Military history

CHAPTER TEN

The First Holocaust

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.

—Carl Sandburg, “Grass”

THE HILL OF MARGADA is steep and littered with volcanic stones, a place of piercing bright light and shadows high above the eastern Syrian desert. It is cold on the summit and the winter rains have cut fissures into the mud between the rocks, brown canyons of earth that creep down to the base of the hill. Far below, the waters of the Habur slink between grey, treeless banks, twisting through dark sand dunes, a river of black secrets. You do not need to know what happened at Margada to find something evil in this place. Like the forests of eastern Poland, the hill of Margada is a place of eradicated memory, although the local Syrian police constable, a man of bright cheeks and generous moustache, had heard that something terrible happened here long before he was born.

It was The Independent’s photographer, Isabel Ellsen, who found the dreadful evidence. Climbing down the crack cut into the hill by the rain, she brushed her hand against the brown earth and found herself looking at a skull, its cranium dark brown, its teeth still shiny. To its left a backbone protruded through the mud. When I scraped away the earth on the other side of the crevasse, an entire skeleton was revealed, and then another, and a third, so closely packed that the bones had become tangled among each other. Every few inches of mud would reveal a femur, a skull, a set of teeth, fibula and sockets, squeezed together, as tightly packed as they had been on the day they died in terror in 1915, roped together to drown in their thousands.

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Exposed to the air, the bones became soft and claylike and flaked away in our hands, the last mortal remains of an entire race of people disappearing as swiftly as their Turkish oppressors would have wished us to forget them. As many as 50,000 Armenians were murdered in this little killing field, and it took a minute or two before Ellsen and I fully comprehended that we were standing in a mass grave. For Margada and the Syrian desert around it—like thousands of villages in what was Turkish Armenia—are the Auschwitz of the Armenian people, the place of the world’s first, forgotten, Holocaust.

The parallel with Auschwitz is no idle one. Turkey’s reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. The Armenian death toll was almost a million and a half. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to “resettle” their Armenian population—as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe—the true intentions of the Turkish government were quite specific. On 15 September 1915, for example—and a carbon of this document exists—the Turkish interior minister, Talaat Pasha, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo. “You have already been informed that the Government . . . has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey . . . Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience.”

Was this not exactly what Himmler told his SS murderers in 1941? Here on the hill of Margada, we were now standing among what was left of the “indicated persons.” And Boghos Dakessian, who along with his five-year-old nephew Hagop had driven up to the Habur with us from the Syrian town of Deir es-Zour, knew all about those “tragic measures.” “The Turks brought whole families up here to kill them. It went on for days. They would tie them together in lines, men, children, women, most of them starving and sick, many naked. Then they would push them off the hill into the river and shoot one of them. The dead body would then carry the others down and drown them. It was cheap that way. It cost only one bullet.”

Dakessian knelt beside the small ravine and, with a car key, gently prised the earth from another skull. If this seems morbid, even obscene, it must be remembered that the Armenian people have lived with this for nine decades—and that the evidence of evil outweighs sensitivity. When he had scraped the earth from the eye sockets and the teeth, Dakessian handed the skull to little Hagop, who stood in the ditch, smiling, unaware of the meaning of death. “I have told him what happened here,” Dakessian says. “He must learn to understand.” Hagop was named after his great-grandfather—Boghos Dakessian’s grandfather—who was himself a victim of the first Holocaust of the twentieth century, beheaded by a Turkish gendarme in the town of Marash in 1915.

In Beirut back in 1992, in the Armenian home for the blind—where the last survivors had lived with their memories through the agony of Lebanon’s sixteen-year civil war, I would discover Zakar Berberian, in a room devoid of light, a single electric bar vainly struggling with the frosty interior. The eighty-nine-year-old Armenian cowered in an old coat, staring intently at his visitors with sightless eyes. Within ten years Zakar Berberian—like almost all those who gave me their testimony of genocide—was dead. But here is his story, just as he told it to me:

I was twelve years old in 1915 and lived in Balajik on the Euphrates. I had four brothers. My father was a barber. What I saw on the day the Turkish gendarmes came to our village I will never forget. I had not yet lost my eyesight. There was a market place in Balajik which had been burned down and there were stones and building bricks on the ground. I saw with my own eyes what happened. The men were ordered to leave the village—they were taken away and never seen again. The women and children were told to go to the old market. The soldiers came then and in front of the mothers, they picked up each child—maybe the child was six or seven or eight—and they threw them up in the air and let them drop on the old stones. If they survived, the Turkish soldiers picked them up again by their feet and beat their brains out on the stones. They did all this, you see? In front of their mothers. I have never heard such screaming . . . From our barber’s shop, I saw all these scenes. The Turkish soldiers were in uniform and they had the gendarmerie of the government with them. Of course, the mothers could do nothing when their children were killed like this. They just shouted and cried. One of the children was in our school. They found his school book in his pocket which showed he had the highest marks in class. They beat his brains out. The Turks tied one of my friends by his feet to the tail of a horse and dragged him out of the village until he died.

There was a Turkish officer who used to come to our shop. He sheltered my brother who had deserted from the army but he said we must all flee, so we left Balajik for the town of Asma. We survived then because my father changed his religion. He agreed to become a Muslim. But both my father and my mother got sick. I think it was cholera. They died and I was also sick and like a dead person. The deportations went on and I should have died but a Turk gave me food to survive.

Berberian was eventually taken to a children’s orphanage.

They gave me a bath but the water was dirty. There had been children in the same bath who had glaucoma. So I bathed in the water and I too went blind. I have seen nothing since. I have waited ever since for my sight to be given back to me. But I know why I went blind. It was not the bath. It was because my father changed his religion. God took his revenge on me because we forsook him.

Perhaps it was because of his age that Berberian betrayed no emotion in his voice. He would never see again. His eyes were missing, a pale green skin covering what should have been his pupils.

So terrible was the year 1915 in the Armenian lands of Turkey and in the deserts of northern Syria and so cruel were the Turkish authorities of the time that it is necessary to remember that Muslims sometimes risked their lives for the doomed Armenian Christians. In almost every interview I conducted with the elderly, blind Armenians who survived their people’s genocide, there were stories of individual Turks who, driven by religion or common humanity, disobeyed the quasi-fascist laws of the Young Turk rulers in Constantinople and sheltered Armenians in their homes, treating Armenian Christian orphans as members of their own Muslim families. The Turkish governor of Deir es-Zour, Ali Suad Bey, was so kind to the Armenian refugees—he set up orphanages for the children—that he was recalled to Constantinople and replaced by Zeki Bey, who turned the town into a concentration camp.

The story of the Armenian genocide is one of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish soldiers and policemen who enthusiastically carried out their government’s orders to exterminate a race of Christian people in the Middle East. In 1915, Ottoman Turkey was at war with the Allies and claimed that its Armenian population—already subjected to persecution in the 1894–96 massacres—was supporting Turkey’s Christian enemies. At least 200,000 Armenians from Russian Armenia were indeed fighting in the Tsarist army. In Beirut, Levon Isahakian— blind but alert at an incredible 105 years old—still bore the scar of a German cavalry sabre on his head, received when he was a Tsarist infantryman in Poland in 1915. In the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution two years later, he made his way home; he trudged across Russia on foot to Nagorno-Karabakh, sought refuge in Iran, was imprisoned by the British in Baghdad and finally walked all the way to Aleppo, where he found the starving remnants of his own Armenian people. He had been spared. But thousands of Armenians had also been serving in the Ottoman forces; they would not be so lucky. The Turks alleged that Armenians had given assistance to Allied naval fleets in the Mediterranean, although no proof of this was ever produced.

