by Robert Fisk
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.”
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 becau
se 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!”
