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  • Putting the case for an Armenian genocide

    The Australian
    January 3, 2015 Saturday


    Putting the case for an Armenian genocide

    by Louis Nowra


    An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Remembers the Armenians?
    By Geoffrey Robertson Vintage, 304pp,

    ON April 24, 1915, the day before the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli, the
    Turkish government in Constantinople rounded up hundreds of Armenian
    artists, intellectuals, academics, priests and community leaders and
    killed most of them.

    At the time there were 15 million Turkish Muslims and about two
    million Christian Arm-enians in Turkey (or Anatolia as it was then).
    The Armenians were better educated and wealthier than most Turks and
    because of that were envied and hated, so much so that the government
    instituted a program of ethnic cleansing. The Turks had had practice
    runs before. Between 1894 and 1896, 200,000 Armenians were massacred
    by soldiers and armed mobs.

    >From May to September 1915, up to two million Armenians were killed or
    expelled from the Ottoman Empire. The adult men were massacred or sent
    to death camps, while their families were sent on death marches
    through the desert. They were murdered, raped, drowned, burned alive
    and left to die of hunger and thirst. Churches, monasteries and
    schools were destroyed. All material goods were confiscated. Girls
    were made sex slaves and forced to convert. Up to 1.5 million died.

    Since then Turkish apologists have protested that only 600,000 died
    and that the deportations and massacres were merely unfortunate
    incidents in a civil war. In An Inconvenient Genocide, Australian
    lawyer Geoffrey Robertson sifts the evidence and details the reasons
    he considers the Turkish elimination of the Armenians a crime against
    humanity, a genocide.

    He doesn't spend much time on the history but presents witness
    accounts by diplomats, missionaries, journalists, doctors and
    soldiers. Some of the compelling accounts are by Australian prisoners
    of war. Even Turkey's German allies, especially diplomats, were
    horrified by what was happening and sent voluminous reports back to
    Berlin.

    Turkish law sanctions citizens who "insult Turkishness" by referring
    to the treatment of Armenians as genocide. Nobel prize-winning writer
    Orhan Pamuk was charged but his international fame kept him out of
    jail. This national-istic hypersensitivity cannot be over-estimated.
    In 2010, the BBC recorded a play I wrote based on the memoirs of a US
    vice-consul, Leslie Davis, who witnessed deportations, death marches
    and atrocities. Because Turkish actors were afraid news of their
    participation would travel back home, they dropped out or acted under
    assumed names.

    Robertson makes it clear that genocide is a matter for judges, not
    historians. He takes as his guide the International Court of Justice
    decree that genocide means acts committed with an intent to destroy,
    in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. In
    practice this means disrupting social cohesion (murdering leaders and
    intellectuals), destroying cultural institutions and prohibiting
    cultural activities, shifting wealth from the persecuted group to
    privileged nationals, depopulating areas inhabited by a group,
    interfering with the activities of churches catering to the persecuted
    group and reducing its numbers by starvation or murder.

    This book is a prosecutor's brief: brilliant, forensic and
    irrefutable, and on all counts Robertson finds the 1915 Turkish
    government guilty of genocide. The subtitle, Who Remembers the
    Armenians?, is a paraphrase of Hitler's remarks to his generals in
    1939, ordering them to show no mercy to the Poles: "Who, after all,
    speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Robertson is part
    of a growing global movement to have the Armenian genocide classed as
    a crime against humanity. Governments in Canada, France, Russia,
    Sweden and Poland have recognised the genocide, as have 43 of the 50
    US states. The British and US governments have refused to do so;
    Turkey's pro-Western stance makes it an important ally.

    Led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a cynical populist, Turkey is
    doing all within its power not to confront its own past and also to
    stop the truth from being heard. This is of course not unusual
    (witness Japan's refusal to acknowledge its horrific crimes in World
    War II and Australia's deliberate amnesia about its treatment of
    Aborigines) but the evidence of the genocide is so overwhelming that
    the Turkish denial of what happened is breathtaking in its immaturity
    and lack of pity.

    In Australia's case, the NSW parliament recognised the genocide in
    2013, but the federal government has not done so. Foreign Minister
    Julie Bishop has gone so far as to deny it happened. Why is this?
    Well, the answer is quite simple: blackmail. She is afraid the Turkish
    government will stop Australians from visiting Gallipoli. She has good
    reasons for this, given the Turks have banned any member of the NSW
    parliament from attending this year's centenary memorial service at
    Anzac Cove.

    An Inconvenient Genocide should be compulsory reading for anyone who
    knows nothing about the Armenian genocide. It's also a vivid reminder
    that we must never forget such crimes against humanity. Very few books
    are necessary, but this is one.Louis Nowra is a novelist, playwright
    and screenwriter.



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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