Dead Reckoning; Holocausts vs holocausts

[Gavur]

Dead Reckoning; Holocausts vs holocausts
The Independent (London)
August 5, 2000, Saturday

THE ESSAY: DEAD RECKONING;
WHY IS IT THAT ONLY ONE OF THE GREAT HOLOCAUSTS OF THE LAST CENTURY MERITS
A CAPITAL 'H'? HERE, ROBERT FISK, WHO HAS SPENT MANY YEARS RESEARCHING THE
MASSACRE OF ONE AND A HALF MILLION ARMENIAN CHRISTIANS, ARGUES THAT ALL
ACTS OF GENOCIDE DESERVE EQUAL RECOGNITION

by Robert Fisk



In the spring of 1993, with my car keys, I slowly unearthed a set of skulls
from the clay wall of a hill in northern Syria. I had been looking for the
evidence of a mass murder - the world's first genocide - for the previous
two days but it took a 101-year-old Armenian woman to locate the river bed
where her family were murdered in the First World War. The more I dug into
the hillside next to the Habur river, the more skulls slid from the earth,
bright white at first then, gradually, collapsing into paste as the cold,
wet air reached the calcium for the first time since their mass murder. The
teeth were unblemished - these were mostly young people - and the bones I
later found stretched behind them were strong. Backbones, femurs, joints, a
few of them laced with the remains of some kind of cord. There were dozens
of skeletons here. The more I dug away with my car keys, the more eye
sockets peered at me out of the clay. It was a place of horror.

In 1915, the world reacted with equal horror as news emerged from the dying
Ottoman Empire of the deliberate destruction of at least a million and a
half Christian Armenians. Their fate - the ethnic cleansing of this ancient
race from the lands of Turkey, the razing of their towns and churches, the
mass slaughter of their menfolk, the massacre of their women and children -
was denounced in Paris, London and Washington as a war crime. Tens of
thousands of Armenian women - often after mass rape by their Turkish guards
- were left to die of starvation with their children along the banks of the
Habur river near Deir ez-Zour, in what is today northern Syria. The few men
who survived were tied together and thrown into the river. Turkish
gendarmes would fire a bullet into one of them and his body would drag the
rest to their deaths. Their skulls - a few of them - were among the bones I
unearthed on that terrible afternoon seven years ago.

The deliberate nature of this slaughter was admitted by the then Turkish
leader, Enver Pasha, in a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the US
ambassador in Constantinople, a Jewish-American diplomat whose vivid
reports to Washington in 1915 form an indictment of the greatest war crime
the modern world had ever known. Enver denounced the Armenians for siding
with Russia in its war with the Turks. But even the Germans, Ottoman
Turkey's ally in the First World War, condemned the atrocities; for it was
the Armenian civilian population which was cut down by the Turks. The
historian Arnold Toynbee, who worked for the Foreign Office during the war,
was to record the "atmosphere of horror" which lay over the abandoned
Armenian lands in the aftermath of the savagery. Men had been lined up on
bridges to have their throats cut and be thrown into rivers; in orchards
and fields, women and children had been knifed. Armenians had been shot by
the thousand, sometimes beaten to death with clubs. Earlier Turkish pogroms
against the Armenians of Asia Minor had been denounced by Lord Gladstone.
In the aftermath of the 1914-18 war, Winston Churchill was the most
eloquent in reminding the world of the Armenian Holocaust.

"In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the
infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor,"
Churchill wrote in his magisterial volume four of The Great War. "... the
clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act,
on a scale so great, could well be ... There is no reasonable doubt that
this crime was planned and executed for political reasons." Churchill
referred to the Turks as "war criminals" and wrote of their "massacring
uncounted thousands of helpless Armenians - men, women and children
together; whole districts blotted out in one administrative holocaust -
these were beyond human redress."

So Churchill himself, writing 80 years ago, used the word "holocaust" about
the Armenian massacres. I am not surprised. A few miles north of the site
where I had dug up those skulls, I found a complex of underground caves
beneath the Syrian desert. Thousands of Armenians had been driven into this
subterranean world in 1915 and Turkish gendarmes lit bonfires at the mouths
of the caves. The smoke was blown into the caves and the men were
asphyxiated. The caves were the world's first gas chambers. No wonder,
then, that Hitler is recorded as asking his generals - as he planned his
own numerically far more terrible holocaust - "Who does now remember the
Armenians?"

Could such a crime be denied? Could such an act of mass wickedness 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 20th century
produced further acts of mass barbarity?

Alas, all this has come to pass. When I wrote about the Armenian massacres
in The Independent in 1993, the Turks denounced my article - as they have
countless books and investigations before and since - as a lie. Turkish
readers wrote to the editor to demand my dismissal from the paper. If
Armenian civilians had been killed, they wrote, 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 eye-witness accounts of Western
journalists at the later slaughter of Armenians at Smyrna - the present-day
holiday resort of Izmir where British sunbathers today have no idea of the
bloodbath that took place around their beaches - the denunciations of
Morgenthau and Churchill, are all dismissed as propaganda.