The reality was that a Young Turk movement—officially the “Committee of Union and Progress”—had effectively taken control of the corrupt Ottoman empire from Sultan Abdul Hamid. Originally a liberal party to which many Armenians gave their support, it acquired a nationalistic, racist, pan-Turkic creed which espoused a Turkish-speaking Muslim nation stretching from Ankara to Baku—a dream that was briefly achieved in 1918 but which is today physically prevented only by the existence of the post-Soviet Armenian republic. The Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a mixture of Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, swiftly became disillusioned with the new rulers of the Turkish empire.70

Encouraged by their victory over the Allies at the Dardanelles, the Turks fell upon the Armenians with the same fury as the Nazis were to turn upon the Jews of Europe two decades later. Aware of his own disastrous role in the Allied campaign against Turkey, Winston Churchill was to write inThe Aftermath—a volume almost as forgotten today as the Armenians themselves—that “it may well be that the British attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula stimulated the merciless fury of the Turkish government.” Certainly, the Turkish victory at the Dardanelles over the British and Australian armies—Private Charles Dickens, who peeled Maude’s proclamation from the wall in Baghdad, was there, and so was Frank Wills, the man my father refused to execute in 1919—gave a new and ruthless self-confidence to the Turkish regime. It chose 24 April 1915—for ever afterwards commemorated as the day of Armenian genocide—to arrest and murder all the leading Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople. They followed this pogrom with the wholesale and systematic destruction of the Armenian race in Turkey.

Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army had already been disbanded and converted into labour battalions by the spring of 1915. In the Armenian home for the blind in Beirut, ninety-one-year-old Nevart Srourian held out a photograph of her father, a magnificent, handsome man in a Turkish army uniform. Nevart was almost deaf when I met her in 1992. “My father was a wonderful man, very intelligent,” she shouted at me in a high-pitched voice. “When the Turks came for our family in 1915, he put his old uniform back on and my mother sewed on badges to pretend he had high rank. He wore the four medals he had won as a soldier. Dressed like this, he took us all to the railway station at Konya and put us on a train and we were saved. But he stayed behind. The Turks discovered what he had done. They executed him.”

In every town and village, all Armenian men were led away by the police, executed by firing squad and thrown into mass graves or rivers. Mayreni Kaloustian was eighty-eight when I met her, a frail creature with her head tied in a cloth, who physically shook as she told her story in the Beirut blind home, an account of such pathos that one of the young Armenian nursing staff broke down in tears as she listened to it.

I come from Mush. When the snow melted each year, we planted rye. My father, Manouk Tarouian, and my brother worked in the fields. Then the Turkish soldiers came. It was 1915. They put all the men from the village, about a thousand, in a stable and next morning they took them from Mush—all my male relatives, my cousins and brothers. My father was among them. The Turks said: “The government needs you.” They took them like cattle. We don’t know where they took them. We saw them go. Everybody was in a kind of shock. My mother Khatoun found out what happened. There was a place near Mush where three rivers come together and pass under one bridge. It is a huge place of water and sand. My mother went there in the morning and saw hundreds of our men lined up on the bridge, face to face. Then the soldiers shot at them from both sides. She said the Armenians “fell on top of each other like straw.” The Turks took the clothes and valuables off the bodies and then they took the bodies by the hands and feet and threw them into the water. All day they lined up the men from Mush like this and it went on until nightfall. When my mother returned to us, she said: “We should return to the river and throw ourselves in.”

What Mayreni was describing was no isolated war crime. It was a routine. At the Kemakh Gorge, Kurds and troops of the Turkish 86th Cavalry Brigade butchered more than 20,000 women and children. At Bitlis, the Turks drowned more than 900 women in the Tigris River. So great was the slaughter near the town of Erzinjan that the thousands of corpses in the Euphrates formed a barrage that forced the river to change course for a hundred metres.

The American ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, himself a Jew, described what happened next in a telegram to the U.S. State Department:

Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place.

Mayreni Kaloustian, along with her mother Khatoun, her sisters Megad, Dilabar, Heriko and Arzoun and her two youngest brothers Drjivan and Feryad, set off on the death march from Mush the day after the men were murdered at the river.

First we travelled in carts hauled by bulls. Then we had to walk for so many weeks. There were thousands of us. We begged food and water. It was hot. We walked from the spring and we did not stop until St. Jacob’s Day, in December. I was only twelve and one day I lost my mother. I did not see her again. We went to Sivas. Then the Russians came, the army of the Tsar, and they reached Mush and blew up the bridge where my father was killed. We tried to go back to Mush but the Russians were defeated. Then my brothers and sisters and I all caught cholera. They died except for Arzoun and myself. I lost her, too. I was taken to an orphanage. You can never know what our life was like. The Turks let the bandits do what they wanted. The Kurds were allowed to kidnap the beautiful girls. I remember they took them away on horses, slung over the saddles. They took children. The Turks made us pay for water.

It is now largely forgotten that the Turks encouraged one of their Muslim ethnic groups to join them in this slaughter. Thus tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred—amid scenes of rape and mass pillage—by the Kurds, the very people upon whom Saddam Hussein would attempt genocide just over sixty years later. On the banks of the Habur River not far from Margada, Armenian women were sold to Kurds and Arab Muslims. Survivors related that the men paid 20 piastres for virgins but only 5 piastres for children or women who had already been raped. The older women, many of them carrying babies, were driven into the river to drown.

In 1992, 160 kilometres south of Margada, in a hamlet of clay huts 30 kilometres from the Iraqi frontier—so close that in 1991 the Syrian villagers could watch Saddam’s Scud missiles trailing fire as they were launched into the night skies above their homes—I found old Serpouhi Papazian, survivor of the Armenian genocide, widow of an Arab Muslim who rescued her at Deir es-Zour. A stick-like woman of enormous energy, with bright eyes and no teeth, she thought she was a hundred years old—she was in fact ninety-two—but there could be no doubting her story.

I come from Takirda, twelve hours by horse from Istanbul. I was fifteen at the time. The Turks drove us from our home and all my family were put on a filthy ship that brought us from Konya to the coast and then we went to Aleppo—my mother Renouhi and my father Tatios, my aunt Azzaz and my sisters Hartoui and Yeva. They beat us and starved us. At Aleppo, my mother and Auntie Azzaz died of sickness. They made us walk all the way to Deir es-Zour in the summer heat. We were kept in a camp there by the Turks. Every day, the Turks came and took thousands of Armenians from there to the north. My father heard terrible stories of families being murdered together so he tattooed our initials in the Armenian alphabet on our wrists so that we could find each other later.

Tattooed identities. The grim parallels with another genocide did not occur to old Serpouhi Papazian. She was rescued by an Arab boy and, like so many of the Armenian women who sought refuge with non-Turkish Muslims, she converted to Islam. Only later did she hear what happened to the rest of her family.

The Turks sent them all north into the desert. They tied them together with many other people. My father and my sisters were tied together, Yeva and Hartoui by their wrists. Then they took them to a hill at a place called Margada where there were many bodies. They threw them into the mud of the river and shot one of them—I don’t know which—and so they all drowned there together.

Ten years after the Armenian Holocaust, Serpouhi returned to the hill at Margada to try to find the remains of her father and sisters. “All I found in 1925 were heaps of bones and skulls,” she said. “They had been eaten by wild animals and dogs. I don’t even know why you bother to come here with your notebook and take down what I say.” And Boghos Dakessian, in a bleak moment among the place of skulls on Margada hill, said much the same thing. One of the skulls he was holding collapsed into dust in his hands. “Don’t say ‘pity them,’ ” he told us. “It is over for them. It is finished.” Serpouhi remembered the river running beside the hill—but Isabel Ellsen and I had at first found no trace of bones along the banks of the Habur River. It was only when we climbed the hill above the main road to Deir es-Zour— almost 2 kilometres from the water—to survey the landscape, that we made out, faintly below us, the banks of a long-dried-up river. The Habur had changed its course over the previous seventy-five years and had moved more than a kilometre eastward. That is when Isobel found the skulls. We were standing on the hill where Yeva and Hartoui were murdered with their father. And it occurred to me that, just as the Euphrates had changed course after its waters became clogged with bodies, so here too the Habur’s waters might have become choked with human remains and moved to the east. Somewhere in the soft clay of Margada, the bodies of Yeva and Hartoui lie to this day.

