The Great War for Civilisation (71 page)

So now, it seemed, mere mention of the Armenian genocide might “dilute” the “message” of Holocaust Day! All this had come about because of a “consultation exercise” in Whitehall. How typical it was of the Blair government to hold a “consultation exercise” to decide which ethnic group would have the privilege of having its suffering commemorated and which would be ruthlessly excised from the history books. At no point, of course, did the deadly word “Turkey” appear in Frater's correspondence. But he wrote another letter of astonishing insensitivity to Armen Lucas, a prominent Armenian businessman in France, repeating the same mantra of sympathy for the Armenians but adding that the British government had considered requests to examine other atrocities, including “the Crusades, slavery, colonialism, the victims of Stalin and the Boer War.” The Armenian genocide was now lumped in by the government with Pope Urban II's eleventh-century war against the Muslims of the Middle East. The principal of the Armenian Evangelical College in Beirut, deploring Frater's committee decision, argued powerfully that “any serious commemoration must include the aetiology of genocide, particularly those of the twentieth century, especially if the oblivion of one encouraged the next one.”

The BBC were asked to produce the official Holocaust Day commemoration, but when Lucas raised the omission of the Armenians with Daniel Brittain-Catlin, the BBC producer in charge, Brittain-Catlin admitted that the Home Office had “retained overall editorial control.” There then followed a breathtaking example of political arrogance. “Our historical frame of reference,” Brittain-Catlin announced, “does not include the period of 1915–20, and in terms of the event it was never in our brief to survey all 20th century atrocities.” However, he added, an outside broadcast on BBC2 “is likely to include reference to, however briefly, the Armenian genocide.” Note how the letter avoids the real issue. Lucas was not asking whether the BBC's “historical frame of reference”—whatever that is supposed to be—included the Armenian genocide, but why it did not do so. If it was never in the BBC's “brief” to survey all twentieth-century atrocities, the question is why not—and why not the Armenians? In the end, they were to be consigned—all those hundreds of thousands of slaughtered men, raped women and murdered children—to a reference, “however brief.” Brittain-Catlin did at least call the massacre of the Armenians a “genocide,” although I suspect this was a bureaucratic slip. But it would be hard to devise a more patronising letter to a man whose people were so cruelly persecuted.

All this obfuscation was based on a cynical premise by the Blair government, namely that it could get away with genocide denial to maintain good relations with Turkey. The message was very clear in 1999 when the British government stated, in a House of Lords reply, that “in the absence of unequivocal evidence to show that the Ottoman administration took a specific decision to eliminate the Armenians under their control at the time, British governments have not recognised the events of 1915 and 1916 as ‘genocide.' ” Now if this statement is true—if there is no “unequivocal evidence” of genocide in 1915—then the government must believe that the Bryce report; Churchill; Lloyd George; the American diplomats posted across the Ottoman empire at the time of the massacres; Armin Wegner, the photographer of the Armenian Holocaust; and the scholar Israel Charny—not to mention the actual survivors and the 150 professors who signed a declaration that the 1915 slaughter was genocide—are or were all frauds. This is clearly not true. Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, who delivered this meretricious statement for the British government, claimed that few other governments “attributed the name ‘genocide' to these tragic events. In our opinion that is rightly so because we do not believe it is the business of governments today to review events of over 80 years ago with a view to pronouncing on them . . . And who would benefit from taking such a position?”

Certainly not Tony Blair. But another part of the statement is even more disturbing—and indicative of the Blair government's immoral attitude towards history—when it suggests that Armenia and Turkey should “resolve between themselves the issues which divide them . . . we could not play the role of supportive friend to both countries were we to take an essentially political position on an issue so sensitive for both.” So acknowledging or denying genocide is a “political” issue. The mass killings are now the “events.” And governments cannot review events of “over 80 years ago” and take a position on them. What this means is that if in the year 2025 a new and right-wing Germany—from which heaven preserve us—were to deny the Jewish Holocaust, the British government might stand back and say that it could not take a position on “events” that happened eighty years earlier, that the Jewish community would have to “resolve” this matter with the Germans. That is the logic of claiming that the powerful Turkish successor to the Ottoman genociders must resolve this “sensitive” matter with the descendants of the Armenian victims.

