The Great War for Civilisation (70 page)

Most outrageous of all, however, has been
The New York Times
, which so bravely recorded the truth—and scooped the world—with its coverage of the Armenian genocide in 1915. Its bravery has now turned to cowardice. Here, for example, is a key paragraph from a 25 March 1998
New York Times
report, by Stephen Kinzer, on the 70,000 Armenians who survive in present-day Turkey:

Relations between Turks and Armenians were good during much of the Ottoman period, but they were deeply scarred by massacres of Armenians that pro-Ottoman forces in eastern Anatolia carried out in the spring of 1915. Details of what happened then are still hotly debated, but it is clear that vast numbers of Armenians were killed or left to die during forced marches in a burst of what is now called “ethnic cleansing.”

Now I have a serious problem with this paragraph. First of all, the figure of a million and a half Armenians—or even a million Armenians—the all-important statistic that puts the Armenians in the genocide bracket, indeed marks them as victims of the first holocaust of the last century, has totally disappeared. We are left with what Kinzer calls “vast numbers” of killed which, I suppose, keeps
The
New York Times
out of harm's way with the Turks. Then genocide is reduced to “ethnic cleansing,” a phrase familiar from the Serb wars against the Muslims of Bosnia and the Albanians of Kosovo, but on an infinitely less terrible scale than the massacres of 1915. And note how this was a “burst” of “ethnic cleansing,” a sudden, spontaneous act rather than a premeditated mass killing. Note, too, the reference to “pro-Ottoman forces” rather than the dangerous but real “Turkish forces,” or even “Turkish Ottoman forces,” that he should have been writing about. Then we are told that the issue is “hotly debated.” How very “fair” of
The New York
Times
to remind us that a campaign exists to deny the truth of this genocide without actually saying so, a lie every bit as evil as that most wicked claim that the Jewish Holocaust never happened. Another of Kinzer's articles was headlined: “Armenia Never Forgets—Maybe It Should.”

I have my suspicions about all this. I think
The New York Times'
reporter produced this nonsense so as to avoid offending the present Turkish government. He didn't want his feature to be called “controversial.” He didn't want to stir things up. So he softened the truth—and the Turks must have been delighted. Now let's supply a simple test. Let us turn to that later and numerically more terrible Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. Would Kinzer have written in the same way about that mass slaughter? Would he have told us that German–Jewish relations were merely “deeply scarred” by the Nazi slaughter? Would he have suggested—even for a moment—that the details are “hotly debated”? Would he have compared the massacre of the Jews to the Bosnian war? No, he would not have dared to do so. He should not have dared to do so. So why was he prepared to cast doubt on the Armenian genocide?

Kinzer was back to his old denial tricks in an article in
The New York Times
on 24 April 2002, about the proposed Armenian Genocide Museum in Washington:

Washington already has one major institution, the United States Holocaust Museum, that documents an effort to destroy an entire people. The story it presents is beyond dispute. But the events of 1915 are still a matter of intense debate.

Here we go again. The Jewish Holocaust is “undeniable,” which is true. But its undeniability is used here to denigrate the truth of the Armenian Holocaust which, by inference, is not “beyond dispute” and is the subject of “intense debate.” The “hotness” of the debate and its “intensity” again give force in both of Kinzer's articles to the idea that the Turkish denial may be true. The same slippage reappeared in
The New York Times
on 8 June 2003, when a famous photograph of Armenian men being led by Turkish gendarmes from an anonymous town in 1915 carried the caption “Armenians were marched to prison by Turkish soldiers in 1915.” Scarcely any Armenians were marched off to prison. They were marched off—prior to the deportation, rape and massacre of their womenfolk and children—to be massacred. The town in the picture is Harput—the photograph was taken by a German businessman—and the men of Harput, some of whom are in this remarkable picture, were almost all massacred. But
The New York Times
sends these doomed men peacefully off to “prison.”

