrian desert with my own hands in 1992. A few correspondents wanted
to express their support. Most letters were little short of pernicious.

And I rather fear that the continued denial by the Turkish government
could be as dangerous to Turkey as it is outrageous for the Armenian
descendants of the dead. I remember an elderly Armenian lady describing
to me how she saw Turkish militiamen piling living babies on top of
each other and setting fire to them. Her mother told her that their
cries were the sound of their souls going up to heaven.

Isn’t this – and the enslavement of women – exactly what Isis is
perpetrating against its ethnic enemies just across the Turkish border
today? Denial is fraught with peril.

And let’s ask ourselves what would happen if the present German
government was to claim that any demand to recognise the “events” of
1939-1945 – in which six million Jews were murdered – as a genocide
was “Jewish propaganda” and “mutilating history and law”. Yet that
was pretty much what the Turkish government said when the EU last
week asked it to recognise the Armenian genocide. The EU, the foreign
ministry said in Ankara, had succumbed to “Armenian propaganda” about
the “events” of 1915, and was “mutilating history and law”. If Germany
had adopted such unforgivable words about the Jewish Holocaust, you
would not have been able to see through the Berlin exhaust fumes as
the world’s ambassadors headed for the airport.

Yet the very day after the brave little commemoration scheduled
for Taksim Square this week, the great and the good of the Western
world will be gathering with Turkish leaders a few miles to the
west of Istanbul to honour the dead of Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal’s
extraordinary – and brilliant – 1915 victory over the Allies in the
First World War. How many of them will remember that among the Turkish
heroes fighting for Turkey at Gallipoli was a certain Armenian Captain
Torossian – whose own sister would soon die in the genocide?

I plan to report on the commemoration next week in the company of
Turkish friends. But the second thought that comes to mind – and
Armenian friends must forgive me – is that I’m not terribly interested
in what the Armenians say and do on this 100th anniversary. I want
to know what they plan to do on the day after the day of the 100th
anniversary. The Armenian survivors – those who could remember – are
now all dead. In about 30 years, Jews around the world will suffer
the same deep sadness as their own last survivors disappear from the
world of living testimony. But the dead live on, especially when their
victimhood is denied – a curse that forces them to die again and again.

Armenians must surely now compile a list of the brave Turks who
saved their lives during their people’s persecution. There is at
least one provincial governor, and individual named Turkish soldiers
and policemen, who risked their own lives to save Armenians at
this gruesome moment in Turkish history. Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
Turkey’s triumphalist prime minister, has spoken of his sorrow
for the Armenians, while continuing to deny the genocide. Would he
dare to refuse to sign an Armenian genocide book of commemoration
listing the brave Turks who tried to save their nation’s honour at
its darkest hour?

I’ve been banging on about this idea to Armenians for years. I said
the same to Armenians in Detroit last week. Honour the good Turks.

Alas, everyone claps. And does nothing.

From: Baghdasarian