When a Holocaust conference was to be held in Israel, the Turkish
government objected to the inclusion of material on the Armenian slaughter.
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, but only in miniature
form. In the United States, Turkey's powerful lobby groups attack
journalists or academics who suggest the Armenian genocide was fact.
Turkish ambassadors regularly write letters - which have appeared in all
British newspapers, even in the Israeli press - denying the truth of the
Armenian Holocaust. No one - save the Armenians - objects to this denial.
Scarcely a whimper comes from those who would, rightly, condemn any denial
of the Jewish Holocaust.

For Turkey - no longer the "sick man of Europe" - is courted by the Western
powers which so angrily condemned its cruelty in the last century. It is a
valued member of the Nato alliance - our ally in bombing Serbia last year -
the closest regional ally of Israel and a major buyer of US and French
weaponry. Just as we remained largely silent at the persecution of the
Kurds, so we prefer to ignore the world's first holocaust. While Britain's
massive contribution to the proposed Euphrates dam project in south-eastern
Turkey was in the balance, Tony Blair was not going to mention the Armenian
atrocities. Indeed, when this year he announced that Britain was to honour
an annual Holocaust Day, he made no mention of the Armenians. Holocaust
Day, it seems, was to be a Jewish-only affair. And it was to take a capital
"H" when it applied to the Jews.

I've always agreed with this. Mass ethnic slaughter on such a scale -
Hitler's murder of six million Jews - deserves a capital "H". But I also
believe that the genocide of other races merits a capital "H". Millions of
Jews - despite Wiesel's gutlessness and the shameful reaction of the
Israeli government - have shown common cause with the Armenians in their
suffering, acknowledging the 1915 massacres as the precursor of the "Shoah"
or Jewish Holocaust. Norman Finkelstein in his angry new book on the
"Holocaust industry" makes a similar point, adding that the Jewish
experience - both his parents were extermination camp survivors - should
not be allowed to diminish the genocide committed against other ethnic
groups in modern history. Indeed, the very word "genocide" was invented for
the Armenians in 1944 - by a Polish-born Jew, Raphael Lemkin.

Nor can I myself forget the Armenian Holocaust. The very last survivors of
that genocide are still - just - alive, and several of them live in Beirut
where I am based as Middle East correspondent of The Independent. I have
read extensively about and, occasionally, researched the Jewish Holocaust -
my own book about the Lebanese war, Pity the Nation, begins in Auschwitz,
where I found frozen lakes filled with the powdered bones of the dead from
the ashpits of Birkenau. But the Armenian Holocaust has been "my" story
because it is part of the Middle East's history as well as the world's.
Only this year, I interviewed Hartun, a 101-year-old blind Armenian in an
old people's home in East Beirut who remembered how, in the Syrian desert
in 1915, his mother pleaded with Turks not to rape her 18-year-old daughter
- Hartun's sister. "As she begged them not to take my sister, they beat her
to death," Hartun recalled. "I remember her dying, shouting 'Hartun,
Hartun, Hartun' over and over. When she was dead, they took my sister away
on a horse. I never saw her again." Hartun - after years of bitterness and
longing for revenge - was overcome with what he called "my Christian
belief" and decided to abandon the notion of vengeance. "When the Turkish
earthquake killed so many people last year," he told me, "I prayed for the
poor Turkish people."

It was a deeply moving example of compassion from a man whose suffering
those Turks will not admit and whose Holocaust we prefer to ignore. Stirred
partly by Hartun's story, I wrote an article for The Independent in January
of this year on the "sublimation" of the Armenian genocide, its wilful
denial by US academics who hold American university professorships funded
by the Turkish government, and the absence of any reference to the
Armenians in the British Government's announcement of Holocaust Day. And,
yes, I referred to the Armenian Holocaust - as I did to the Jewish
Holocaust - with a capital "H". Chatting to an Armenian acquaintance, I
mentioned that I had given the Armenian genocide the same capital "H" which
I believe should be attached to all acts of genocide.

Little could I have guessed how quickly the dead would rise from their
graves. When the article appeared in The Independent - a paper which has
never failed to dig into 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?"

There are no conspiracies on The Independent's subs desk; just a tough, no
-nonsense rule that our articles follow a grammatical "house style" and
conform to what is called "common usage". And the Jewish Holocaust, through
common usage, takes a capital "H". Other holocausts don't. No one is quite
sure why - the same practice is followed in newspapers and books all over
the world, although it has been the subject of debate in the United States,
not least by Finkelstein. Harvard turned down a professorial "Chair of
Holocaust and Cognate Studies" because academics objected to the genocide
of other groups (including the Armenians) being lumped together as
"cognate". But none of this answered the questions of my Armenian friend.
To have told him his people didn't qualify for a capital "H" would have
been shameful and insulting.