But the Armenian killing fields are spread wide over the Syrian desert. Eighty kilometres to the north, east of the village of Shedadi, lies another little Auschwitz, a cave into which Turkish troops drove thousands of Armenian men during the deportations. Boghos Dakessian and I found it quite easily in the middle of what is now a Syrian oilfield. Part of the cave has long since collapsed, but it was still possible to crawl into the mouth of the rock and worm our way with the aid of a cigarette lighter into its ominous interior. It stretched for over a kilometre underground. “They killed about five thousand of our people here,” Dakessian said with a statistician’s annoyance at such imprecision. “They stuffed them in the cave and then started a bonfire here at the mouth and filled the cave with smoke. They were asphyxiated. They all coughed till they died.”

It took several seconds before the historical meaning of all this became apparent. Up here, in the cold, dry desert, the Turks turned this crack in the earth’s crust into the twentieth century’s first gas chamber. The principles of technological genocide began here in the Syrian desert, at the tiny mouth of this innocent cave, in a natural chamber in the rock.

There are other parallels. Enver Pasha, the Turkish war minister,71 told Morgenthau that the Armenians were being sent to “new quarters,” just as the Nazis later claimed that the Jews of Europe were being sent east for “resettlement.” Armenian churches were burned like the synagogues of Nazi Europe. The Armenians died on what the Turks called “caravans” or “convoys,” just as the Jews of Europe were sent on “transports” to the death camps. In southern Turkey, the Turks did sometimes use railway cattle wagons to herd Armenian men to their mass graves. The Kurds played the same role of executioners for the Turks that Lithuanians and Ukrainians and Croatians would later assume for the Nazis. The Turks even formed a “Special Organisation”—Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye—to carry out exterminations, an Ottoman predecessor to Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, the German “Special Action Groups.”

Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people’s persecution every bit as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway routes to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Dachau and the other Nazi camps. The Armenians in Sivas were driven to Malatya, from Malatya to Aleppo; or from Mush to Diyarbekir to Ras al-Ain or—via Mardin—to Mosul and Kirkuk. It is a flow chart of suffering, some of the “convoys” of humiliation and grief driven 150 kilometres south from Marash to Aleppo, then another 300 kilometres east to Deir es-Zour and then north—back in the direction of Turkey for another 150 kilometres up the Habur River and past the hill of Margada. Armenians were deported from the Black Sea coast and from European Turkey to the Syrian desert, some of them moved all the way south to Palestine.

What was at once apparent about this ethnic atrocity was not just its scale— perhaps two hundred thousand Armenians had been slaughtered two decades earlier—but the systematic nature of the Holocaust. A policy of race murder had been devised in wartime by senior statesmen who controlled, as one historian phrased it, the “machinery of violence, both formal and informal.” Like the Jews of Europe, many Armenians were highly educated; they were lawyers, civil servants, businessmen, journalists. Unlike the Jewish Holocaust, however, the world knew of the Turkish genocide almost as soon as it began. Viscount James Bryce and the young Arnold Toynbee were commissioned to prepare a report for the British government in 1915, and their work, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916 —700 pages of eyewitness accounts of the massacres—was to become not only a formative history of the slaughter but the first serious attempt to deal with crimes against humanity. Much of the testimony came from American missionaries in Turkey—the “non-governmental organisations” of the era—and from Italian, Danish, Swedish, Greek, U.S. and German diplomats and records.72

U.S. diplomats were among the first to record the Armenian Holocaust—and among the bravest eyewitnesses—and their accounts in State Department archives remain among the most unimpeachable testimonies of the Armenians’ fate. Leslie Davis, the thirty-eight-year-old former lawyer who was American consul in Harput, has left us a terrifying account of his own horseback journeys through the dead lands of Armenia. Around Lake Goeljuk and in the space of just twenty-four hours, he saw “the remains of not less than ten thousand Armenians.” He found corpses piled on rocks at the foot of cliffs, corpses in the water and in the sand, corpses filling up huge ravines; “nearly all the women lay flat on their backs and showed signs of barbarous mutilation by bayonets of the gendarmes . . .” On one of his excursions, Davis came across a dying Armenian woman. When she was offered bread, she “cried out that she wanted to die.” An Armenian college teacher called Donabed Lulejian who was rescued by Davis passed through a village littered with the bodies of men, women and children, and wrote an essay of pain and dignity—a “benediction,” in the words of the Armenian historian Peter Balakian:

At least a handful of earth for these slain bodies, for these whitened bones! A handful of earth, at least, for these unclaimed dead . . .

We dislike to fancy the bodies of our dear ones worm-ridden; their eyes, their lovely eyes, filled with worms; their cheeks, their kiss-deserving cheeks, mildewed; their pomegranate-like lips food for reptiles.

But here they are in the mountains, unburied and forlorn, attacked by worms and scorpions, the eyes bare, the faces horrible amid a loathsome stench, like the odour of the slaughter-house . . .

There are women with breasts uncovered and limbs bare. A handful of earth to shield their honour! . . . Give, God, the handful of earth requested of Thee.

Germans, too, bore witness to the massacres because officers of the Kaiser’s army had been seconded to Turkey to help reorganise the Ottoman military. Armin Wegner, a German nurse and a second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, disobeyed orders by taking hundreds of photographs of Armenian victims in the camps at Ras al-Ain, Rakka, Aleppo and Deir es-Zour. Today these fearful pictures of the dead and dying comprise the core of witness images. The Germans were also involved in building Turkey’s railway system and saw with their own eyes the first use of cattle trucks for human deportation, men packed ninety to a wagon—the same average the Germans achieved in their transports to the Nazi death camps—on the Anatolian and Baghdad railways. Franz Gunther, a Deutsche Bank representative in Constantinople—the bank was financing the Turkish railway projects—sent a photograph of a deportation train to one of his directors as an example of the Ottoman government’s “bestial cruelty.”

Across the world—and especially in the United States—newspapers gave immense prominence to the genocide. From the start, The New York Times distinguished itself with near daily coverage of the slaughter, rape, dispossession and extermination of the Armenians. Its first reports appeared in the paper in November 1914. “Erzerum fanatics slay Christians,” ran a headline on 29 November. Ambassador Morgenthau’s representations to the Turkish government were published on 28 April 1915, under the words “Appeal to Turkey to stop massacres.” By 4 October, The New York Times was headlining “Tell of Horrors done in Armenia” above a long dispatch containing details of atrocities, of torture, deportations and child-killing. On 7 October the paper’s headline ran “800,000 Armenians counted destroyed . . . 10,000 drowned at once.” Morgenthau’s memoranda and Bryce’s speeches to the House of Lords were given huge coverage. The Nation carried a series of powerful editorials, calling upon Berlin—the United States still being a neutral in the war—to stop the killings by its Turkish ally. Narratives of the mass murders were still being published in The New York Times in June 1919, almost eight months after the war ended; “Armenian girls tell of massacres,” read the paper’s headline on 1 June. Even in the Canadian city of Halifax, the local paper carried almost weekly reports on the genocide. A volume containing dispatches on the destruction of the Armenians which appeared in the Halifax Herald runs to 352 pages.

Rarely have ethnic cleansing and genocidal killings been given publicity on this scale. British diplomats across the Middle East were themselves receiving first-hand accounts of the massacres. In the former Ottoman city of Basra, Gertrude Bell, who would later be Britain’s “Oriental Secretary” in Baghdad, was filing an intelligence report on the outrages received from a captured Turkish soldier.

