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  • Book Review: Lest We Remember:

    The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
    January 31, 2015 Saturday

    Lest we remember

    BOOKS Reviews
    REVIEW BY JENNIFER BALINT


    Book: An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians? by
    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON, VINTAGE

    April 24, 1915, marks both the eve of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli,
    Australia's "coming of age", and the night in which Armenian
    political, intellectual and community leaders were rounded up in
    Constantinople and throughout the Ottoman state, imprisoned, and
    mostly executed. The 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing comes
    one day after the 100th anniversary of a mostly unrecognised genocide,
    the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman state under
    cover of the First World War.

    In An Inconvenient Genocide, international human-rights barrister
    Geoffrey Robertson makes the case for the atrocities perpetrated
    against the Armenian population to be categorised, legally, as
    genocide. He is insistent that it is a matter of law, not history nor
    morality.

    The significance of this book is that since the establishment of
    modern-day Turkey, the genocide has been denied. The systematic denial
    has left the Armenian community in a state of unrecognised mourning.
    As Robertson outlines, Turkey spends millions of dollars promoting its
    justification of the massacres as "strategically necessary in a civil
    war", and has made denial a condition of diplomatic relations. In
    showing that this is a matter of law, not history, Robertson engages
    directly with Turkey's denialist stance that it be "left to
    historians".

    The crime was always known. At the end of the war, Ottoman newspapers
    wrote editorials denouncing the massacres, and parliamentarians
    decried the actions of the Young Turks; one railed "we inherited a
    country turned into a huge slaughterhouse". The Allies had promised an
    international tribunal, describing the crimes - with the term used for
    the first time, as Robertson notes - as a "crime against humanity". No
    international tribunal eventuated. The Ottoman state set up its own
    tribunal, which was shut down with the rise of the Kemalist party and
    the establishment of the modern Turkish state.

    Robertson's book is an important contribution. Its strength lies in
    its systematic presentation of the evidence, that he then applies to
    the law of genocide - graphic eyewitness accounts by missionaries, aid
    workers, army officers, business people, consuls and ambassadors, part
    of which was collated by the British government in 1916, two
    commissioned US reports in 1919, the evidence presented at the Ottoman
    courts-martial, cables sent by key political leaders clearly outlining
    genocidal intent, even of the laws passed at the time that gave
    authority to the state to obtain the "abandoned" homes and property of
    deportees.

    He also includes diary entries found at the Australian National
    Archives from Australian diggers who as prisoners of war were
    witnesses to the slaughter of Armenians and the horrific deportations
    they were subject to that resulted in death, rape and abduction.
    Diaries from British servicemen are witness to the complicity of
    Germany, a complicity that extended to assisting the key political
    leaders to escape.

    Robertson's conclusion, in relation to the deportations authorised by
    the Ottoman state, is that "those political leaders who gave the
    orders intended that a substantial part of the Armenian population
    would be exterminated in consequence. There is no other inference that
    is 'reasonable'."

    And if Turkey finds it so hard to recognise it as a genocide, he
    maintains, then it should at least know that it is clearly a "crime
    against humanity" for which it should apologise and make reparations.
    "If these same events occurred today," he argues, "there can be no
    doubt that prosecutions before the International Criminal Court of
    Talaat [Pasha] and other CUP [Committee of Union and Progress]
    officials for genocide, for persecution and for other crimes against
    humanity would succeed."

    The larger question in this book is what can be done when there is no
    possibility of criminal legal accountability now that all the main
    perpetrators are dead. Here, Robertson argues for the pursuit of legal
    means as well as non-legal, including an apology and the gift of Mount
    Ararat to Armenia. He cautions against genocide denial laws, although
    his argument for "freedom of speech" neglects the harm that genocide
    denial causes. And he illustrates what he terms "genocide
    equivocators" through his own Freedom of Information requests that
    reveal how the British government was advised not to recognise the
    genocide.

    When the term "genocide" was coined, it was with the memory of the
    Ottoman massacres. The Holocaust led to its becoming law, but it was
    the Armenian genocide that motivated its development, a story Robinson
    tells in the book.

    While he dismisses historians, arguing that it is lawyers who make
    judgments on whether or not an act can be characterised as genocide,
    using the law to make the case is necessary in the face of Turkey's
    continued denial. What Robertson clearly shows, as historians and
    social scientists have said for decades, and victims and their
    descendants have known, what the Ottoman state did, was, in fact and
    in law, a genocide.

    Jennifer Balint teaches in the school of social and political sciences
    at the University of Melbourne.

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