Nor is
The New York Times
alone in its gutlessness. On 20 November 2000, The Wall Street Journal Europe, perhaps Israel's greatest friend in the U.S. press— though there are many other close contenders—went in for a little Holocaust denial of its own. While acknowledging the “historical fact that during World War I an estimated 600,000 Armenians, possibly more, lost their lives, many in forced deportations to Syria and Palestine orchestrated by Ottoman armies,” it goes on to say—and readers should not smile at the familiarity of this wretched language—that “whether the majority of these deaths were the result of a deliberate policy of extermination or of other factors is a matter of contentious scholarly debate.” Here is the same old vicious undercutting of truth. The Armenians “lost their lives”—as soldiers do, though rarely have journalists referred to massacre victims in quite so bland a phrase—in deportations “orchestrated” by “Ottoman armies.” Once more, the word “Turkish” has been deleted. “Orchestrated” is a get-out phrase to avoid “perpetrated,” which would, of course, mean that we were talking about genocide. And then at the end, we have our old friend the “debate.” The truth of the Armenian genocide is “hotly” debated. Then it is subject to “intense” debate. And now this debate is “contentious” and “scholarly.”

And I think I know the identity of the “scholar” whom the
Journal
had in mind: Heath Lowry, Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University, who has written several tracts—published in Turkey— attempting to discredit the Armenian genocide. Peter Balakian and the historian Robert Jay Lifton have done an excellent job of investigating Lowry's work. Lowry went to Turkey with a Ph.D. in Ottoman Studies, worked at a research institute in Istanbul and lectured at Bosphorus University, returning to America in 1986 to become director of the Institute for Turkish Studies in Washington, D.C. The American institute was set up by the Turkish government; from here Lowry wrote op-eds and essays denying the 1915 genocide, and lobbied Congress to defeat Armenian genocide commemorative resolutions.

What was astonishing, however, was that when the Turkish ambassador to Washington, Nüzhet Kandemır, wrote to Robert Jay Lifton to complain about references to the Armenian genocide in his new book
The Nazi Doctors
, the diplomat accidentally enclosed with it a letter from Lowry to the embassy which was an original draft of the ambassador's letter to Lifton himself; Lowry, in other words, was telling the Turkish ambassador how to object to the genocide references in Lifton's book, adding for good measure that he had “repeatedly stressed both in writing and verbally to Ankara” his concerns about the historians whose scholarship had been used by Lifton; they included the indefatigable Vahakn Dadrian. What was Lowry doing, advising the Turkish government how to deny the Armenian Holocaust?

There are other chairs of Turkish studies at Harvard, Georgetown, Indiana, Portland State and Chicago. To qualify, the holders must have performed research work in archives in Turkey (often closed to historians critical of that country) and have “friendly relations with the Turkish academic community”—something they are not going to have if they address the substance of the Armenian genocide. The University of California at Los Angeles had the courage to turn down a chair. All holders, of course, believe that “historians” must primarily decide the truth, an expression that precludes evidence from the dwindling survivors of the massacres. All this prompted 150 Holocaust scholars and historians to call upon Turkey to end its campaign of denial; they included Lifton, Israel Charny, Yehuda Bauer, Howard Zinn and Deborah Lipstadt. They failed. It was Elie Wiesel who first said that denial of genocide was a “double killing.” First the victims are slaughtered— and then their deaths are turned into a non-event, an “un-fact.” The dead die twice. The survivors suffer and are then told they did not suffer, that they are lying.

And big guns are brought into action—almost literally—to ensure that this remains the case. When the U.S. House of Representatives proposed an Armenian Genocide Resolution in 2000, asking President Clinton in his annual Armenian commemoration address to refer to the killings as genocide—it had the votes to pass—Turkey warned Washington that it would close its airbases to American aircraft flying over the Iraqi “no-fly” zones. The Turkish defence minister, Sabahattin Çakmakoğlu, said that Turkey was prepared to cancel arms contracts with the United States. The Israeli foreign ministry took Turkey's side and President Bill Clinton shamefully gave in and asked that the bill be killed in the Senate. It was.

