by Robert Fisk
Any discussion of genocide in The Independent shows just how much it dominates the public mind. After writing about the Armenian Holocaust, the chairman of the Latvian National Council in Britain wrote to remind me that up to 11 million people died in the “terror famine” in the Ukraine between 1930 and 1933. “There will be no Holocaust Day for them,” he said. What of the deaths of millions of Muslims expelled from the Balkans and Russia in the nineteenth century, “part of Europe’s own forgotten past,” as a historian has put it? Readers urge me to examine King Leopold II’s Congo Holocaust, in which millions died—beaten or from physical exhaustion, famine or disease—in effective slave labour camps in the last century. And how are we to deal with those Spaniards who claim, with good reason, that Franco’s annihilation of 30,000 political and military opponents—still buried in 600 mass graves across Spain—was a form of genocide?
When the historian Norman Davis wrote to me in 1998 to remind me that Hitler’s question about the Armenians—“Who, after all, is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?”—was asked in relation to the Poles and first recorded by the Berlin bureau chief of the Associated Press, Louis Lochner, in August 1939, Davis concluded that “one is tempted to add—‘and who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of Poles?’ ” But sure enough, there was a book written anonymously just after the Second World War with a preface by, of all people, T. S. Eliot, which records the suffering of the millions of Poles deported to death and starvation by the Soviet army which had entered Poland shortly after the 1939 German invasion. And there is one passage in this book which always moves me, in which a Polish mother hopes that the deportation train will leave in the night:
for the track went round a low hill just beside the homestead, and she hoped that the children need not see it and feel all their sorrow freshly burst out again. Unfortunately, the train left during the day. As the homestead came in sight, they saw neighbours and other members of the family standing on the hill and the parish priest with a crucifix in his hand . . . As the chimneys, the orchard, and the trees came clearly into sight, Tomus cried out in a terrible voice, “Mammy, Mammy, our orchard, our Pond, our . . . cow grazing! Mammy why do we have to go away?
That departure, the innocence of Tomus, his affection for the family cow, the growing awareness of the mother that the deportation train will pass their home, and that child’s question echoes those of millions of other voices that would be heard on these same railway tracks as Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews gathered momentum in the months and years to come, just as they carried back to the Armenian Holocaust twenty-four years earlier. It was a Polish-born Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who in 1944 coined the word “genocide” for the Armenians, an act which helped to put in place the legal and moral basis for a culture of human rights.
So with all the evidence, the eyewitness accounts, the diplomatic reports, the telegrams, the bones and skulls of a million and a half people, could such a genocide be denied? Could such an act of mass wickedness as the Armenian genocide be covered up? Or could it, as Hitler suggested, be forgotten? Could the world’s first Holocaust—a painful irony this—be half-acknowledged but downgraded in the list of human bestiality as the dreadful twentieth century produced further acts of mass barbarity and presaged the ferocity of the twenty-first?
Alas, all this has come to pass. When I first wrote about the Armenian massacres in 1993, the Turks denounced my article—as they have countless books and investigations before and since—as a lie. Turkish readers wrote to my editor to demand my dismissal from The Independent. If Armenian citizens were killed, they wrote—and I noted the “if” bit—this was a result of the anarchy that existed in Ottoman Turkey in the First World War, civil chaos in which countless Turks had died and in which Armenian paramilitaries had deliberately taken the side of Tsarist Russia. The evidence of European commissions into the massacres, the eyewitness accounts of Western journalists of the later slaughter of Armenians at Smyrna—the present-day holiday resort of Izmir, where countless British sunbathers today have no idea of the bloodbath that took place on and around their beaches—the denunciations of Morgenthau and Churchill, were all dismissed as propaganda.
