Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Transcript: Geoffrey Robertson On His Latest Book The Inconvenient G

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Transcript: Geoffrey Robertson On His Latest Book The Inconvenient G

    TRANSCRIPT: GEOFFREY ROBERTSON ON HIS LATEST BOOK THE INCONVENIENT GENOCIDE

    ABC, Australia
    Show: Lateline
    Oct 20 2014

    Elgin Marbles should be reunited in Athens

    Australian Broadcasting Corporation
    Broadcast: 20/10/2014
    Reporter: Emma Alberici

    Human rights barrister and author discusses his attempt to have the
    Elgin Marbles in the British Museum returned to Greece, and his latest
    book , The Inconvenient Genocide

    Transcript

    EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: My guest tonight is Geoffrey Robertson QC,
    human rights lawyer, academic, author and broadcaster. In case you
    missed it, he spent much of last week in Greece with his barrister
    colleague, the new Mrs Clooney, Amal Alamuddin. The pair have worked
    for three years to try to have the Elgin Marbles returned to Athens.

    Almost 50 per cent of the sculptures that once decorated the exterior
    of the Parthenon are at the British Museum, which continues to reject
    requests to send them home. Geoffrey Robertson is back in Australia
    and I caught up with him a little earlier tonight.

    Geoffrey Robertson, welcome to Lateline. Good to have you here in
    person, not via satellite for once.

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON, HUMAN RIGHTS BARRISTER & AUTHOR: Or in Athens.

    EMMA ALBERICI: Indeed. You've just been to Greece in an effort to
    have the Elgin Marbles returned to Athens from London. They've been
    in British ownership now for something like 200 years.

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well ownership is stretching the point. They were
    stolen by Lord Elgin ...

    EMMA ALBERICI: But that is a point of contention, I guess, because
    the British ...

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: No, it's not really. i think - we have the licence
    that he extracted wrongly because he was ambassador and bankrupt
    and wanted to make some money and it gave him permission to pick up
    stones and make drawings. It didn't give him permission to rip the
    Parthenon apart to get at these extraordinary marbles - sculptures.

    EMMA ALBERICI: So is there a legal right? Does Athens have a legal
    right to demand them back?

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well, it's important to understand what they are
    before - because the law operates on the fact that this is like a kind
    of snapshot of what civilisation was like when it started. Because
    I snuck into the British Museum the other day and I was astonished
    by the fact that here, 2,500 years ago, 500 years before the birth
    of Christ, is a picture of civilisation when it started. They were
    communicating, they were having discourse, they were making love,
    showing affection. They were drinking a lot of wine, which obviously
    lubricated the beginnings of civilisation. But it's like a photograph.

    And 55 per cent of these extraordinary sculptures made by Phidias are
    in the British Museum and 40 per cent are in Athens where they belong
    in the shadow over the Parthenon, which is this marvellous temple. And
    in the British Museum, they're lit in bright white light and they're
    like bodies in a mausoleum. They're like as if they were set out on
    a mortuary slab. So, it's all wrong. And what we're trying to do is
    to reunite this extraordinary picture. The British Museum is kind of
    ripping it apart and we want to put it back together to understand it.

    I mean, you get the body of Poseidon, the God of the sea - half of
    it is in London and half of it is in Greece. Well, it all ought to
    be there under the blue Attic sky in the shadow of the Parthenon at
    the New Acropolis Museum. And that's the object, actually, to reunite
    perhaps the most important work of art in the world, which - not for
    the sake of Greece, particularly, but for the sake of the world.

    EMMA ALBERICI: Well this British intransigence comes from the
    very highest levels. David Cameron has said he has no intention of
    repatriating them. The Mayor of London has said similar things. Do
    you have any confidence at all that there's some movement likely?

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Yes, but most British people are in favour of
    sending them back. The opinion polls always say 88 per cent of the
    British want it - want them returned. And the great thing about
    Britain, what makes it great, is that they do accept the umpire's
    finger. If you're out, you're out. If you're given out by a court and
    there is doctrine developing in international law about the return
    of cultural property. There are courts - the International Court of
    Justice, the European Court of Human Rights - that have acknowledged
    this. We're seeing a lot of the Nazi art being returned under threat
    of court action. UNESCO has given Britain six months to agree to a
    mediation. If they don't agree, then I think a legal action will be
    the way forward.