A debate then opened within The Independent. I wrote in a memo that the
word "holocaust" could be cheapened by over-use and exaggeration - take the
agency report last year which referred to the "holocaust" of wildlife after
an oil -spill on the French coast. But I said that I still had no answer
worthy of the question posed by my Armenian friend.

One of the paper's top wordsmiths was asked to comment - a grammatical
expert who regularly teases out the horrors of definition in an imperfect
and savage world. He cited Chambers Dictionary, which stated that the
Jewish Holocaust was "usually" capitalised. And, said our expert on the
paper, "It is in the nature of a proper noun to apply to only one thing."
Thus there may be many crusades but only one Crusade (the Middle Ages one).
There may be many cities but the City is London. Similarly the Renaissance.

"There can be only one Holocaust," he wrote. "Is the Holocaust really
unique? Yes. It was perpetrated by modern Europeans. Its purported
justification was a perversion of Darwin, one of the great thinkers of
modern Europe. Above all, in the gas chambers and crematoria it
manufactured death by modern industrial methods. The Holocaust says to
modern Western man that his technological mastery will not save him from
sin, but rather magnify the results of his sins. There have been acts of
genocide throughout history and some of them have killed more people than
the Nazis did, but we call the Nazi holocaust 'the Holocaust' because it is
our holocaust."

Must we, our grammarian asked, "commit grammatical faux pas and overturn an
accepted usage for which there is ample justification? Finally, where does
it end? Are, for instance, the crimes of Stalin against minority
nationalities in the Soviet Union not just as bad as the Armenian
slaughters? What of the Khmer Rouge? Rwanda? The Roman destruction of
Carthage? Are these also to be 'Holocausts'? If not, why not?"

Powerful arguments, but ones with which I disagreed. The Jewish Holocaust,
I wrote back, should be capitalised not because its victims were European
Jews, or those of any other race, but because its victims were human
beings. Human values, the right to life, the struggle against evil, are
universal - "not confined to Europeans or one ethnic or religious group, or
involving those who distorted Darwin's theories of biological evolution".
It was, after all, The Independent's editorial policy that the world must
fight against all atrocities - a belief which underlay our demand for
humanitarian action in East Timor and Kosovo. This did not mean that I
regarded Timor and Kosovo as holocausts, but that we should never accept
the idea that one group of victims had special status over others. I spend
hours telling Arabs that they must accept and acknowledge the facts of the
Jewish Holocaust, but if we are now to regard this as a specifically
European crime, as "our" crime, I have few arguments left. The Arabs can
say it is none of their business.

As for the question, "Where does it end?" Yes, what about Armenia? And
Rwanda? If Armenians are disqualified from a capital "H" because they only
lost one and a half million, what is Rwanda's sin of exclusion? Religion?
Race? Colour? When Armenians in Israel speak of their people's suffering,
they use the Hebrew word Shoah - which means Holocaust.

The Independent's editor suggested that we should debate these questions in
an article in the paper - this is the article - but the issues, of course,
remain unresolved. "Common usage" is a bane to all us journalists but it is
not sacred. It doesn't have to stand still. My father fought in what he
called the Great War - common usage which was later amended, after 1945, to
the First World War. Similarly, I believe, the Holocaust. In the aftermath
of my January remarks on the Armenian genocide, The Independent published a
denial of that same genocide by a Turkish Cypriot academic, in which we
printed the word Holocaust with a capital "H". The world did not end. The
Turks did not complain. Nor did any members of the Jewish community.
Indeed, only last year, a prominent academic at the Hebrew University's
Armenian studies programme in Israel talked of the Armenians and Jews
having "suffered holocaust".

In the meantime, Holocaust - or holocaust - denial continues. President
Chirac has declined to endorse the French parliament's acknowledgement of
the Armenian genocide and forthcoming Holocaust conferences have not
invited Armenians to participate. Mr Blair doesn't mention the destruction
of the Armenians. They don't count, literally. Common usage - and our
concern for Turkish sensitivities - has seen to that, even though genocide
is anything but normal. Germany dutifully acknowledges its historical guilt
for the wickedness of the Jewish Holocaust. Not so the Turks. Armenians
accept that a few Turks - courageous, outstanding men - risked their lives
in 1915 to shelter their Armenian friends and neighbours, just as
"righteous gentiles" did for the Jews of Europe. But Turkey cannot honour
these brave men. Since the Armenian Holocaust supposedly did not exist, nor
did they. A holocaust rather than a Holocaust helps to diminish the
suffering of the Armenians. What's in a name? What's in a capital letter?
How many other skulls lie beneath the sands of northern Syria? Did the
Turks not kill enough Armenians?

