Dr Fatma Goçek of the university of Michigan is among the bravest of those Turkish-born academics who are fighting to confront the Ottoman Empire’s terror against the Armenians. Yet she, too, objects to the use of the word genocide – though she acknowledges its accuracy – on the grounds that it has become ‘politicised’ and thus hinders research.
I have some sympathy with this argument. Why make the job of honest Turks more difficult when these good men and women are taking on the might of Turkish nationalism? The problem is that other, more disreputable folk are demanding the same deletion. Mr Alptuna writes to me – with awesome disingenuousness – that Armenians ‘have failed to submit any irrefutable evidence to support their allegations of genocide’. And he goes on to say that ‘genocide, as you are well aware, has a quite specific legal definition’ in the UN’s 1948 Convention. But Mr Alptuna is himself well aware – though he does not say so, of course – that the definition of genocide was set out by Raphael Lemkin, a Jew, in specific reference to the wholesale mass slaughter of the Armenians.
* Hrant Dink’s fate is recorded in the next pages.
And all the while, new diplomatic archives are opening in the West which reveal the smell of death – Armenian death – in their pages. I quote here, for example, from the newly discovered account of Denmark’s minister in Turkey during the First World War. ‘The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate the Armenian people,’ Carl Wandel wrote on 3 July 1915. The bishop of Karput was ordered to leave Aleppo within forty-eight hours ‘and it has later been learned that this Bishop and all the clergy that accompanied him have been killed between Diyarbekir and Urfa at a place where approximately 1,700 Armenian families have suffered the same fate… In Angora… approximately 6,000 men… have been shot on the road. Even here in Constantinople [Istanbul], Armenians are being abducted and sent to Asia…’
There is much, much more. Yet now here is Mr Alptuna in his letter to me: ‘In fact, the Armenians living outside Eastern Armenia including Istanbul… were excluded from deportation.’ Somebody here is not telling the truth. The late Mr Wandel of Copenhagen? Or the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James?
The Independent, 20 May 2006
Armenia’s 1,500,001st genocide victim
Hrant Dink became the 1,500,001st victim of the Armenian genocide yesterday. An educated and generous journalist and academic – editor of the weekly Turkish–Armenian newspaper Agos – he tried to create a dialogue between the two nations to reach a common narrative of the twentieth century’s first Holocaust. And he paid the price: two bullets shot into his head and two into his body by an assassin in the streets of Istanbul yesterday afternoon. It was not only a frightful blow to Turkey’s surviving Armenian community but a shattering reversal to Turkey’s hope of joining the European Union, a visionary proposal already endangered by the country’s broken relations with Cyprus and its refusal to acknowledge the genocide for what it was: the deliberate mass killing of an entire race of Christian people by the country’s Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. Winston Churchill was among the first to call it a holocaust, but to this day the Turkish authorities deny such a definition, ignoring documents which Turkey’s own historians have unearthed to prove the government’s genocidal intent.
The 53-year-old journalist, who had two children, was murdered at the door of his newspaper. Just over a year ago, he was convicted under Turkey’s notorious Law 301 of ‘anti- Turkishness’, a charge he strenuously denied even after he received a six-month suspended sentence from an Istanbul court. The EU has demanded that Turkey repeal the law under which the country also tried to imprison Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk. At the time of his trial, Dink appeared on Turkish television in tears. ‘I’m living together with Turks in this country,’ he said then. ‘And I’m in complete solidarity with them. I don’t think I could live with an identity of having insulted them in this country.’
It is a stunning irony that Dink, in one of his articles, had accused his fellow Armenians of allowing their enmity towards the Turks for the genocide to develop to the point where it had a ‘poisoning effect on your blood’ – and that the court took the article out of context and claimed he was referring to Turkish blood as poisonous. Dink told news agency reporters in 2005 that his case had arisen from a question on what he felt when, at primary school, he had to take a traditional Turkish oath: ‘I am a Turk, I am honest, I am hard-working.’ In his defence, Dink said: ‘I said that I was a Turkish citizen but an Armenian and that even though I was honest and hard-working, I was not a Turk, I was an Armenian.’ He did not like a line in the Turkish national anthem that refers to ‘my heroic race’. He did not like singing that line, he said, ‘because I was against using the word “race”, which leads to discrimination’.
Pamuk had earlier faced a court for talking about the 1915 genocide in a Swiss magazine. Leading Turkish publishers say that there is now an incendiary atmosphere in Turkey towards all writers who want to tell the truth about the genocide, when vast areas of Turkish Armenia were ‘cleansed’ of their Christian populations.
The Independent, 20 January 2007
Sneaking a book out in silence
Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It’s from a letter from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation. The reason is a chapter entitled ‘The First Holocaust’, which records the Armenian genocide. It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read the following, fromtheir message tomy London publishers HarperCollins, remember it is written by a citizen of a country that seriously wishes to enter the European Union. Since I do not speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses in Mr Osman’s otherwise excellent English.
We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems, Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of April 2007… Therefore we would like to undertake the publication quietly, which
means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk’s book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to us if any trial [is]… held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk and HarperCollins can understand our reservations.
I can. Here is a publisher in a country negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds, Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) – even Turkey’s bid to join the EU – is reason enough to sneak my book out in silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book? Well, I can give you an example. When Taner Akçam’s magnificent A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was first published in Turkish – it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a terrifying historical fact – the Turkish historian experienced an almost identical reaction. His work was published ‘quietly’ in Turkey – and without a single book review.
Now I’m not entirely unsympathetic with my Turkish publishers. It is one thing for me to rage and roar about their pusillanimity. But I live in Beirut, not in Istanbul. And after Hrant Dink’s foul murder,