The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours . . . some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardian-ship of some hundreds of Kurds . . . These Kurds were called gendarmes, but in reality mere butchers; bands of them were publicly ordered to take parties of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations, but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and old women . . . One of these gendarmes confessed to killing 100 Armenian men himself . . . the empty desert cisterns and caves were also filled with corpses . . . The Turkish officers of the battalion were horrified by the sights they saw, and the regimental chaplain (a Muslim divine) on coming across a number of bodies prayed that the divine punishment of these crimes should be averted from Muslims, and by way of expiation, himself worked at digging three graves . . . No man can ever think of a woman’s body except as a matter of horror, instead of attraction, after Ras al-Ain.

Even after the United States entered the war, its diplomats continued to compile reports on the atrocities. J. B. Jackson, formerly the American consul in Aleppo, wrote in July 1915 of a group of more than 1,000 women and children from Harput who were handed over to Kurds:

who rode among them, selecting the best-looking women, girls and children . . . Before carrying off those finally selected and subdued, they stripped most of the remaining women of their clothes, thereby forcing them to continue the rest of their journey in a nude condition. I was told by eyewitnesses to this outrage that over 300 women arrived at Ras alAin . . . entirely naked, their hair flowing in the air like wild beasts, and after traveling six days afoot in the burning sun . . . some of them personally came to the Consulate (in Aleppo) and exhibited their bodies to me, burned to the color of a green olive, the skin peeling off in great blotches, and many of them carrying gashes on the head and wounds on the body . . .

The Armenian Holocaust was recorded, too, in countless private letters and diaries—some of them still unpublished—written by Europeans who found themselves in Ottoman northern Syria and southern Turkey. Here, for example, is an extract from a long account written by Cyril Barter, a British businessman who was sent out of Iraq to Aleppo under Turkish guard in 1915:

I may tell you that two days south of Deir [es-Zour] we met the first fringe of Armenian refugees, and for the next three months I was seeing them continually. To attempt to describe their plight would be impossible. In a few words, there were no men of between sixteen and sixty among them, they had all been massacred on leaving their homes, and these, the remainder, old men, women and children were dying like flies from starvation and disease, having been on the road from their villages to this, the bare desert, with no means of subsistence, for anything from three to six months . . . It was a nightmare to me for a long time afterwards.

Barter would later submit a report to the Bryce Commission—which originally printed it anonymously—in which he recorded how carts would be taken through Aleppo for newly dead Armenians, the bodies “thrown into them as one would throw a sack of coal.” Barter, too, would be a witness to the railway deportations, describing how Turks would drive Armenians from their places of refuge and “hustle them down to the railway station, pack them into the trucks like cattle and forward them to Damascus and different towns in the Hidjaz.”

A British prisoner of war in Turkey, Lieutenant E. H. Jones, was to recall the fate of the Armenians of Yozgat, where he himself was held in a POW camp. “The butchery had taken place in a valley some dozen miles outside the town,” he wrote. “Amongst our sentries were men who had slain men, women, and children till their arms were too tired to strike. They boasted of it amongst themselves. And yet, in many ways, they were pleasant enough fellows.” As late as 1923, an Irish schoolboy, John de Courcy Ireland, the future nautical writer and historian, would visit Castel Gandolfo outside Rome, where he would see Armenian refugee children, “dark, fascinating to look at but very quiet in spite of the disorder in which they swarmed.”

As the survivors of the Armenian Holocaust have died, so their children have taken up their story. A number of Armenians not only escaped death in the 1915 deportations but were confronted by a second massacre in the Greek-held Turkish city of Smyrna—now Izmir—in 1922. “My father, Sarkis, not only survived the Syrian desert but barely made it out of Smyrna alive,” his daughter Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut wrote to me.

. . . he and two friends came to Smyrna just when Attaturk [ sic] and his men had taken it over. Arrested and taken to an abandoned railway yard with several hundred Greeks and Armenians, they were subjected to rounds and rounds of machine gun fire. He survived the onslaught because he fainted. Later he was not so lucky when with fixed bayonets the Turkish soldiers repeatedly stabbed the dead and dying. Wounded badly on his forehead and leg, he nevertheless got up and made for the quay.

Ahead of him he saw two young girls trembling with fright and dazed by what they had seen. He could not leave them there. He grabbed ahold of their hands and the three of them ran for their lives. What they saw on the quay would stay with my father for the rest of his days. Tens of thousands of people crammed together in terror, with the flames of the dying city drawing ever closer. And yet . . . there was no help forthcoming from the British, French and American warships. But, in the distance, my dad saw that another ship was taking people on board. The three of them would have to jump into the water and swim for it. They did and were rescued by Italian sailors.

The first writer to call the Armenian genocide a holocaust was Winston Churchill, including in a list of Turkish wartime atrocities the “massacring [of] uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women and children together, whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust . . . beyond human redress.” For Churchill:

the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be . . . There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions, cherishing national ambitions that could be satisfied only at the expense of Turkey, and planted geographically between Turkish and Caucasian Moslems.

Acknowledging that British and American interest in the “infamous” massacre of the Armenians “was lighted by the lamps of religion, philanthropy and politics,” Churchill said that the atrocities “stirred the ire of simple and chivalrous men and women spread widely about the English-speaking world.”

But there were other, less chivalrous men whose interest in the Armenian Holocaust—gleaned at first hand—would prove to be a useful experience in a new and brutal Europe. Franz von Papen, for example, was chief of staff of the Fourth Turkish Army during the 1914–18 war and served as Hitler’s vice chancellor in 1933. During the Second World War, he was the Third Reich’s ambassador to Turkey. Another German who knew the intimate details of the Armenian genocide was Lieutenant General Hans von Seeckt, who was chief of the Ottoman General Staff in 1917. He laid the groundwork for the Wehrmacht in the 1920s and was honoured by Hitler with a state funeral on his death in 1936. Much more sinister was the identity of a young German called Rudolf Hoess, who joined the German forces in Turkey as a teenager. In 1940 he was appointed commandant of Auschwitz, and he became deputy inspector of all Nazi concentration camps at SS headquarters in 1944.

In a work of remarkable scholarship, the Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian identified Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter as one of the most effective Nazi mentors. Scheubner-Richter was German vice-consul in Erzerum and witnessed Turkish massacres of Armenians in Bitlis province, writing a long report on the killings for the German chancellor. In all, he submitted to Berlin fifteen reports on the deportations and mass killings, stating in his last message that with the exception of a few hundred thousand survivors, the Armenians of Turkey had been exterminated (ausgerottet). He described the methods by which the Turks concealed their plans for the genocide, the techniques used to entrap Armenians, the use of criminal gangs, and even made a reference to the Armenians as “these ‘Jews of the Orient’ who are wily businessmen.” Scheubner-Richter met Hitler only five years later and would become one of his closest advisers, running a series of racist editorials in a Munich newspaper which called for a “ruthless and relentless” campaign against Jews so that Germany should be “cleansed.” When Hitler staged his attempted coup against the Bavarian government, Scheubner-Richter linked arms with Hitler as they marched through the streets and was shot in the heart and killed instantly by a police bullet.

We do not know how much Hitler learned of the Armenian Holocaust from his friend, but he was certainly aware of its details, referring to the genocide first in 1924 when he said that Armenians were the victims of cowardice. Then in August 1939 he asked his rhetorical and infamous question of his generals—in relation to Poles—“Who, after all, is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” There have been repeated attempts—especially by Turkey—to pretend that Hitler never made such a remark but Dadrian has found five separate versions of the question, four of them identical; two were filed in German High Command archives. Furthermore, German historians have discovered that Hitler made an almost identical comment in a 1931 interview with a German newspaper editor, saying that “everywhere people are awaiting a new world order. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy . . . remember the extermination of the Armenians.” And there came another fateful reference to the century’s first genocide when Hitler was demanding that the Jews of Hungary be deported; he ended a tirade to Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian regent, in 1943 with a remark about “the downfall of a people who were once so proud—the Persians, who now lead a pitiful existence as Armenians.”