[Gavur]

A conflict conveniently forgotten and a holocaust deliberately denied

The British Army's 1945-48 campaign in Palestine has been 'disappeared', sidelined and forgotten
By Robert Fisk - 31 August 2002

http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=328955

In the years that followed the Second World War, Lord Beaverbrook's old Sunday Express would regale its readers with the secret history of the 1939-45 conflict: "What Hitler would have done if England was under Nazi occupation"; "How Ike almost cancelled D-Day"; "Churchill's plans for using gas on Nazi invaders." Often – though not always – the stories were true. After war come the facts. It's not so long ago, after all, that we discovered that Nato's mighty 1999 blitz on Serbia's army netted a total of just 10 tanks.

But it took Eric Lowe of Hayling Island in Hampshire to remind me of the inversion of history, the way in which historically proven facts, clearly established, come to be questioned decades later or even deleted from the record for reasons of political or moral weakness. Eric runs a magazine called Palestine Scrapbook, a journal for the old British soldiers who fought in Palestine – against both Arabs and Jews – until the ignominious collapse of the British mandate in 1948. In Mr Lowe's magazine, there are personal memories of the bombing of British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem – a "terrorist" bombing, of course, except that it was carried out by a man who was later to become Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin.

Dennis Shelton of the King's Royal Rifle Corps writes a letter, recalling an Arab attack on a British Army lorry in Gaza. "We opened up on them, the ones who could still run away. We found two [British] army bods under the wagon, both badly wounded. I went in the ambulance with them to Rafah hospital. I was holding the side of one's head to keep his brains in. I often wondered if indeed they recovered." Mr Lowe has asked for information about the soldier whom Dennis Shelton tried to save.

But he's probably wasting his time, because the British Army's first post-World War Two war – the 1945-48 conflict in Palestine – has been "disappeared", sidelined as something that no one wants to remember. According to Mr Lowe, many of the British campaign medals for Palestine were never issued. Dennis Peck, of the Sherwood Foresters, only realised he'd been awarded one in 1998. Until two years ago, the campaign was never mentioned at the Armistice parade in London. There's not even a definitive figure for the British troops who died – around 400 were killed or died of wounds. And it took over 50 years for British veterans to get a memorial for the dead: in the end, the veterans had to pay for it from their own pockets.

But in the late Forties, all Britain was seized by the war in Palestine. When Jewish gunmen hanged two British sergeants, booby-trapping their bodies into the bargain, Britons were outraged. The British, it must be added, had just hanged Jewish militants in Palestine. But now – nothing. Our dead soldiers in Palestine, far from being remembered at the going down of the sun, are largely not remembered at all.

So who are we frightened of here? The Arabs? The Israelis? And isn't this just a small example of the suppression of historical truth which continues over the 20th century's first holocaust? I raise this question because of a recent and deeply offensive article by Stephen Kinzer of The New York Times. Back in 1915, his paper – then an honourable journal of record – broke one of the great and most terrible stories of the First World War: the planned slaughter of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman government. The paper's headlines, based in many cases on US diplomats in Turkey, alerted the world to this genocide. By 16 September, a New York Times correspondent had spoken of "a campaign of extermination, involving the murdering of 800,000 to 1,000,000 persons".

It was all true. Save for the Turkish government, a few American academics holding professorships funded by Turkey and the shameful denials of the Israeli government, there is today not a soul who doubts the nature or the extent of this genocide. Even in the 1920s, Winston Churchill himself called it a "holocaust". But not Mr Kinzer. Over the course of the past few years, he's done everything he can to destroy the integrity of his paper's brilliant, horrifying, exclusive reports of 1915. Constantly recalling Turkey's fraudulent claim that the Armenians died in the civil unrest in Asia Minor at the time, he has referred to the genocide as "ethnic cleansing" and treated the figure of 1.5 million dead as a claim – something he would surely never do in reference to the 6 million Jews later murdered by the Nazis.

Recently, Mr Kinzer has written about the new Armenian Genocide museum in Washington, commenting artfully that there's "a growing recognition by advocacy groups that museums can be powerful tools to advance political causes". In other words, unlike the Jewish Holocaust museum – and the Jewish Holocaust itself, which would never be used by Israel to silence criticism of its cruel behaviour in the occupied territories – there might be something a bit dodgy about the Armenian version. Then comes the killer. "Washington already has one major institution, the United States Holocaust Museum, that documents an effort to destroy an entire people," Mr Kinzer wrote. "The story it presents is beyond dispute. But the events of 1915 are still a matter of intense debate." Are they hell, Mr Kinzer.

