By: Geoffrey Robertson
Armenians bring flowers to a Yerevan memorial marking the
genocide launched by Turkey on April 24, 2015, on the eve of the Gallipoli
landings. Source: AFP. JUST before the invasion of Pol¬and, Adolf Hitler urged his
generals to show no mercy towards its people — there would be no retribution
because “after all, who now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?” As the centenary of the Armenian genocide approaches — it
began on April 24, 1915, the night before the Gallipoli landing, with the
rounding up and subsequent “disappearance” of intellectuals and community
leaders — remembrance of the destruction of more than half of the Armenian
people is more important than ever.
The Young Turks who ran the Ottoman government did not use
gas ovens but they did massacre the men and sent the women, children and elders
on death marches through the desert to ¬places we hear of now only because they
are overrun by Islamic State. They died en route in their hundreds of thousands
from starvation or attack, and many survivors died of typhus in concentration
camps at the end of the line. The government ordered these forced deportations
in 1915, then passed laws to seize the Armenians’ lands, homes and churches on
the pretext that they had been abandoned.
The destruction of more than a million Armenians was
declared a “crime against humanity” by Britain, France and Russia in 1915, and
these allies formally promised punishment for what a US inquiry at the end of
the war described as “a colossal crime — the wholesale attempt on a race”. But
the Treaty of Sevres, designed at the end of World War I to punish the Young
Turks for the colossal crime — now called genocide — was never implemented.
Modern Turkey funds a massive genocide denial campaign,
claiming that the death marches were merely relocations required by military
necessity and that the undeniable massacres (the Euphrates was so packed with
bodies that it altered its course) were the work of a few “unruly” officials.
In Turkey today, you can go to jail — and some do — for affirming that there
was a genocide in 1915: this counts as the crime of “insulting Turkishness”
under section 301 of its penal code.
Ironically, in some European countries, it counts as a crime
to deny the Armenian genocide. The parliaments of many democracies — France,
Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Russia, Greece and Canada, for example —
recognise it explicitly, as do 43 states of the US. The problem is that Turkey,
“neuralgic” on the subject (the word used privately by the British Foreign
Office to describe its attitude), has threatened reprisals and is too important
geopolitically at present to provoke by stating the truth, lest it carries out
threats to close it air bases to NATO and its borders to refugees.
Thus Barack Obama, who roundly condemned the Armenian genocide
in 2008 and promised to do so when elected President, dares not utter the
G-word. Instead, he calls it Meds Yeghern (Armenian for “the great crime”) and
asserts that his opinion has not changed.
The same double standard has been adopted by the Australian
government. Tony Abbott, when opposition leader, did not hesitate to condemn
the Armenian genocide. But when the NSW parliament formally recognised it,
Turkey threatened to ban MPs from Gallipoli for next year’s Anzac centenary.
That doubtless explains Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s
bizarre statement in June that the events of 1915 were “a tragedy” but “we do
not recognise the events as genocide”. She added: “The approach of the
Australian government has been not to become involved in this sensitive
debate.” A sure-fire way of becoming involved in the debate is to refuse to
recognise the genocide, and she was duly hailed in Turkey as a genocide denier.
“Australian Foreign Minister: Armenians not victims of genocide” screamed the
newspaper headlines in Istanbul.
Telling the truth about this genocide has, for the
Australian government, never been more inconvenient. Although many of its
members will be at the dawn service at Gallipoli on April 25 next year, nobody
has yet been appointed to represent Australia at the international
commemoration in Armenia’s capital Yerevan on the day before.
This is shameful because the Dardanelles landings were the
trigger for the start of the genocide, and (together with Russian military
activity on Turkey’s eastern front) were used as an excuse for the destruction
of the Armenians, on the pretext that they might support the allied invasion.
Even today, Turkey defends the death marches on grounds of
“military necessity”, as if the destruction of civilians far from the front,
and the ethnic cleansing of women, old men and children, could ever be
necessary to gain a military advantage.
The evidence of the government’s genocidal intent, in any
case, is overwhelming, coming as it does from appalled German and Italian
diplomats and neutral Americans, to whom the Young Turk leaders admitted that
they were going to eliminate “the Armenian problem” by eliminating the
Armenians.
There can never be justification for genocide. This was
understood by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the word and worked
tirelessly between the wars to have the annihilation of the Armenians
recognised as an international crime. The Holocaust soon provided another
example of the need for a convention to bind the world to act against governments
that seek to destroy racial or religious minorities.
It is sometimes forgotten that Australia was first to take
up Lemkin’s cause, through the foresight of Doc Evatt, who bonded with Lemkin
and introduced the Genocide Convention in 1948 during his presidency of the UN
General Assembly. Its definition of the crime, applied to the undisputed facts
of 1915, produces a verdict of guilt that is beyond reasonable doubt.
It was, of course, a century ago: does it still matter? A
century is just within living memory: this year a 103-year-old woman, once a
small child carried by her mother across burning sands, took tea with Obama and
the world’s most famous Armenian (Kim Kardashian). The mental scars and trauma
for the children and grandchildren of survivors throughout the diaspora will
continue until Turkey makes some acknowledgment of the crime and offers an
apology.
International law may provide some assistance: there are
assets expropriated in 1915 that can still be traced, and many ruined churches
that can be restored and returned. Armenians want restoration of their historic
lands in eastern ¬Turkey, which is asking too much ¬(although I have suggested
that the majestic Mount Ararat, overlooking Yerevan, could be handed over by
Turkey as an act of ¬reconciliation).
But what they want most of all is what they are plainly
entitled to have: an acknowledgment from Turkey, and for that matter from the
Australian government, that what happened to their people in 1915 was not a
tragedy but a crime.
Geoffrey Robertson QC is author of An Inconvenient Genocide:
Who Now Remembers the Armenians?, published this month by Random House.
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