Historical research into the identity of Germans who witnessed the destruction of the Armenians and their later role in Hitler’s war is continuing. Some Armenian slave labourers—male and female—spent their last months working to complete a section of the German-run Baghdad railway and were briefly protected by their German supervisors. But other German nationals watched the Armenians die— and did nothing.73 What was so chilling about Hitler’s question to his generals, however, was not just his comparison—the whole world knew the details of the Turkish destruction of its Armenian population—but his equally important knowledge that the perpetrators of these war crimes were rewarded with impunity.

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Turkish courts martial were held to punish those responsible and Turkish parliamentarians confessed to crimes against humanity. A Turkish military tribunal, unprecedented in Ottoman history, produced government records that were used as evidence at the trial. One exchange over the telegraph had a Nazi ring to it. An official says of the Armenians: “They were dispatched to their ultimate destination.” A second voice asks: “Meaning what?” And the reply comes back: “Meaning massacred. Killed.” Three minor officials were hanged. The triumvirate itself—Jemal, Enver and Talaat— was sentenced to death in absentia.

But the Turkish courts lacked the political will to continue, and the Western allies, who had boldly promised a trial of the major Turkish war criminals—the Armenian mass killings were described as “crimes against humanity” in an Allied warning to the Ottoman government in May 1915—lacked the interest to compel them to do so. Indeed, what was to come—the systematic attempt, which continues to this day, to deny that the mass killings were ever perpetrated—is almost as frightening as the powerlessness of the Allies who should have prosecuted those who devised the Armenian genocide. Talaat Pasha, the former interior minister, was assassinated in Berlin by an Armenian whose family had died in the genocide. Soghomon Tehlirian’s trial and subsequent acquittal in 1921 meant that details of the Armenian Holocaust were widely known to the German public. Franz Werfel, the German-Jewish novelist, wrote a prophetic warning of the next Holocaust in his account of Armenian resistance to the Turkish killers, The Forty Days of MusaDagh. He lectured across Germany in 1933, only to be denounced by the Nazi newspaper Das Schwarze Korps as a propagandist of “alleged Turkish horrors perpetrated against the Armenians.” The same paper—and here was another disturbing link between the Armenian Holocaust and the Jewish Holocaust still to come—condemned “America’s Armenian Jews for promoting in the U.S.A. the sale of Werfel’s book.”

Already, the century’s first genocide was being “disappeared.” Winston Churchill continued to emphasise its reality. In 1933, the same year that Werfel toured Germany, Churchill wrote that

the Armenian people emerged from the Great War scattered, extirpated in many districts, and reduced through massacre, losses of war and enforced deportations adopted as an easy system of killing . . . the Armenians and their tribulations were well known throughout England and the United States . . . Their persecutors and tyrants had been laid low by war or revolution. The greatest nations in the hour of their victory were their friends, and would see them righted.

But the Armenians would be betrayed. The archives tell a bitter story of weakness and impotence and false promises. Here, for example, is Clause 1d of the Treaty of Sèvres between the Allied and Ottoman governments of 10 August 1920:

Turkey recognised Armenia as an independent state, and consented to accept President [Woodrow] Wilson’s arbitration with regard to the boundary between the two states.

And here is Article 64 of the same treaty:

If within one year . . . the Kurdish peoples shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show the majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council . . . recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation and to renounce all rights and title over these areas.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points were the United States’ first attempt at a “new world order” and included honourable demands. Point Five insisted upon:

a free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims . . . the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

And Point Twelve clearly referred to the Armenians and the Kurds:

The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development . . .

Wilson did subsequently award the Armenian republic large areas of modern-day Turkey—including the provinces of Erzerum and Van—but the Turks and the Bolsheviks together destroyed it before the end of December 1920. Unlike a later president, however, Wilson was in no position to send a “desert storm” and drive out these armies and prevent yet another massacre of Armenians. The Kurds, who had been among the cruellest perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, were equally doomed. Enthusiasm for a British-protected Kurdish state that would act as a buffer between Turkey, Iran and Iraq was extinguished when Britain decided to win over Arab opinion in Iraq by including Kurdish areas in the state and when it became obvious that the emerging Soviet Union might benefit from the creation of a puppet Kurdish state.

American isolationism meant that the Armenians were to be abandoned. The Turks attacked a French army in Cilicia, drove them out of Marash and massacred another fifty thousand Armenians who believed they were living under French protection. A further massacre occurred in Yerevan. Of the Treaty of Lausanne, which registered the final peace between Turkey and the Great Powers, Churchill was to write: “history will search in vain for the word ‘Armenia.’”

Yet it is important to remember that the one country which—in the immediate aftermath of my father’s war—chose a truly democratic alternative to the Middle East was the United States of America. I am not just referring to the Fourteen Points, in themselves a powerful argument for democratic development. In a speech to Congress, Wilson stated that “people and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game.” U.S. diplomats and missionaries spread across the old Ottoman empire argued eloquently that the Arabs of the empire should be set up—without Turkey—as one “modern Arab nation,” as they called it, to develop and progress in the world. Another powerful argument came from the King-Crane commission, set up under Wilson, which sailed to the Middle East to actually ask the peoples of the region what they wanted.

It was not Wilson’s fault that illness and an increasingly isolationist American public caused a withdrawal from world affairs by the United States. In retrospect, however, that withdrawal—at a time when America was non-partisan in the Middle East—was one of the great tragedies of our time. We Europeans took over the area. And we failed. When the United States re-entered the region a quarter of a century later, it did so for oil and, shortly thereafter, as an almost unquestioning supporter and funder of Israel.

Lord Bryce, whose report on the Armenian genocide had done so much to enlighten public opinion, lamented in a lecture tour of the United States in 1922 that Allied failure to enforce the disarmament of the Turkish army had led the Turks to recover “their old arrogance.” And in a most enigmatic phrase, he suggested there was more than war-weariness behind the Allied refusal to provide restitution to the Armenians. “Why the Turkish Government, which had in 1915 massacred a million of its Christian subjects . . . why after these crimes that Government should have been treated by the Allies with such extraordinary lenity— these are mysteries the explanation whereof is probably known to some of you as it is to me,” he said. “But the secret is one which, as Herodotus says of some of those tales which he heard from the priests in Egypt, is too sacred for me to mention.” The Armenians, Bryce said, had suffered more than any other peoples in the 1914–18 war and had been “most cruelly abandoned.”

What was the secret of which Bryce claimed privileged knowledge? Was this a mere rhetorical flourish to explain the Allies’ postwar irresolution? Or did he think that Britain and France wanted Turkey as an ally in the face of the newly created Bolshevik state that might soon threaten the oilfields of the Middle East? In Transcaucasia, British troops initially opposed the Bolsheviks—“smelling the oil of Baku,” as one observer of the time put it—and for a short time preserved the independence of Georgia, Azerbaijan and a truncated Armenian state. But when Britain withdrew its troops in 1920, the three nations fell to the Soviet Union. In Turkestan, where we were interested in preventing Germany from gaining access to cotton supplies, British forces actually fought the Russians with the assistance of Enver Pasha’s Turkish supporters, an odd exchange of alliances, since Tsarist Russia had been an ally of Britain until the 1917 Revolution.

In just one corner of their former Turkish homeland, the Armenians clung on; in the province of Alexandretta and the now broken fortress of Musa Dagh, 20 kilometres west of Antioch, whose people had withstood the siege about which Werfel wrote his novel. Alexandretta fell under French colonial rule in the far north of Syria and so, in 1918, many thousands of Armenians returned to their gutted homes. But to understand this largely forgotten betrayal, the reader must travel to Aanjar, a small town of sorrow that blushes roses around its homes. From the roadside, smothering the front doors, all the way up Father Ashod Karakashian’s garden, there is a stream of pink and crimson to mock the suffering of the Armenians who built this town on the malarial marshes of eastern Lebanon in 1939. They are proud people, holders now of Lebanese passports, but holders, too, of one of the darkest secrets of the Armenian past: for they were “cleansed” from their homeland twice in a century, first in 1915, then in 1939. If they blame the Turks for both evictions, they blame the French as well. And Hitler. Mostly they blame the French.