But why should we be surprised at this classic piece of historical revisionism? Israel's own ambassador to present-day Armenia, Rivka Cohen, has been peddling more or less the same rubbish, refusing to draw any parallels with the Jewish Holocaust and describing the Armenian Holocaust as a mere "tragedy". She is, in fact, following the official Israeli Foreign Office line that "this [Armenian Holocaust] should not be described as genocide".Israel's top Holocaust scholar, Israel Charney, has most courageously campaigned against those who lie about the Armenian genocide – I advise readers to buy his stunning Encyclopaedia of Genocide – and he has been joined by many other Jewish scholars. But with Turkey's alliance with Israel, its membership of Nato, its possible EU entry, and its massive arms purchases from the United States, the growing power of its well-paid lobby groups has smothered even their efforts.

Which raises one last question. Armenian academics have been investigating the identity of those young German officers who were training the Ottoman army in 1915 and who in some cases actually witnessed the Armenian Holocaust – whose victims were, in some cases, transported to their deaths in railway cattle-cars. Several of those German soldiers' names, it now transpires, crop up again just over a quarter of a century later – as senior Wehrmacht officers in Russia, helping Hitler to carry out the Jewish Holocaust. Even the dimmest of us might think there was a frightening connection here. But not, I guess, Mr Kinzer. Nor the modern-day New York Times, which is so keen to trash its own historic exclusives for fear of what Turkey – or Israel – might say. Personally, I'd call it all a form of Holocaust denial. And I know what Eric Lowe would call it: cowardice under fire.

[Gavur]

British Muslim Council against Oblivion of Armenian Genocide Victims

27.01.2006 00:32 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The British Muslim Council stated its unwillingness to take part in the national ceremony of commemoration of Holocaust victims, held in UK Thursday, January 26. According to a statement by its Spokesperson Inayat Bunglavala, the Council «unambiguously denounces both the Nazi attempt of genocide against Jews during World War II and anti-Semitism on the whole». Meantime, the leaders of the Council, which unites 350 Islamic communities of the country, expresses disagreement against «increased concentration of public attention to merely one historical incident, while the victims of the Genocide in Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan are forgotten, which is unjust.» In 2001, when the Day of Commemoration of Holocaust victims was marked in UK for the first time, the British Muslim Council suggested to change the official name of the day or establish a separate Commemoration Day of Genocide Victims. Last year the Council also ignored the celebration of the 60th anniversary of release of prisoners of Auschwitz concentration camp, reported CNS News web-site.

[Gavur]

The Century Of The Holocaust

BY: Peter Kirsch, MD

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2006/02/15/six_simple_words

02/15/06

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word "holocaust" as follows:
1) A sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; 2) A complete or large-scale
sacrifice; 3) A complete or wholesale destruction, esp. by fire;
a great slaughter or massacre; 4) spec. The (period of the) mass
murder of the Jews (or transf. of other groups) by the Nazis in the
war of 1939 - 45.

On the basis of these definitions, the 20th century qualifies eminently
as the century of the holocaust. Let us take a look at a few of the
major events of that 100-year span.

[More:]

1) The Anglo-Boer War (1899 - 1902) in South Africa (in which the
British, at great cost to both sides, seized the gold and diamond
fields from the Boers) was significant in that it led to the invention
of the concentration camp designed especially for women and children -
an all-British idea which was subsequently developed by the National
Socialists in Germany. In these concentration camps was an early
holocaust of the century - the death of thirty thousand women
and children from starvation, typhoid and measles. In proportion
to later holocausts, the numbers don't sound very impressive, but
they constituted a significant proportion of the Boer population at
the time.

2) Contemporaneous with the Anglo-Boer War was the Spanish-American
War of 1898 -1902 in which some three or four hundred American
soldiers were killed and 270 000 Filipinos died of wounds, disease
or starvation. What both these wars of aggression had in common was,
of course, greed.

3) Between 1914 and 1918, the First World War killed thirteen million
soldiers and seventeen million civilians - indeed a holocaust which
could have pleased only a Malthusian. During this period, to add to the
slaughter, was the Turkish/Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in
about 1915 - yet another holocaust to blot the pages of that century.

4) In the early years of the USSR under Lenin (1917 - 1923) it is
estimated that about seven million people died during the civil war,
either from starvation or military action. I should note here that
numbers vary from five to ten million, depending on whose figures
one accepts, so I have given an average. We can skip a few years to
the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Josef Stalin collectivised the
kulaks of the USSR, killing millions of them either by the sword or by
disease and starvation throughout Russia and Siberia. In 1932-1933,
Stalin also summarily appropriated all the grain in Ukraine and had
this essential foodstuff transported to Russia or sold abroad for
much-needed foreign goods. The result of this was mass starvation in
Ukraine and the death of approximately five to seven million Ukrainians
- a period and a holocaust known in Ukraine as the Holodomor.

5) It was only about three years later that Stalin began the great
purges of 1936 - 1938, the Yezhovshchina, in which it is believed
that about eight million Soviet citizens died either by execution or
by disease and inanition in Siberia.

6) World War Two. The numbers of deaths vary slightly, but a generally
acceptable figure is fifty-six million military and civilian dead. This
is doubtless the greatest holocaust in history.

