Financial Times, UK

Nov 30 2018

 

 

LETTER to EDITOR

 

 

The history of the mass-murder of more than a 1m Ottoman Armenian and Assyrian civilians by their own government has been extremely well documented. The past couple of decades especially have seen a surge of groundbreaking studies by numerous Turkish and western academics that have meticulously unpacked this difficult history, explained its causes and analysed its effects. These include Donald Bloxham’s The Great Game of Genocide, Fatma Muge Gocek’s Denial of Violence and Stefan Ihrig’s Justifying Genocide, to mention just three.

The justification that “all sides suffered during the first world war” flies in the face of this vast established body of scholarship.

Furthermore, the ambassador’s calls for closer relations between Turks and Armenians are disingenuous at best, particularly when uttered at the moment when the state he represents is actively persecuting journalists and academics, and locking up members of civil society such as Osman Kavala, who have been tirelessly striving towards a desirable reconciliation.