Güler Köknar, head of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, wrote to my editor, Simon Kelner, to claim that Armenians “had defected en masse to fight for the enemy, served as Fifth Columnists, and commenced a civil war against Ottoman Muslims.” Ms. Suna Çakır wrote to tell me that claims of an Armenian genocide were “purely fabricated . . . a mere figment of the imagination.” Aygen Tat of Washington, D.C., emailed my paper to say that an article I wrote about the Armenian genocide was “a fraud.” The Hitler quotation was “fabricated” and “there never was an Armenian Holocaust or Genocide but there was a Turkish massacre by Armenians and their Czarist Russian masters.” Tat’s final line was to ask “why blame Turkey and the Turks for events that occurred in 1915?” Ibrahim Tansel said interestingly that the “so called Armenian genocide was partially response [sic] of villagers. In fact to avoid more bloodshed Armenians were moved from Anatolia to Lebanon.” This flood of mail was performing something very disturbing: it was turning the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide into the victims and the victims into murderers and liars.
Each new letter—and some were clearly organised on a “round robin” basis— would add to the store of denial. S. Zorba of Rochester, New York, referred to “100-year-old unfortunate victims of the unfortunate event,” which he later identified as “the alleged genocide.” Other emails denounced me as “wicked” and one, after condemning my “ignorance” and “arrogance,” finished with a very revealing line. “May be there was a genocide but it is not your duty to judge. It is up to historians to find out the reality.” This was to become a weary refrain, repeated— incredibly—even by Israeli politicians, of whom more later.
But these remarks should not be seen in isolation. They were supported by Turkish diplomats. Korkmaz Haktanır, the Turkish ambassador to London, complained in a letter to The Independent that “many members of my family and their community suffered and died at the hands of Armenian terrorists.” He enclosed two photographs of the bodies of horribly mutilated women, killed by Armenians—according to his captions—in the villages of Subatan and Merseni Dere in 1915. Fisk had shown, he asserted, “an eagerness to reopen old wounds”—which at least provided an admission that there were wounds inflicted in the first place.
Haktanir’s opposite number in Israel, Barlas Özener, made an even more extraordinary démarche—in view of the country in which he was serving—in a letter to the Jerusalem Post Magazine in which he accused the author of an article on Armenia’s “Genocide Denied” of an attempt to rewrite history. “The myth of ‘Armenian Holocaust’ was created immediately after World War I with the hope that the Armenians could be rewarded for their ‘sufferings’ with a piece of disintegrating Ottoman state,” he wrote. What survivors of the Jewish Holocaust were supposed to make of this piece of “denialism” was beyond comprehension. The journalist, Marilyn Henry, had, according to Özener, “used her pen” to target “the new Knesset and the new Israeli government and Turkish–Israeli relations.”
But Turkish diplomats need have no fear of Israel’s opprobrium. When a Holocaust conference was to be held in Tel Aviv in 1982, the Turkish government objected to the inclusion of material on the Armenian slaughter. Again incredibly, Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel withdrew from the conference after the Israeli foreign ministry said that it might damage Israeli–Turkish relations. The conference went ahead—with lectures on the Armenian genocide—after Shimon Peres vainly asked Israel’s most prominent expert in genocide, Israel Charny, not to include the Armenian massacres.
Peres was to go much further—and deep into the moral quagmire of Holocaust denial—in a statement he made prior to an official visit to Ankara as Israeli foreign minister in April 2001. In an interview with the Anatolia News Agency, Peres said that “we reject attempts to create a similarity
between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide.” If a position should be taken about these “allegations,” Peres said, “it should be done with great care not to distort the historical realities.” These astonishing comments by Peres—which flew in the face of all the facts that he must himself have been aware of, all the witness testimony, all the direct German links between the 1915 genocide and the Jewish extermination—received a powerful response from Charny, who is an Israeli academic of absolute integrity.
