Robert Fisk
Despite what some sub-editors might think, the genocide
of 1.5m Armenian Christians in 1915 was not a holocaust… An image from 1915.
Turkey deported two thirds of the Armenian population; many were either killed
or died of starvation during the journey An image from 1915. Turkey deported
two thirds of the Armenian population; many were either killed or died of
starvation during the journey Many years ago, therefore, I used the phrase
“Armenian Holocaust” in The Independent. A sub-editor immediately changed the
capital H to a lower-case h. My phone did not stop ringing. Armenians were
outraged. Why did they not deserve a capital H, they demanded to know? Didn’t
the Turks murder enough Armenians to qualify them for a capital H? I wrote a
long memorandum to my then editor, Simon Kelner, explaining that it was racist
to make a distinction between two genocides; we could not base our definition
on the numerical difference between 1,500,000 and 6,000,000. Besides, Israelis
(as opposed to the state of Israel, which doesn’t even regard the Armenian
catastrophe as a genocide) refer to the Armenian massacres as the Armenian
Shoah – using the Hebrew word for Holocaust. Kelner later published my memo as
an article in The Independent – and it won the DC Watt journalism award.
***
Despite what some sub-editors might think, the genocide
of 1.5m Armenian Christians in 1915 was not a holocaust
What’s in a name? Let’s start with the Persian Gulf. Or
the Arabian Gulf. Or just the Arab Gulf. I’m indebted to reader (and surgeon)
Ross Farhadieh for complaining to me last week about my use of “The Gulf” –
bland, dull and historically anaemic – in a column on Iran and its possible
return to geopolitical power in the Middle East. Historically, legally – and in
the UN – Ross told me, it should be called the Persian Gulf. It was Gamal Abdul
Nasser’s nationalism which renamed it the “Arabian Gulf”.
And Ross is right. And I think I know the background to
this slippage in nomenclature. When I worked in the Middle East for The Times –
long before Murdoch emasculated the paper – we found that whenever we referred
to the Persian Gulf, Arab states would refuse to let the paper go on sale in
Dubai or Cairo. But whenever we called it the Arabian Gulf, the paper was not
allowed into Iran.
So we went for “The Gulf”. Maybe this was a bit cowardly
– I wasn’t involved in the decision – but many other papers followed suit. The
British press was not going to be censored in the Middle East if a little
historical obfuscation could be built in to our copy. The Independent, still
unborn at the time, referred quite innocently to The Gulf once it began
publication – probably without the slightest idea of why it didn’t carry the
Persian or Arabian appellation.
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We’d always had a faintly similar problem with Northern
Ireland. In the worst days of the war there, we on The Times often used
“Ulster” as shorthand for the six-county province – only to find that Irish
readers in the Republic took great exception to the name. Ulster, they rightly
pointed out, historically contained nine counties, which included the three
counties of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, which the Protestant seigneurs of the
north declined to accept in Northern Ireland because (of course) these three
counties had too many Catholics. Irish republicans – or just plain Irish
citizens – preferred the “Six Counties” or, at a push, Northern Ireland. They
were right. But since The Times still sold in the Republic, we went on using
Ulster when we felt like it. Indeed, my first book on Irish history included
the word Ulster in the title. And it meant six, not nine, counties.
I tended to take a harsher view of countries whose titles
began with the words “the People’s Democratic Republic of” – mainly because
they invariably belonged to their dictators rather than their people, and were
neither popular nor democratic. Yemen – or the PDRY – for example. So we called
it just Yemen – or Algeria, which also likes to call itself popular and
democratic.
Then we had to acknowledge Father Time. My dad, a veteran
of what he called “The Great War” of 1914-18, went on calling it that long
after the second and even more titanic bloodbath had been fought around the
world. The Brits officially decided to call the Great War the First World War –
in, I think, 1948 – because they had to yield to history. My dad’s war had not proved
to be the war to end all wars after all, and we had to acknowledge that. I
still like the epic ring of The Great War – but by 1945, the Great bit simply
didn’t work any more.
Other Great War events remain contentious, not least what
I always refer to as the Armenian Holocaust (with a capital “H”), the genocide
of 1.5m Armenian Christians at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman government in
1915. It was the first industrialised genocide of the last century – the second
being the Jewish Holocaust – and the two mass acts of slaughter had clear
historical connections. The Turks suffocated thousands of Armenians in caves –
by blowing smoke from bonfires into the cavities where they had imprisoned them
in the Syrian desert – and thus created the first primitive gas chambers.
Armenian men were sometimes taken to their execution in
railway goods wagons. And junior members of the German Kaiser’s army who were
training the Turkish army at the time witnessed the genocide; more importantly,
some of the names of these Germans turned up less than a quarter of a century
later as members of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the Ukraine and Belarus, where they
were helping to organise the mass killing of Jews. There’s no doubt where they
learned how to do that.
An image from 1915. Turkey deported two thirds of the
Armenian population; many were either killed or died of starvation during the
journey An image from 1915. Turkey deported two thirds of the Armenian
population; many were either killed or died of starvation during the journey
Many years ago, therefore, I used the phrase “Armenian Holocaust” in The
Independent. A sub-editor immediately changed the capital H to a lower-case h.
My phone did not stop ringing. Armenians were outraged. Why did they not
deserve a capital H, they demanded to know? Didn’t the Turks murder enough
Armenians to qualify them for a capital H? I wrote a long memorandum to my then
editor, Simon Kelner, explaining that it was racist to make a distinction
between two genocides; we could not base our definition on the numerical
difference between 1,500,000 and 6,000,000. Besides, Israelis (as opposed to the
state of Israel, which doesn’t even regard the Armenian catastrophe as a
genocide) refer to the Armenian massacres as the Armenian Shoah – using the
Hebrew word for Holocaust. Kelner later published my memo as an article in The
Independent – and it won the DC Watt journalism award.
But we newspaper folk have poor institutional memories.
Earlier this month, I again referred to the Armenian Holocaust – and a
sub-editor, unfamiliar with the expression, innocently downgraded the poor old
Armenians again. He changed the capital H into h! My phone trilled once more.
The same unanswerable arguments. Didn’t the Turks kill enough of us, my
Armenian callers asked again? So of course we sheepishly upgraded the Armenians
on the website version of my report and returned to them their capital H…
And of course, I haven’t even begun to address today the
use of that generic, racist (in its use), pejorative and repulsive word
“terrorist”. I only use it in inverted commas for direct quotations. But what
can we do when the masters of the universe – America and that dreadful chap
who’s just won a Save the Children award – long ago embarked on an everlasting
“War on Terror”?
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