    EMMA ALBERICI: Your colleague on this trip to Athens last week was
    Amal Alamuddin, now known as Amal Clooney, after she married that
    actor chap. Was it intentional, the timing of this particular trip,
    given the media frenzy around the wedding?

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: No, it was purely fortuitous, actually. We were
    - I was asked to advise the Greek Government three years ago. And in
    writing my opinion then, I brought in a very brilliant young associate,
    Amal, who is a terrific international lawyer. She counter-signed the
    opinion. And when we were asked to go and see the Greek Government
    again, it just happened to be her first job after her honeymoon and
    that's the way the world is.

    EMMA ALBERICI: You have to say from a publicity perspective, it was
    brilliant if you were trying to exert a little more pressure on the
    British Government.

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well it has had focus, it has caused - the way
    the world is, it's caused a lot of attention to be drawn to this very
    important matter. But we had to - we decided actually to cancel a
    trip to the Parthenon itself, which was not necessary for the work
    that we did, but because it would've simply provided an opportunity
    for photographs to grace magazines around the world.

    EMMA ALBERICI: Let's change gears now. I want to talk about your
    latest book, The Inconvenient Genocide. It's about the massacre of
    Armenians during the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Is it still illegal in
    Turkey to recognise this as a genocide?

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Pretty much. It's the crime of insulting
    Turkishness under rule 301 of the Criminal Code and you can go to
    prison for it and some people do and there've been - it's quite
    ludicrous. You go to prison if you affirm the genocide in Turkey
    and you can go to prison if you deny it in places like France or
    Switzerland. So it's a hot topic and it's going to get hotter as
    we move up to the centenary, which has a particular resonance for
    Australians.

    EMMA ALBERICI: Indeed. You mention Julie Bishop in the book, and in
    fact, you call her foolish.

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Yeah, she was - well, the drafting of her letter on
    the subject was foolish because she said, "The Australian Government
    doesn't recognise the genocide." Now that's a very provocative thing
    to say. She went on to say that the Australian Government doesn't
    get involved in this sensitive debate, which is an acceptable
    thing to say and a contradictory thing to say, but of course it
    was relished by the Turkish press, which had screaming headlines,
    "Australia denies genocide," which was not, I suspect, the impression
    that she wanted to give at all. The Parliament of New South Wales
    has recognised the genocide and been threatened with exclusion from
    Gallipoli on the centenary next year. So it is an interesting and
    controversial question and a damaging question, I think, for reasons
    I'll explain. But we should be aware that the trigger for the killing
    of over half the Armenian race was in fact the landing at Gallipoli.

    The genocide began on 24th April, 1915 when the boats were seen, the
    ANZACs huddled in the landing craft and that is when they went out
    and rounded up all the intellectuals, the Armenian community leaders,
    school teachers, MP, journalists, took them away and killed them. And
    that was the beginning of a set of of massacres, deportations, death
    matches of women and their children and old men through the deserts
    and at least a million Armenians were killed in the course of the
    next few months.

    EMMA ALBERICI: Am I right to say that in the book you seem to point
    out a contradiction between what was written in the letter by Julie
    Bishop in June of this year and what had previously been said by the
    Prime Minister?

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Oh, yes, Tony Abbott when in opposition every
    year and the Armenians commemorate the killing of their people on 24th
    April, the day before we commemorate ANZAC Day, and Tony Abbott every
    year would condemn the Armenian genocide. But of course, like President
    Obama, who when he was on the campaign trail said it was a genocide,
    "And when I'm President, I'm going to recognise it." Of course, when
    he became President, the importance of Turkey as a NATO ally with its
    bases that we're currently using in the battle against ISIS became too
    important. The Turks were neuralgic about it. They threatened to close
    down the American use of the bases. So, President Obama refers to it
    each year as "Medz Yeghern", which is Armenian for "the great crime",
    but doesn't mean pronouncing G-word. He says, "If you want to know my
    views, they haven't changed. You'll have to Google them." And if you
    Google them back to 2008, you find that he declared it was a genocide.

    And in this book, I - the first thing I want to do is to clear up any
    confusion and to explain and I've been an international judge, that
    applying the law, the genocide convention, which our own Dr Evert
    introduced to the United Nations in 1948, that what happened - the
    massacres, the death marches in 1915 were certainly genocide. And the
    problem with the Turkish denial is that they say, "Well, this wasn't
    genocide, it wasn't a crime at all. It was relocation." Well it wasn't
    relocation. It was death marching. And it's important to establish
    that you can't claim military necessity as some sort of defence
    to genocide, otherwise you find Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka justifying
    the killing of 40,000 civilians get at the Tamil Tigers. You find
    the Pakistanis justifying the killing of three million Bengalis in
    the war in 1971. These are genocides pure and simple and there is no
    defence of military necessity of anything else to the destruction of
    a race or part of it.