“It seems to me . . .” Charny wrote in a personal letter to Peres, “that you have gone beyond a moral boundary that no Jew should allow himself to trespass . . . it may be that in your broad perspective of the needs of the State of Israel it is your obligation to circumvent and desist from bringing up the subject with Turkey, but as a Jew and an Israeli I am ashamed of the extent to which you have now entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to the denials of the Holocaust.” Charny reminded Peres that at a conference on the Jewish Holocaust in Philadelphia in 2000, a large number of researchers, including Israeli historians, signed a public declaration that the Armenian genocide was factual, and that a 1997 meeting of the Association of Genocide Scholars voted a resolution that the Armenians suffered “full-scale genocide.” Nor did Charny flinch in his fine two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide , which includes forty-five pages of factual testimony and contemporary diplomatic and journalistic accounts of the Armenian slaughter, especially from The New York Times, and—unusually—large quotations from original Turkish sources. One of them, the distinguished Turkish historian Ahmed Refik, who served in the intelligence service of the Ottoman general staff, stated categorically that “the aim of Ittihad [the Turkish leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress] was to destroy the Armenians.”
Charny rightly pointed out that Peres’s denial was founded upon his wish to advance Israeli–Turkish relations—relations that Turkey itself endangered when it interfered with Charny’s 1982 genocide conference in Tel Aviv. According to Elie Wiesel, he was told “by an Israeli official . . . that the Turks had let it be known there would be serious difficulties if Armenians took part in the conference.”
So for the Armenians, is there to be no justice, no acknowledgement of the terrible crime committed against them, no restitution, no return of property, no apology? Just a million and a half skeletons whose very existence the Turks still try to deny? Is Turkey so fearful, so frightened of its own past that it cannot do what Germany has done for the Jews—purged itself with remorse, admission, acknowledgement, reparations, good will? As Jonathan Eric Lewis of the Remarque Institute at New York University has asked, “how can the destruction of a huge portion of the Ottoman Empire’s merchant class be anything other than a central issue in Turkey’s modern history? The lands, homes, and property of the Armenians are now in the hands of those who have benefited from past crimes. The fear of having to pay reparations is but one of the many reasons why the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the genocide.”
Yet still the denials continue. When Pope John Paul II dared to refer to “the Armenian genocide, which was the prelude of future horrors,” the Turkish newspaper Milliyet libelled him on its front page with the headline: “The Pope has been struck with senile dementia.” Dr. Salâhi Sonyel, claiming—falsely—that Hitler’s question about the Armenians is a forgery, tried to disconnect it from the Nazi genocide by pointing out correctly that the German Führer was talking about the Poles, not the Jews. It sounds a strong line—until you remember that one-third of all Poles in 1939 were Jewish, the very section of the population Hitler intended to exterminate. This is the same Sonyel who entitled one of his essays: “How Armenian Propaganda against the Ottoman Caliphate swayed the gullible Christian World.” The real difference between the Armenian Holocaust and the Jewish Holocaust, of course, is that Germany has admitted its responsibility while successive Turkish governments have chosen to deny the Armenian genocide.
In the United States, Turkey’s powerful lobby groups attack any journalist or academic who suggests that the Armenian genocide is fact. For Turkey—no longer the “sick man” of Europe—is courted by the same Western powers that so angrily condemned its cruelty in the last century. It is a valued member of the NATO alliance—our ally in bombing Serbia in 1999—the closest regional ally of Israel and a major buyer of U.S. and French weaponry. Just as we remained silent at the start of the persecution of the Kurds, so we now prefer to ignore the twentieth century’s first Holocaust.
This scandalous denial now even infects journalists. When the Pope visited Armenia in September 2001, the Associated Press felt constrained to tell its subscribers that “Turkey firmly denies Armenian charges that Ottoman Turk armies were involved in a genocide, a word that came into general use only after World War II.” Quite apart from that wonderful word “firmly”—if the Turks are “firm” about it, you see, maybe they are right!—the word “charges” is a disgraceful pieces of journalism, and the reference to Lemkin’s definition (which was made during, not after, the Second World War) fails to acknowledge that he was referring to the Armenians. The BBC, covering the same papal visit, also showed contemptible standards when it told listeners that “more than a million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman empire broke up.” Note how the Armenians were killed rather than massacred and how this mysteriously took place during the breakup of the Ottoman empire—which is in any case factually incorrect, since the empire briefly continued after the First World War.
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 Eu
rope. 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.”