Father Karakashian’s sister Viktoria was just ten in 1939, but she remembers her family’s second disaster, a miniature genocide compared to the one in 1915, but nonetheless terrible. “The French army escorted us all the way,” she said. “But we were dying. My brother Varoujan was only a year or two old, but I saw him die in my mother’s lap in the truck. Like many of us, he had malaria. The French didn’t seem to know what to do with us. They took us first for forty days to Abassid in Syria. Then they put us on ships for seven days. We landed at Tripoli [in northern Lebanon] and the French put us on a cattle train to Rayak. From Rayak, they brought us to Aanjar and here we remained.”

Like most of the Armenians of Aanjar, Father Karakashian and his sister were born in Musa Dagh, the Armenian fortress town which is now in south-eastern Turkey and which held out for forty days against overwhelming odds during the genocide. Rescued by French and British warships, the Armenians of Musa Dagh were cared for in Egypt, then sent back to their home town with the French army after the 1914–18 war. And there they lived, in part of the French Mandate of Syria, until 1939, when the French government—in a desperate attempt to persuade Turkey to join the Allies against Hitler—“gave” Musa Dagh and the large city of Alexandretta back to the Turks.

The Karakashian children were born after the 1915 Holocaust, but many of their neighbours have no parents or grandparents. Even when they arrived in Aanjar—which was then in the French Mandate of “Greater Lebanon”—they continued to suffer. “There were plagues of mosquitoes and this place was a wilderness,” Father Karakashian says. “The French gave each man twenty-five Lebanese pounds to break the rocks and build homes for themselves. But many people caught malaria and died.” In the first two years of their ordeal—in 1940, when most of Europe was at war—the Armenians of Aanjar lost a thousand men and women to malaria. Their crumbling gravestones still lie to the north of the town.

The walls of Saint Paul’s church in Aanjar are covered with photographs of the Armenian tragedy. One—taken in 1915—shows the survivors of the Musa Dagh siege climbing desperately onto the deck of an Allied warship. Another shows French officers welcoming Armenian dignitaries back to Alexandretta, along with several men of the French army’s “Armenian Brigade.” In the 1930s, they built a memorial to the siege—it has since been destroyed by the Turks—and when they were forced to leave yet again before the Second World War, the Armenians took their dead, Serb-style, with them. The corpses of eighteen of the “martyrs” of the 1915 battle—whose bodies had been left untouched by the Turks until the French came with the Armenians in 1918—were stuffed on to trucks in 1939 together with the refugees, and brought to Aanjar along with the living. They rest now in a marble sarcophagus next to Saint Paul’s church. “In eternal memory,” it says in Armenian on the marble.

But memory has been softened for the people of Aanjar. “In the first ten years after leaving Alexandretta, the people—there were six thousand deportees who came here—wanted to go back,” Father Karakashian said. “Then after the Second World War, a lot of our people emigrated to South America. Now we don’t want to return. But I went back last year for a holiday. Yes, there is a tiny Armenian community left in our former bit of Turkey around Musa Dagh, thirty families, and they’ve just renovated the Armenian church. The Turks there are polite to us. I think they know what happened and they respect us because they know they are on our land.”

The shame of France’s surrender of the sanjak (provincial district) of Alexandretta—including Musa Dagh—is one of the largely untold stories of the Second World War. Fearing that Turkey would join the German Axis as it had in the 1914–18 war, France agreed to a referendum in Alexandretta so that the Armenian and Turkish inhabitants could choose their nationality. The Turks trucked tens of thousands of people into the sanjak for the referendum, and naturally the “people” voted to be part of Turkey. “The French government made the decision to give the place to Turkey and of course the Armenians realised they couldn’t live there any more and requested from the French government that they be taken away and given new homes,” the priest says. “They wanted to be rid of the Turks. So they left. The French made an agreement in their own interests. I blame the French.” So the sanjak of Alexandretta became the Turkish province of Hatay, and the city of Alexandretta became Iskenderun. And the final irony was that Turkey did join the Allied side against Hitler—but only in the last days of the European conflict, when Hitler was about to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker and the Reich was in ashes. The sacrifice of Alexandretta was for nothing.

Nor have its ghosts departed. In 1998, the Turkish prime minister Mesut Yılmaz launched a warning against the Syrians who were assisting the communist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas operating across the border. He chose a ceremony to mark the French handover of Alexandretta to announce that “those who have their eyes fixed on Turkish territory are suffering from blindness—not even a square centimetre of this country will be taken from it.” Yet Alexandretta had been Armenian. So much for the Treaty of Sèvres.

The world is full of bigger and smaller genocides, some of which we know of from massive testimony and others to which we have blinded ourselves as surely as the Armenian refugee children lost their sight in the vile baths of the refugee homes to which they were taken in 1916. Mark Levene has written extensively about one of the lesser-known genocides—hands up, readers of this book, if you already know of it—when in 1933 the army of the nascent Iraqi state launched an exterminatory attack on members of the Assyrian community. Near the city of Dahuk, the soldiers massacred the entire population of a village called Summayl. The few surviving women were later gang-raped, and Kurds, who formed the predominant ethnic group in the region, joined in the mass killings—in some cases, no doubt, the very same Kurds who had looted and slaughtered the Armenians just across the Turkish border eighteen years earlier. This all happened in British-run Iraq and the local administrative inspector, a Colonel R. S. Stafford, reported to London that Iraqi officers had decided upon the killings with a view to the Assyrians being “as far as possible . . . exterminated.” These Assyrians had been driven from Turkey after genocidal attacks on their villages, had sought sanctuary in Persia, and were then taken by the British to live near Mosul in what would be the new Iraqi state.

Levene has traced this pattern of confrontation with the Iraqi state all the way from 1933 to the Assyrian killings in Saddam’s Anfal campaign of 1988. But even after the initial massacres, the British stifled an inquiry at the League of Nations by suggesting that it could lead to the collapse of King Feisal’s regime, and promptly offered their bombs to the new Iraqi air force for their anti-Assyrian campaign— after the initial killings. The British also warned that a public inquiry might incite “an outbreak of xenophobia directed at foreigners”—something they only succeeded in doing seventy years later.

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 YorkTimes 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 Europe. 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.”

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 because 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!”

Back in the United States, Armenians demanded compensation from U.S. companies with whom their families—murdered in 1915—had insured their lives. If it took Jewish Holocaust survivors forty years to gain recompense from such companies, it took the Armenian Holocaust survivors and descendants eighty-five years. New York Life Insurance agreed to settle a class-action suit for $20 million, but even then its chairman, Sy Sternberg—who said that a third of the claims were settled after the murders—used the neutral language favoured by Turkey. Prompt payment had been made on claims, he said, “when it became clear that many of our Armenian policyholders perished in the tragic events of 1915.” Perished? Tragic events? Several companies in the United States initially declined to pay out because “no one came forward” to make claims. Andrew Kevorkian, one of the most outspoken British Armenians on 1915, asked: “What did they expect? That the Turks would write a little note—‘To Whom It May Concern’—stating the date of the murder each time they killed these men and women?”

When the Armenian community in the United States asked George W. Bush for his policy on their genocide if he were elected president, he stated on 19 February 2000 that “the Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign . . . an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity. If elected President, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people.” Once he became president, however, Bush lost his courage, failed to honour his promise to the Armenian community and resorted to the usual weasel-words. Addressing Armenians on 24 April 2001, the eighty-sixth anniversary of the start of the slaughter, Bush no longer used the word “genocide.” Instead, it became “one of the great tragedies of history”; he talked only about “infamous killings” and “the tragedy that scarred the history of the Armenian people” and their “bitter fate” at “the end of the Ottoman Empire.”