As a footnote to it, we can mention that amongst the casualties were
three gratuitous massacres - the devastation of Dresden by Sir Arthur
("Bomber") Harris who killed between 40 and 70 000 civilians when the
city posed no military threat to the Allies and refugees were streaming
into it, fleeing from the advancing Russians; and the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki ordered by President Truman one month
after Emperor Hirohito of Japan had made a personal appeal to him
for peace negotiations. The combined death toll of these two bombs
was between two and three hundred thousand (immediate and short-term).

7) In the Asian theatre, the Japanese were responsible for the death
of approximately five million people in China, Korea, Indonesia, the
Philippines, Burma, Malaya, Singapore and other East Asian countries.

THUS BY 1945, EVEN BEFORE MID-CENTURY, WE CAN REPORT A HOLOCAUST OF
120 MILLION PEOPLE.

Exact figures are difficult to obtain and vary widely from one
authority to another, so generally I have averaged them out in an
attempt to get a fairly balanced count.

8) In the late 1940s, in the Mao v. Chiang Chinese civil war, untold,
unknown millions of Chinese were slaughtered. The estimates vary
and an accurate count is probably impossible. In 1966, Mao, egged
on by his lovely wife, initiated the Cultural Revolution in China,
which led to a few more million dead - exact numbers unknown.

Meanwhile, there was the Korean "Police Action" as Harry Truman nicely
phrased it - a vicious civil war between North and South Korea which
were in fact puppets of the USSR and the USA.

Another few million dead Koreans - we don't know exactly how many,
but do know exactly how many white folk (Americans, Brits etc)
were killed. Hardly had that slaughter been calmed when the French
were badly beaten in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu and the US gladly took
over from them in due course. The tragic irony of that unnecessary
conflict is that it needn't have happened at all and would not have,
had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles not walked out of peace
negotiations. It also could have ended in 1968, but this is not
the place to discuss the idiocy of Robert McNamara and his Pentagon
cronies before and after the Tet offensive. The Vietnam war gave rise
to a new term -escalation - which proved to be apt, as Kissinger,
President Nixon's pro-consul to the world, extended the war into
Laos and Cambodia, where, in the killing fields, an estimated two
to three million people were massacred while back in Vietnam itself
the US continued to devastate the country and kill off about three
million Vietnamese.

9) Meanwhile, down in Indonesia, great danger presented itself to
the United States - there was a chance that a government hostile to
the US might take power, so in 1965, the US sent troops and military
materiel to ensure that Suharto, their blood-stained friend, would
be the dictator of the country. There was a holocaust of about half
a million civilians.

10) In 1975 - 1978, the number of dead under the Pol Pot regime was
between 1.6 and 1.8 million - about one-fifth of the population. This
doesn't include those millions already killed by Kissinger.

11) During that same period, approximately 100 000 civilians were
murdered in East Timor - about 24% of the East Timorese population.

12) Probably the biggest killing field of the lot was the continent
of Africa from Sudan to the borders of Zambia, and from Eritrea
to West Africa. Countless millions were slaughtered or starved to
death by sundry warlords and dictators - the syphilitic Idi Amin, the
megalomanic Mobutu Sese Seko (one of whose close business associates
for some time was the Reverend Pat Robertson who recently recommended -
on two separate occasions - the assassination of President Hugo Chavez
of Venezuela), the attack by Rwanda and Uganda on the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (3.8 million dead), the ongoing disturbances in
Darfur (400 000 dead) the civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis,
the madman Robert Mugabe... the list is long and tiresome. I think
it is fruitless even to attempt to count the number of Africans
slaughtered in the last fifty or so years. The numbers are probably
in the tens of millions.

By comparison, the Balkan massacres of the 1990s were numerically
minor, while the Bush/Clinton/BushII/Blair murder of over a million
Iraqis between about 1991 and the present, is a significant testimony
to Anglo-American blood-lust (or is it just lust for oil?). Saddam
Hussein murdered approximately 300 000 of his citizens - far fewer
than the killers named above. And then we have estimates that over
a million Iraqis and Iranians were killed in the long-drawn-out war
between the two countries in the 1980s.

I have added up the numbers given above and present them with
the caveat that they are not accurate but approximate and very
conservative.

A BARE MINIMUM OF ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY MILLION HUMAN BEINGS WERE
SLAUGHTERED DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

The death toll during the Chinese civil war and the cultural
revolution, as well as the number of dead in various parts of
sub-Saharan Africa are unreliable and are not included. There are
also disputes about the death tolls in South Asia. I have no reliable
figures on the number of dead in the India-Pakistan dispute and have
omitted the relatively minor number of victims in the Balkans and
Central America. All these figures probably add up to tens of millions,
but WE ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH BLOOD DRIPPING FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Now, in that century of holocausts in which at least one hundred
and forty million human beings were killed, amongst that number were
approximately six million Jewish people (the official number accepted
by World Jewry with few exceptions such as Professor Norman Finkelstein
whose parents were Nazi victims).