The British were now also following Israel's practice of dissociating the Armenian Holocaust from the Jewish Holocaust, creating a uniqueness about the Jewish experience of persecution which no other ethnic group was to be permitted to share. Israel's ambassador to the Armenian state crassly said the same thing in 2002.
⁷⁵
So, two years later, did the British ambassador to Armenia.

But it is easy to be self-righteous. When Blair refused to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, I wrote a series of angry articles in
The Independent
, saying that Holocaust Day was to be an Armenian-free, Jewish-only affair. Yes, the word took a capital “H” when it applied to Jews. I have always agreed with this. Mass ethnic slaughter on such a scale—Hitler's murder of 6 million Jews—deserves a capital “H.” But I also believe that the genocide of other races—of any race— merits a capital “H.” So that's how I wrote it in a long centre-page article in my paper. Chatting to an Armenian acquaintance, I mentioned that I had done this. It would be the “Armenian Holocaust” in my report. Little could I have imagined how quickly the dead would rise from their graves to be counted. For when my article appeared in
The Independent—
a paper which has never failed to dig into the human wickedness visited upon every race and creed—my references to the Jewish Holocaust remained with a capital “H.” But the Armenian Holocaust had been downgraded to a lower-case “h.” “Tell me, Robert,” my Armenian friend asked me in suppressed fury, “how do we Armenians qualify for a capital ‘H'? Didn't the Turks kill enough of us? Or is it because we're not Jewish?”
⁷⁶

The Independent
is the most outspoken paper in Britain in its demand that Turkey admit the truth about the Armenian killings. When the Turkish embassy officially complained in August 2000 that an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London should make textual changes to references about the Armenian killings—“a messy and painful affair” was the most Turkish diplomat Mehmet Akat could bring himself to say of the genocide—an
Independent
editorial said that “it almost beggars belief.” Imagine, the paper said, “the German government declaring that, although a number of Jews died in the Second World War, it was because of poor health and as a result of the fighting.”

But even the Imperial War Museum could bow to Turkey. When it staged another exhibition,
Crimes Against Humanity
, just over a year later—the very expression first used in 1915 about the Armenians—it included an entire panel in the Armenian section containing Turkey's denial that the mass murders ever took place. “What is shocking,” one of our readers commented after visiting a museum dedicated to Muslims murdered by Armenians at the Turkish town of Yeşilyayla, “is that the very language of how we respond to the Jewish Holocaust has been appropriated and applied not to the murdered Armenians but to the Turks themselves.” Turkey had already tried to undermine the authenticity of the photographic evidence of the genocide, demanding that the Hulton Getty picture library withdraw three famous pictures of the Armenian dead—including an iconic portrait by the brave German Armin Wegner of an Armenian girl and two smaller children lying dead amid garbage in 1915—on the grounds that there was no genocide. Hulton withdrew the pictures for three days but the agency's general manager, Mathew Butson, dismissed the Turkish objections. “I think that because of their application to join the EU, the Turks want to ‘clean' their history,” he said. “But this isn't the way to do it!”

Back in the United States, Armenians demanded compensation from U.S. companies with whom their families—murdered in 1915—had insured their lives. If it took Jewish Holocaust survivors forty years to gain recompense from such companies, it took the Armenian Holocaust survivors and descendants eighty-five years. New York Life Insurance agreed to settle a class-action suit for $20 million, but even then its chairman, Sy Sternberg—who said that a third of the claims were settled after the murders—used the neutral language favoured by Turkey. Prompt payment had been made on claims, he said, “when it became clear that many of our Armenian policyholders perished in the tragic events of 1915.” Perished? Tragic events? Several companies in the United States initially declined to pay out because “no one came forward” to make claims. Andrew Kevorkian, one of the most outspoken British Armenians on 1915, asked: “What did they expect? That the Turks would write a little note—‘To Whom It May Concern'—stating the date of the murder each time they killed these men and women?”