All across the United States, this same pressure operates. In 1997, for example, the Ellis Island Museum removed photographs and graphic eyewitness texts of the Armenian genocide from an exhibition. It had done the same thing in 1991. In 2001, the Turkish consul-general in San Francisco objected to the use of a former First World War memorial cross as an Armenian memorial to the genocide. When I investigated this complaint in San Francisco, it turned out that a so-called “Center for Scholars in Historical Accuracy; Stanford Chapter”—which, it turned out, had nothing to do with Stanford University—had claimed in an advertisement in the
San Francisco Chronicle
that such a memorial would become “a political advertisement to preach their [Armenian] version of history which is roundly disputed among objective scholars and historians.” Turks even circulated flyers to the local Chinese American Democratic Club—in Chinese—warning it that the memorial could lead to “an historical dispute that happened in the past.” So now the “debate” had become a “dispute,” but I knew who those “objective scholars” must be.

Holocaust denial is alive and well in the United States—Armenian Holocaust denial, that is. The historian Bernard Lewis, who is a strong supporter of Israel and a favourite of President George W. Bush, no longer accepts that genocide was perpetrated against the Armenians and his views in the United States go largely unchallenged. In France, however, where genocide denial is an offence, there was an outcry from Armenians; Lewis was convicted by the High Court in Paris of committing “an error” (
une faute
) because he said that the word “genocide” was “only the Armenian version of this story.” But when in 2000 the French Senate proposed to acknowledge the Armenian genocide of 1915, the French foreign ministry secretary-general responded with a statement that might have come from the Turkish embassy. Loïc Hennekinne said this was not the work of parliament and that history “should be interpreted by the historians.” It all sounded horribly familiar, but the Senate did pass their vote in November and the French National Assembly formally recognised the Armenian genocide two months later.

Then the sky fell. In revenge, the Turkish government cancelled a $200 million spy satellite deal with the French company Alcatel and threw the arms company Giat out of a $7 billion tank contract. The newspaper
Türkiye
supported the proposal of forty-two Islamist deputies in the Turkish parliament to vote to recognise “the genocide of Algerians by the French”—a real
touché
, this, for a country that has been almost as reticent about its cruelty in the 1954–62 Algerian war as it has about its Second World War Vichy past—and reminded readers of the first wholesale massacres of Muslim Algerians around Kerrata in 1945.

President Jacques Chirac was always frightened of the Armenian mass killings. At a 1999 press conference in Beirut—where tens of thousands of Armenian descendants of the first Holocaust live—he refused to discuss the proposed assembly resolution on the genocide. “I do not comment on a matter of domestic politics when I'm abroad,” he said. Would that, I asked myself as I listened to this dishonourable reply, have been Chirac's response to a condemnation of the Jewish Holocaust? In 2000, the best Chirac could do was to declare that he understood the “concerns” of Armenians.
⁷⁴
Turkey's application to join the European Union opened the question again. In the assembly on 14 October 2004, François Bayrou asked why the European Commission had made so much of the criminalisation of adultery in the new Turkish penal code—it was subsequently withdrawn—but ignored article 305, passed by the Turkish parliament, which states that prosecution for “anti-national plots” included, according to the Turkish commission of justice, “asking for the recognition of the Armenian genocide.”

But for sheer political cowardice, it would be hard to beat the performance of British prime minister Tony Blair—he who was so eager to go to war with Serbia and Iraq to end human rights abuses—when he proclaimed in 2000 that there would be an annual Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain. It would be, he said, a day to remember the Nazi genocide against the Jews. He made not a single reference— not a single pathetic remark—about the murder of one and a half million Armenians in 1915. Was it not a British government that published the Bryce report? Armenian leaders immediately protested against this grotesque omission and demanded the inclusion of their own Holocaust. The British government's response was as weasel-worded as it was shaming.

Neil Frater of the Home Office's “Race Equality Unit”—the very name speaks volumes about the politically correct orientation of Blair's administration—said that the atrocities were “an appalling tragedy” and that the government extended its “sympathies” to the descendants of the victims. His “unit” had asked the “Holocaust Memorial Day Steering Group” to consider the matter but “after full and careful consideration” had decided not to change their plans for the Day. The steering group, Frater said, wanted “to avoid the risk of the message becoming too diluted if we try to include too much history.” The purpose of Holocaust Day, he preached, was to “ensure a better understanding of the issues [of genocide] and promote a democratic and tolerant society that respects and celebrates diversity and is free of the influence of prejudice and racism.”