The term "holocaust" as generally understood today was first used
by Elie Wiesel in his imaginative autobiography first published in
Yiddish ("Und Die Welt hot Geshvign", 1956) and then in French,
("La Nuit," 1958). He used the term in the sense given under 3)
in the Oxford Dictionary: mass immolation by fire, reporting that
people were placed on the edge of flaming pits and then pushed into
them. Interestingly enough, he does not once mention gas chambers
in this book. Since the end of the second world war, the multiple
holocausts of the last century have remained un-capitalised, with
one exception - the Jewish Holocaust.

Now some Western countries, led by the USA, have Jewish Holocaust
Memorials, Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Days, Jewish Holocaust Laws
(it's forbidden by law in some countries even to question the fact
that six million Jews were Holocausted). The politicians in these
same countries make pre-election pilgrimages to the Jewish State to
garner the Jewish vote. The children in these countries have classes
in school devoted to the Jewish Holocaust. I am told that in some
American schools, the children sing the Israeli national anthem.

Many universities have programs in what are called Holocaust Studies.

So I ask myself questions:

Why are ONLY THE JEWISH PEOPLE memorialised and remembered so fondly
in the West?

What about the Cambodians?

The Ukrainians?

The Russians?

The many nations of Europe?

The Laotians?

The Chinese?

The Africans?

The Latin Americans?

The Armenians?

The one hundred and forty million or more dead human beings throughout
the twentieth century?

Are the Jewish people really

so SPECIAL?

so REMARKABLE?

so IMPORTANT?

so... SUPERIOR?

that they alone amongst all nations are worthy of Memorials,
Remembrance Days, special school lessons about the Jewish Six Million?

And if they are, can someone please tell me...

WHY?

[Gavur]

More Lists, Please

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/782/op2.htm

16 - 22 February 2006

Issue No. 782

Are acts of salvation, courage and deliverance meaningful only if
the saved are Jews, asks Mulham Assir*

With his latest movie, Munich, successfully marketed as
"controversial", Steven Spielberg's name is much in the news lately.

Calming any fears that the acclaimed director might test Hollywood's
unswerving support of Israel, the mainstream American media remind
their readers every time that he is, after all, the man who made
the "widely acclaimed" movie Schindler's List. An unquestioned
accomplishment of Zionism because it perpetuates the Holocaust theme as
background to any discussion about Israel, Schindler's List attained
another Zionist objective that no one to my knowledge has mentioned
so far.

The message the movie pounds into the viewer's consciousness is the
concept of the "righteous gentile". Those who have seen Schindler's
List will certainly remember what amounted to a summation at the end:
if only Schindler had saved more Jews. If only there had been more
righteous gentiles like Schindler to save more Jews. Millions of
gentiles died for the same reasons and most in similar circumstances,
but that is another matter, not of concern to the movie.

What is a righteous gentile? The Jerusalem Museum Yad Vashem, the
mother of all Holocaust museums, came up with the concept in 1963 and
created the honour, bestowed by a special committee on candidates that
qualified. Most were already dead by the time of induction into the
hall of gentile righteousness, but that is understandable. Isn't that
the case with Catholic beatification as well? After all, dead heroes
are less likely to engender future controversies and maintenance is
a lot cheaper.

In fact, there is a non-profit organisation in the United States,
the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which has certified about
1,500 living righteous gentiles on behalf of whom it accepts donations
from large corporations. The money goes to maintain the organisation,
pay its own salaries, organise "holocaust education" and also to give
some modest stipends to those righteous gentiles who are in need
of financial assistance. Everybody gains -- even the corporations,
acquiring, one presumes, an unofficial but useful "righteous" status.

Needless to say, gentiles who risked or lost their lives saving other
gentiles from the same fate need not apply. Not if they tried to
save any of the German "left-wing" intellectuals, German "degenerate
artists", "inferior" Germans destined for euthanasia, the anti-Nazi
clergy, the nuns and priests who opposed fascism and offered sanctuary
to the hunted, not if they saved any of the many designated groups
the Nazis deported to labour camps before they even started deporting
the Jews, not if they saved any Gypsies. Well, nobody really worried
too much about the Gypsies, then or now. They have no lobby.

Yet a perfectly legitimate question to ask is this: if righteousness
as a human virtue is subject to Zionist apartheid, and separated by
religion, let's see the other lists. Where is the list of righteous
Jews who saved gentiles before and during World War II in the Soviet
Union and the Ukraine, and after the war behind the Iron Curtain? The
now accessible governmental archives of the former Soviet Union,
especially those of the secret police, offer a good place to start
the research.