When the Armenian community in the United States asked George W. Bush for his policy on their genocide if he were elected president, he stated on 19 February 2000 that “the Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign . . . an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people.” Once he became president, however, Bush lost his courage, failed to honour his promise to the Armenian community and resorted to the usual weasel-words. Addressing Armenians on 24 April 2001, the eighty-sixth anniversary of the start of the slaughter, Bush no longer used the word “genocide.” Instead, it became “one of the great tragedies of history”; he talked only about “infamous killings” and “the tragedy that scarred the history of the Armenian people” and their “bitter fate” at “the end of the Ottoman Empire.”

On the same day a year later, Bush called the genocide “an appalling tragedy,” talked about “horrific killings” but referred only to “this horrendous loss of life.” Again, “genocide” had disappeared and there was even a mystifying remark about “the wounds that remain painful for people in Armenia, in Turkey, and around the globe.” In April 2003 it was “a horrible tragedy” and “a great calamity” but one which—for some reason best known to Bush—reflected “a deep sorrow that continues to haunt them and their neighbours, the Turkish people.” This was preposterous. The Turkish government was denying the genocide—not feeling sorry about it. In the words of the Armenian National Committee of America, Bush, despite his calls for “moral clarity” in international affairs, had “allowed pressure by a foreign government to reduce the President of the United States to using evasive and euphemistic terminology to avoid properly identifying the Armenian genocide . . .”

This, it should be remembered, was the same president who thought he was fighting a “war against terror,” who claimed he was fighting “evil” but who, when confronted with inescapable evidence of both terror and evil on a scale outreaching anything perpetrated against Americans, got cold feet and ran away from the truth. Indeed, there are times when the very existence of the Armenian genocide— for so many nations around the world—seems to have become far more dangerous than the weapons of mass destruction Bush and Blair lied about in Iraq. In this parallel but more realistic universe, it is the Turks who are telling Bush and Blair: You are either with us or against us. And both men have lined up alongside the Turks to deny history.

So now let me shine some sad, wintry sunlight over the West's miserable, cowardly and dangerous response to the twentieth century's first Holocaust. The genocide of 1915 was “forcefully remembered” at Westminster Abbey in 1996 when Sir Michael Mayne, the Dean Emeritus of Westminster, commissioned an Irish artist to carve a stone to lie outside the west doors. “REMEMBER,” the inscription reads, “all innocent victims of oppression, violence and war.” Round the edge is written: “Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by?” Queen Elizabeth unveiled the stone in the presence of men and women who had suffered in Auschwitz, Rwanda, Bosnia, Siberia, Soweto and Armenia. Among them was eighty-nine-year-old Yervant Shekerdemian, who as a boy experienced the Armenian massacres and lost most of his family in the genocide.

And after the months of mean refusal to acknowledge the truth of history, an outpouring of public anger eventually forced the Blair government, at the very last moment, to give way and allow more than twenty Armenians to attend the first Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. Shekerdemian and another genocide survivor, Anig Bodossian, were belatedly invited. The Armenian Bishop in Britain was given a place of honour with other senior clergy, including the Chief Rabbi, and was among those who lit a candle before Blair and other politicians.

Not long afterwards, on Turkish television, an extraordinary event took place. A Turkish writer and historian, Taner Akçam, lectured his people on the facts—the reality—of the 1915 Armenian genocide. In front of a nationwide audience, he advised penitence. “If you can't bring yourself to describe it as genocide, call it a massacre if you want,” he said. “But it was a crime against humanity . . . Ask forgiveness from the Armenian people and . . . make a commitment that in Turkey, political dissent and disagreement should no longer be treated as an offence.”