ROBERT FISK – LET ME DENOUNCE GENOCIDE FROM THE DOCK
AZG Armenian Daily
17/10/2006
The Independent (London), October 14, 2006 Saturday,
First Edition
This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about
those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million
Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France’s
lower house of parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny
that Armenians suffered genocide. And, within an hour, Turkey’s most
celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk – only recently cleared by a Turkish
court for insulting "Turkishness" (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper
that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres – won the
Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of
Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have
been comforted.
While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence – the
systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of
their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of "civil war"
– Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new
evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its
capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust,
some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the
energy of a gravedigger.
Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes
to save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in
the Black Sea and the Euphrates rivers – mostly of women and children,
so many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its
course for up to half a mile. But Dadrian, who speaks and reads Turkish
fluently, has now discovered that tens of thousands of Armenians were
also burned alive in haylofts.
He has produced an affidavit to the Turkish court martial that
briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War,
a document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the
Turkish Third Army. He testified that, when he visited the Armenian
village of Chourig (it means "little water" in Armenian), he found all
the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that
all were standing upright. "In all the history of Islam," General Vehip
wrote, "it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery."
The Armenian Holocaust, now so "unmentionable" in Turkey, was no
secret to the country’s population in 1918. Millions of Muslim Turks
had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier
– a few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and
friends at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families – and,
on 19 October 1918, Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish
senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed
the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: "Let’s face it, we
Turks savagely ( vahshiane in Turkish) killed off the Armenians."
Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued,
Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set
solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for
Armenian deportees but a parallel set instructed Turkish officials to
"proceed with your mission" as soon as the deportee convoys were far
enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to
murder. As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on 19 November
1918: "The ‘mission’ in the circular was: to attack the convoys and
massacre the population??? I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as
an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman
Empire, these criminal people???"
How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths
in 1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide
of the Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of
the great crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how
much more extraordinary that their successors today maintain that
all of this is a myth, that anyone who says in presentday Istanbul
what the men of 1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution
under the notorious Law 301 for "defaming" Turkey.
I’m not sure that Holocaust deniers – of the anti-Armenian or
anti-Semitic variety – should be taken to court for their rantings.
David Irving is a particularly unpleasant "martyr" for freedom of
speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis’s one-franc fine
by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November
1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity to an
elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.
But it’s gratifying to find French President Jacques Chirac and his
interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey
will have to recognise the Armenian death as genocide before it
is allowed to join the European Union. True, France has a powerful
half-million-strong Armenian community.
But, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Lord Blair
of Kut al-Amara, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly
commented that the new French Bill, if passed by the senate in Paris,
will "prohibit dialogue" which is necessary for reconciliation between
Turkey and modern-day Armenia.
What is the subtext of this, I wonder. No more talk of the Jewish
Holocaust lest we hinder "reconciliation" between Germany and the
Jews of Europe?
But, suddenly, last week, those Armenian mass graves opened up
before my own eyes. Next month, my Turkish publishers are producing
my book, The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language,
complete with its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled "The
First Holocaust". On Thursday, I received a fax from Agora Books in
Istanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it "very likely that they
will be sued under Law 301" – which forbids the defaming of Turkey
and which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk – but that,
as a foreigner, I would be "out of reach".
However, if I wished, I could apply to the court to be included in
any Turkish trial.
Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to
touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock
with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa
Kamel Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