    EMMA ALBERICI: I want to talk about the mass killings that are
    currently going on in Iraq and Syria, which many people think amount
    to genocide. How easy do you think it's going to be to prosecute
    Islamic State fighters, because of course, the world was a different
    place when Nazi war criminals were brought to justice?

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: But the crimes are the same - the crime against
    humanity, genocide. I think what we've seen of Islamic State is
    that they are a terrorist group that is committed - it certainly has
    genocidal intentions. In the Nazis we base our claim of genocide on
    the conference of Wannsee and the - Eichmann's minutes of it where
    they talk in these extraordinary euphemisms about "evacuating" Jews,
    by which they mean - to the east, by which they mean killing them
    in Auschwitz, just as the Ottoman Empire talked about "relocating"
    the Armenians, by which they meant having them die on death marches
    through the desert. And so, we can - through inference from the facts,
    we can draw a conclusion of genocidal intent and I think we can do
    that in relation to ISIS because of the way in which they've singled
    out religious communities who won't convert to their particularly
    extreme fundamentalist view to be killed.

    EMMA ALBERICI: You were against the 2003 Iraq invasion, but you
    support the fight against Islamic State. What's the difference?

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Correct. Well, in a sense there's a link because
    if we had obeyed the law, we wouldn't have overthrown the Baathist
    regime in 2003 in Iraq, which - and underneath that stone, once it was
    rolled over, crept all these horrific fighting groups and the latest
    one of them being ISIS. So it may well be that ISIS wouldn't be with
    us if we'd obeyed the law, and let's face it, there were only four who
    didn't. There was George Bush, who wanted to kill the man who had -
    he thought had threatened his father. There was Tony Blair, who went in
    because he thought the British could restrain the Americans. There was
    that Spanish President whose name I forget. He reminded me of Manuel
    in Fawlty Towers. I think he's now been made a member of News Corp
    board. And there was Johnny Howard, who perhaps didn't look at the
    law or had forgotten it or never studied it when he became a solicitor.

    But it was a bad mistake to go in to overthrow Saddam Hussein and
    we are now left with ISIS and we have to deal with it. We have
    an obligation to deal with it, I think, because it is committing
    genocide. It is certainly committing war crimes and crimes against
    humanity and that engages international attention. There was no crime
    against humanity or genocide being committed by Saddam. He committed
    genocide in 1988 against the Kurds, but the world turned a blind eye
    to that. And so we have a duty, I think, to go in. I don't think air
    strikes is going to solve of the problem. The problems are extremely
    deep and will take a lot of solving and we have problems in our own
    backyard with returning members of ISIS in Britain. They've adopted
    a view, initially, that they should keep them out, but that means ...

    EMMA ALBERICI: That's a view that's shared here too ...

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Yes, I know.

    EMMA ALBERICI: ... in our government.

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: But you can't make people stateless. The answer
    I think is that you have to bring them back, arrest them and put them
    on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. We can do that.

    There are those crimes under the Crimes Act. And I think that view
    is gathering force in Britain.

    EMMA ALBERICI: So you think it's wrong to deny them - to cancel their
    passports, deny them re-entry to Australia?

    GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well perhaps cancel their passports if they're
    going, but when they come back, I think the answer is not to refuse
    them and leave them stateless because that's - what we should do is
    prosecute them, send them to prison for a long time, or perhaps - the
    view in Britain is the Channel program. We're developing programs with
    psychologists and imams and possibly returned jihadis to discourage
    young people from joining. And it may be that instead of getting
    a 25-year sentence for being an accomplice to war crimes in Syria,
    you will get a reduction if you're prepared to help discourage other
    people from taking this primrose path. But it's a problem that both
    countries are facing. I think the answer is to prosecute for the crimes
    that they've committed, for their accompliceship in these monstrous
    events and to punish them and hopefully the punishment will act as
    a deterrent itself.

    EMMA ALBERICI: We have to leave it there. Many thanks for coming in,
    Geoffrey Robertson.

    http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2014/s4111106.htm




    From: A. Papazian
Working...
X