Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Denial Redux
by Charles Glass, The New York Press - Wednesday, January 24, 2001
Posted: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 07:28 am CST

The London Desk

Who denies genocide? As a rule, the perpetrators and their apologists. The apologists do two things: first, deny the genocide took place; and, then, excuse it. Their strategy imitates that of defense lawyers, who assure the jury that while their client did not commit murder, he had a good excuse. In the Dec. 13 issue I wrote on this page that the British government was appeasing modern Turkey by refusing to acknowledge Ottoman Turkey’s last great crime, the annihilation of half the empire’s Armenian population. The Labor regime joins the ranks of Armenian-holocaust deniers this coming Jan. 27, when it honors all the other victims of the 20th century’s genocides.

Representatives of Britain’s tiny Armenian community, a mere 25,000 souls, complained that the BBC was following the government’s lead by excluding their forebears from all television coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day. The BBC’s response was, in its way, more shocking than the government’s position that the only genocides worth commemorating were the Nazis’ of Jews and Roma (Gypsies), the Hutus’ of Tutsis in Rwanda and the Serbs’ of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The BBC admitted in a letter to General-Secretary Misak Ohanian of the Center for Armenian Information and Advice that it had surrendered editorial control to the Home Office. "The BBC," wrote producer Gaby Koppel, "have been invited to produce the official event on behalf of the Home Office, who have retained overall editorial control."

Overall editorial control? The BBC is a state-owned corporation in which, according to its charter, the government is not allowed to interfere. The government puts its placemen in charge: Margaret Thatcher installed as deputy director-general (thus ensuring he would succeed to the top job) the egregious John Birt to sell off many of the BBC’s best assets and corporatize the place; and Tony Blair replaced him with Labor Party donor Greg Dyke to make Auntie, as the BBC is known here, more amenable to the New Labor’s vision of whatever the party has a vision of (like winning the next election). After putting their favorites in charge, governments are not expected to take direct control of anything, especially news. Granting the Home Office editorial control over Holocaust remembrance is a bit like CNN turning over its coverage of the Gulf War and Kosovo to the Pentagon. (In a way, CNN did just that. Unlike the British government and BBC, however, it never admitted the fact.)

This is the first time Britain has sponsored a Holocaust Memorial Day, and it has chosen the odd date of Jan. 27, anniversary of the Red Army’s conquest of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, rather than the day in April 1945 when Britain’s own army liberated Belsen. That the whole enterprise was confused is reflected in Tony Blair’s explanation that it is intended to "celebrate our diversity and build a new patriotism that is open to all." What Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity–specifically against Jews, Roma, Poles, homosexuals and communists–have to do with British diversity is a question best left to New Labor’s ideologues. The point is that, despite all the confusion surrounding this "celebration" (who celebrates mass murder?), the only victims of genocide during the 20th century who are excluded from the program are the Armenians. I suggested last December that the reason for their exclusion was Britain’s unwillingness to offend Turkey, a major market for British arms and a staging area for Anglo-American bombing runs against sanctions-starved Iraqis. The suggestion appeared to annoy another columnist on these pages, Melik Kaylan, who wrote that I "should know better."

Kaylan writes that for me and Edward Said, although I’m not certain why America’s greatest Palestinian intellectual was dragged into this, "the Turks remain unredeemable, a common sentiment in the West." I have never expressed animosity toward the Turks. While I decry their historic massacres of 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War and their filthy war against their Kurdish citizens for the past quarter century, I love Turkey, its people and its culture. In 1990, I published a book, Tribes with Flags (Atlantic Monthly Press–still in print, so please buy it), that was a long lament for the demise of the Ottoman Empire. To compare the architecture of the great Sinan in Istanbul and Damascus to the pathetic European structures that followed under British, French and independent rule is to see that the Middle East was far better under the Ottomans than subsequently. The borders that Britain and France drew across the landscape of the Middle East have scarred the region ever since. Turkey was a great power, whose greatest stain is the crime it has never admitted: genocide against the Armenians.

It sickens me that people still deny it took place. Their more or less successful denial helps us to understand why Israel and the Jewish Diaspora will not let us forget what happened to Jews during World War II. Since Oct. 29, 1923, when Turkey became a republic, the state has systematically denied the organized massacre of the Armenians. Where massacres are acknowledged, the official version was that rebellious Armenians provoked them. One of the more famous cases was the so-called revolt at Van in eastern Turkey in 1915, when the Russians intervened. What Kaylan does not mention is that American missionaries at Van (America was not at war with Turkey) observed that "The Russians cremated nearly 55,000 slain Armenian corpses they found." The missionary Grace Knapp, who lived through the massacre, wrote, "The fact cannot be too strongly emphasized that there was no [Armenian] rebellion." American missionary files record massacres at Akhisar and the long death marches to the desert, where Armenians were burned alive.

History can be denied. People forget. While a defeated Germany admitted its crimes against the Jews, Turkey did not really lose the war. It lost an empire, but the brilliant leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later called Ataturk, Father of the Turks) saved his country from colonization by the Allied Powers. Ataturk’s struggle to keep the Turks free enabled him to deny crimes with which he, who had an honorable record during the World War at Gallipoli and in Syria, was not associated. It is time for Turkey to admit what happened and take its place among the free and open societies of the world. Britain and writers in Western newspapers, meanwhile, should stop conniving in the lie.

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