On the same day a year later, Bush called the genocide “an appalling tragedy,” talked about “horrific killings” but referred only to “this horrendous loss of life.” Again, “genocide” had disappeared and there was even a mystifying remark about “the wounds that remain painful for people in Armenia, in Turkey, and around the globe.” In April 2003 it was “a horrible tragedy” and “a great calamity” but one which—for some reason best known to Bush—reflected “a deep sorrow that continues to haunt them and their neighbours, the Turkish people.” This was preposterous. The Turkish government was denying the genocide—not feeling sorry about it. In the words of the Armenian National Committee of America, Bush, despite his calls for “moral clarity” in international affairs, had “allowed pressure by a foreign government to reduce the President of the United States to using evasive and euphemistic terminology to avoid properly identifying the Armenian genocide . . .”

This, it should be remembered, was the same president who thought he was fighting a “war against terror,” who claimed he was fighting “evil” but who, when confronted with inescapable evidence of both terror and evil on a scale outreaching anything perpetrated against Americans, got cold feet and ran away from the truth. Indeed, there are times when the very existence of the Armenian genocide— for so many nations around the world—seems to have become far more dangerous than the weapons of mass destruction Bush and Blair lied about in Iraq. In this parallel but more realistic universe, it is the Turks who are telling Bush and Blair: You are either with us or against us. And both men have lined up alongside the Turks to deny history.

So now let me shine some sad, wintry sunlight over the West’s miserable, cowardly and dangerous response to the twentieth century’s first Holocaust. The genocide of 1915 was “forcefully remembered” at Westminster Abbey in 1996 when Sir Michael Mayne, the Dean Emeritus of Westminster, commissioned an Irish artist to carve a stone to lie outside the west doors. “REMEMBER,” the inscription reads, “all innocent victims of oppression, violence and war.” Round the edge is written: “Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by?” Queen Elizabeth unveiled the stone in the presence of men and women who had suffered in Auschwitz, Rwanda, Bosnia, Siberia, Soweto and Armenia. Among them was eighty-nine-year-old Yervant Shekerdemian, who as a boy experienced the Armenian massacres and lost most of his family in the genocide.

And after the months of mean refusal to acknowledge the truth of history, an outpouring of public anger eventually forced the Blair government, at the very last moment, to give way and allow more than twenty Armenians to attend the first Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. Shekerdemian and another genocide survivor, Anig Bodossian, were belatedly invited. The Armenian Bishop in Britain was given a place of honour with other senior clergy, including the Chief Rabbi, and was among those who lit a candle before Blair and other politicians.

Not long afterwards, on Turkish television, an extraordinary event took place. A Turkish writer and historian, Taner Akçam, lectured his people on the facts—the reality—of the 1915 Armenian genocide. In front of a nationwide audience, he advised penitence. “If you can’t bring yourself to describe it as genocide, call it a massacre if you want,” he said. “But it was a crime against humanity . . . Ask forgiveness from the Armenian people and . . . make a commitment that in Turkey, political dissent and disagreement should no longer be treated as an offence.”

These were difficult, treacherous things for a Turkish audience to hear. So Akçam was interrupted during the bitter six-hour television debate on 3 February 2001. “How dare you let this man speak? Shut him up!” came an imperious voice over a phone link-up. It was Semra Özal, widow of former Turkish president Turgut Özal. But Dr. Akçam did not give up. “Unless we distance ourselves from the perpetrators of this crime, which was a genocide, we will never be able to relieve ourselves of this terrible burden,” he said. He used the Turkish for genocide—soykırım—throughout the programme. “The constant refrain of ‘We are not guilty,’ and the parallel blaming of the Armenians, the victims, very much hurts the cause of Turkey,” he said. Akçam even quoted Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish state, who on 23 April 1920 denounced the “Armenian massacres” as “a shameful act.”

Hikmet Çiçek, the editor of Aydınlık , immediately denounced Akçam as a “traitor,” but other journalists were more courageous. Columnist Ertuğrul Özkök of Hurriyet had written the same day that the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide were “our Pol Pots, Berias and Stalins and the sooner we call their crimes to account . . . the better our chances of redeeming ourselves from this scourge of being accused of genocide.”

Almost exactly three years after Akçam’s television “debate,” more than 500 Turkish intellectuals—university teachers, authors, writers and human rights officials—protested at a new school history curriculum which ordered teachers to denounce to their children “the unfounded allegations” of the Armenians. Nor was this the first time that Turkish intellectuals had confronted their government. Three Turks were prosecuted in Istanbul in March 1994 for translating into Turkish and publishing 15,000 copies of a French book on the Armenian genocide. The book had been banned in January of that year by the Istanbul State Security Court No. 3, and they had been accused of inciting “belligerency, racial and territorial segregation and undermining the territorial integrity of Turkey.” An Armenian Rights Group campaigned for the three Turks.

During the Jewish Holocaust, the Jews of Europe found their “righteous gentiles,” the non-Jewish men and women living under Nazi occupation who risked their lives to save those of Jews. And the ghosts of another group of saviours pass through the pages of the massive Bryce report on the Armenian Holocaust. Two American witnesses record how orders arrived for Tahsin Bey, the governor of Erzurum, in 1915, instructing him “that all Armenians should be killed. Tahsin refused to carry this out and, indeed, all through the time he was reluctant to maltreat the Armenians, but was overruled by force majeure.”77

Armenians themselves are taught at school of the brave governor of Aleppo, Jelal Pasha, who said he was a governor, not an executioner—who said “it is the natural right of a human being to live.” He saved thousands of lives. But it is the small man—the good Turk—who occasionally shines out of the Bryce report. On the deportation to Ras al-Ain, Maritza Kedjedjian was the witness to the rape of young women by Kurds. “When they were going to carry off another girl,” she wrote later, “I asked Euomer Çavuş, a Mardin man, to help us.” Çavu ş means he was a Turkish army sergeant. Maritza goes on:

He stopped them at once and did not let them take [the girl] away . . . The Kurds from the surrounding villages attacked us that night. Euomer, who was in charge of us, immediately went up to the heights and harangued them in Kurdish, telling them not to attack us. We were hungry and thirsty and had no water to drink. Euomer took some of our [drinking] vessels and brought us water from a long way off . . . The wife of my brother-in-law . . . had a baby born that night. The next morning we started again. Sergeant Euomer left some women with her and kept an eye on her from a distance. Then he put the mother and the new-born child on a beast, and brought her to us in safety.

Could there be a more moving story from the bloody fields of the Armenian Holocaust? And so I return to my original question. Should not the Armenians commemorate all those brave Turks who acted out of compassion and refused to obey orders? Though these Turks were painfully few in number, Armenians would be acknowledging their humanity. And how would the Turks react? By refusing to honour these courageous fellow Turks? Or by remembering their courage and thus—by the same token—accepting the fact of the Armenian genocide? Taner Akçam deserves such a gesture. So does Sergeant Euomer.

SO DO THE ARMENIANS. In 2002, Aram Kevorkian sent me an account of his visit to Chunkoush, the Armenian town in Turkey where his father Karnig was born. He found the rubble of the Armenian homes of ninety years ago, and the still standing wreckage of two Armenian churches. And he went to the ravine where his people had been murdered in April 1915. “There the Armenians had been forced to undress, their hands had been tied, and their throats slit or their heads shattered with axes, and their bodies thrown into the pits.” Kevorkian stood and read from Yeats’s poem of hope, “Lapis Lazuli”:

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again . . .

