Weekend Edition
October 14-15, 2006
"Suddenly, Those Armenian Graves Opened Up Before My Own Eyes"
Confronting Turkey’s Armenian Genocide
By ROBERT FISK
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 Arm! enian 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, ha s 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, o! n 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 present-day 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 Chi! rac 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 Is
tanbul. 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.
Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the
Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s collection, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk’s new book is The Conquest of the
Middle East.