It is 1992, and I am at Margara on the border of Turkey and Armenia—the real Armenian state, free at last of its dark Soviet cloak—and I look at the snow-peak of Mount Ararat beyond the Turkish border; for Ararat, the national symbol of Armenia, is inside Turkey, a place to be looked at and wondered at from afar. I stand in the garden of Levon Karapegian, and above his tomato bushes and potato beds, his cucumbers and sick-looking cherry trees, I see a Turkish flag drooping in the midday heat on top of a wooden guard post. “Sometimes I see the Turkish soldiers standing over there by the little tree on the other side of the fence,” Karapegian says. What Armenian, I ask myself, wants to live within 6 metres of the nation whose Ottoman rulers annihilated his people?

There are not many villagers left; today they are outnumbered by the storks that nest on the disused factory crane, on the telegraph poles, on the roof of the crumbling public library, on top of the marble podium commemorating those Armenians who fell in the 1941–45 “Great Patriotic War” against Hitler. Karapegian is a teacher of Armenian history at the local secondary school, educating the great-grandchildren of those who survived the genocide and fled—in most cases from villages scarcely 25 kilometres away on the other side of the Turkish border—between 1915 and 1918.

As I sit with Levon Karapegian and his family at a table in their garden, eating plates of cherries, a cuckoo calls from beyond the trees, from Turkey, from what the family call western Armenia. And his wife points to a line of poplars behind the Turkish guard post. “That was our family home,” she says. “I remember my father putting me on his shoulders when I was small and telling me how my grandfather planted all those trees.”

Five years later and 3,500 kilometres away, the sea mist curling over the Sussex dunes on a damp English evening, Astrid Aghajanian is pouring tea for me from a big, heavy pot. She is one of the last survivors. Eighty-two years ago, the Turks shot her grandfather, grandmother and uncle.

What was left of the family all walked and walked. At a village one night, my father who had been deported with us came to see us. He told my mother that he thought he was being allowed to say goodbye, that he would be shot with the other men. I remember my mother told me that my father’s last words were: “The only way to remember me is to look after Astrid.” We never saw him again. It was a long march and the Turks and Kurds came to carry off girls for rape. My mother would run from one end of the column to the other each time she saw them attacking us. My other grandmother died along the way. So did my newly-born brother Vartkes. We had to leave him by the roadside. One day, the Turks said they wanted to collect all the young children and look after them. Some women, who couldn’t feed their children, let them go. Then my mother saw them piling the children on top of each other and setting them on fire. My mother pushed me under another pile of corpses. She buried herself with me under those bodies. Even today I cannot stand to be in darkness or to be on my own. My mother saved me from the fire. She used to tell me afterwards that when she heard the screams of the children and saw the flames, it was as if their souls were going up to heaven.

Astrid Aghajanian’s mother eventually carried her to a Bedouin camp and, after reaching Aleppo—with the help of a Turkish officer—she remarried and moved to the newly mandated territory of Palestine. In Jerusalem young Astrid was to meet her future husband Gaspar, whose family had lived in Palestine for generations. But her Armenian agony had not ended. They were forced to flee the 1948 Arab–Israeli war and took refuge in Jordan—where Gaspar Aghajanian secured British citizenship—and then moved to Cyprus. But when the Turks invaded the island in 1974, after the Greek coup d’état, the couple were dispossessed once again. Astrid was now a refugee from the Turks twice in the same century. The Turkish army moved into what had been their family home. Could history torture anyone more than this?

It could. The Aghajanians received money for their lost home, but when Gaspar demanded compensation for the couple’s possessions—Persian carpets, furniture, an ancient coin collection, photographs of massacred relatives from 1915, a piano and a large library of valuable books all stolen by the Turks—he received a letter from the British Foreign Office stating that “the Turkish Cypriot authorities . . . enacted ‘legislation’ to exclude claims made by those persons who were deemed to have Greek or Greek Cypriot connections. They have now extended this exclusion to cover claims by persons deemed to be of Armenian descent.”

The couple were never Greek Cypriots and never asked for Greek Cypriot passports. “We were full British citizens,” Gaspar Aghajanian says. “But we were refused compensation on grounds of our ethnic background.” When he heard that Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, was to visit Turkey in 1990 for ceremonies marking the 1915 Gallipoli battle—another full-circle of the catastrophe—Astrid’s husband wrote to his MP to complain, adding that his wife was a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Back came a letter from Foreign Office minister Francis Maude, saying—and here the reader of this book may be permitted to scream—that while the government “regard the loss of so many lives as a tragedy . . . we have long considered that it would not be right to raise with, or attribute to, the present Turkish government acts which took place 75 years ago during the time of the Ottoman empire . . .”

Catch-22 is a cliché compared to this. In order to maintain relations with Turkey, the British government no longer acknowledges that the Armenian genocide happened. But it cannot obtain compensation for the Aghajanians because the Turks refuse to compensate British citizens of Armenian descent—because of the 1915 Armenian genocide. To this day, the couple have received nothing for their possessions.

If there was any international kindness to be bestowed upon the Aghajanians, however, it came in 2003 when a young Turkish woman, a student from Chicago, asked to see them. The girl, whose identity it is still better to protect, had moved from Turkey to the United States and found herself living among Armenians and insisted on hearing the story of their genocide. She began academic work to discover what happened in 1915. One afternoon she came to the little bungalow in Shoreham in southern England and expressed her sorrow to Astrid, and her remorse for what her Turkish people had done. She gently produced a tape recorder. And so Astrid Aghajanian’s memories—of her father’s last goodbye, of the death of her baby brother and of the burning children whose souls went up to heaven—are now safeguarded by a young Turkish woman.78

In Beirut, the Armenian home for the blind—now for all elderly Armenians— is warmer now than it was during the last days of the civil war. There are new doors and central heating, although all the Holocaust survivors I met there in 1994 are dead. There are only two new patients who are survivors. There will be no more. One is an old lady who can only remember the songs her mother taught her of the horrors of the march and the deportation. She squeals them out in Turkish because she never learned Armenian, so that the staff have to find a nurse who speaks the Turkish language to translate. I know these songs. They have been meticulously collected by an Armenian academic:

Bunches and bunches of roses are coming,
Death is hard to bear for me,
Wake up, sultan, tyrant sultan!
The whole world is weeping blood!

Down the corridor, a very old man is lying on a bed. He is Haroutioun Kebedjian. He is holding in his left hand a Bible in Braille and his right hand is fingering the embossed paper letters. He greets me with a smile, sightlessly. It is now the year 2000 and he is ninety-three years old, so he was eight when he survived the Armenian Holocaust. His memory is as clear as his emotions:

We lived in Dortyol. My father was called Sarkis and my mother was Mariam. There were ten children including me and my brothers and sisters. The Turks collected all the people with their donkeys and horses. We were to go to Aleppo and Ras el-Ain. But they started killing us on the way. The Turks forced us to the Habur River and by the time we got there, there was only my mother and my sister and me left. They told the women and the men to take off all their clothes. My sister was eighteen and a man on a horse came and grabbed her and put her on his horse. He did this in front of us. It happened in front of my eyes. I was not blind then. And they started to beat my mother. As she begged them not to take my sister, the Turks beat her to death. I have always remembered that as she died, she screamed my name: “Haroutioun! Haroutioun!” Later an Arab Bedouin took me to his house and I stayed there for three years. The war was over and then people came saying they were looking for Armenian orphans. I said I was Armenian, so they took me to Aleppo. There I caught a virus that affected my eyes. I was suddenly blind and I was only eleven years old. Until I was twenty-three, I was filled with rage because the Turks took my sister and beat my mother in front of my eyes until she died. But when I was twenty-three, I felt this was not the right way to be a man, so I began to pray to God so He would see me. I was making peace with myself. Now I am ready to meet my God. I am at peace. Last year when the big earthquake happened in Turkey, it killed so many Turks. And I prayed to God for those Turks— I prayed for those poor Turkish people.

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