Jews formed a very large percentage of the mid- and high-echelon
officers of the CEKA, GRU, NKVD and KGB between 1917 and the early
1970s. Surely many, or at least some, even a very few, of those
high-placed Jews took pity on their former neighbours, or friends or
even on total strangers who happened to be Jews, and saved them from
deportation to the Siberian gulags and almost certain death. There
must have been at least one little Polish, Russian, Ukrainian,
Czech, Romanian Anne Frank who was hidden, together with her family,
by a righteous Jew in his attic to save them imprisonment, torture
or execution as "enemies of the people," "agents of imperialism,"
during those long dark decades of horror. Documents publicly available
suggest that the righteous Jews were not much in evidence during those
times when good deeds would have been easier for them to enact from
their position of power:

Yoram Sheftel, an Israeli attorney, who visited the Simferopol,
Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990 observed: "On the right-hand wall
was a stone memorial plaque engraved with the names of about 30
KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in the Great Patriotic War,
as the Soviets call World War II. I was shocked and angry as I read
the names: the first was Polonski and the last Levinstein, and all
those between were ones like Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan -- all
Jews. The best of Jewish youth in Russia, the cradle of Zionism,
had sold itself and its soul to the Red Devil."

Righteousness seems to have been inversely proportional with
the ease with which it could have been exercised. And what about
righteous Jews today in Israel? Tens of thousands of Israelis have
been participants in the ethnic cleansing, imprisonment, torture
and killing of Palestinians and none yet has stood in the path of a
bulldozer, like Rachel Corrie, to stop its advance. However, voices of
dissent are heard, like that of Ari Shavit, who himself observes how
timid the opposition is: "Ten thousand (if not 15,000, if not 20,000)
Israelis have done their work faithfully -- have opened the heavy iron
doors of the isolation cell and then closed it, have led the man from
the interrogation chamber to the clinic, from the clinic back to the
interrogation chamber. They have looked close up at people xxxxting
in terror, pissing in fear. And not one among them has begun a hunger
strike in front of the house of the prime minister. Not one among them
that I know of has said: This will not happen. Not in a Jewish state."

The righteous Jews in Israel, if we lower the requirements
for qualification, seem to be those few who lament the lack of
righteousness around them. According to writer Norman Finkelstein,
reviewing the case of a Gazan brutally beaten to death by Israeli
soldiers, Israeli lawyer Avigdor Feldman said: "The illegality in the
territories is total. Everyone -- regardless of echelon, regardless
of disagreement on every other conceivable topic -- is of a mind on
one matter: the value of an Arab's life is equal to zero."

Voices like those of Norman Finkelstein in the US are drowned out
by Zionist insults and accusations of being "self-hating Jews". It
is clear that the need for a revised list of righteous Jews is
becoming increasingly urgent. In fact, there is an even greater
need for the creation of a number of lists; lists which would honour
righteous people regardless of religion, nationality, skin colour;
lists of righteous vegetarians, righteous right- and left-handed
people, and many more categories. When we exhaust all possible
compartmentalisations we should merge the lists, purge them of
duplications and retain a single list: Righteous People.

The same process might be applied to holocaust museums: we need
lots more of them to dedicate to the Native Americans, the African
Americans, the Armenians, the Iron Curtain nations, the Palestinians,
the Vietnamese, quite a number to former African colonies, and so on.

All these should also merge and become one, perhaps under a banner
such as The Museum of Man's Inhumanity to Man. I hope it will come to
pass, but it is not likely to happen before we have agreed that every
human life is precious, and no one is more "special" than anyone else.

* The writer is a Lebanese political commentator.

[Gavur]

An Interview With British Journalist Robert Fisk

An Interview With British Journalist Robert Fisk
A meeting with the Middle East correspondent of The Independent of London

Horizon Weekly, Canada
April 14, 2006

By Aris Babikian

Earlier this year renowned British journalist Robert Fisk recently published
`The Great War For Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East,' an
outstanding book on the recent history of the Middle East. In a 50-page
chapter on the Armenian Genocide, Fisk deftly condensed the 90-year-old
history of the Genocide with fairness, rendering justice to the victims and
to the survivors of the first genocide of the 20th century. The extensive
chapter covered the history, the circumstances, the betrayal, the cover up,
the denial, and the political intrigues behind the Armenian Genocide.

During his visit to Toronto to promote the book, we met him to discuss his
views on the Armenian Genocide.

Aris Babikian: Reading your chapter `The First Holocaust' on the Armenian
Genocide, I was amazed by your ability to encapsulate the complex history of
the Armenian Genocide in 50 pages. Can you tell me how did you stumble on
the Armenian Genocide? What was your motivation in exploring the calamity?

Robert Fisk: The book is partly about the First World War and the results of
that war. I realized, because my father was a soldier in the First World
War - he took part in the Gallipoli landing, that the Armenian Genocide took
place in a context of that war, not a civil war.

When I first arrived to Lebanon in 1976, during the civil war there, I
become aware of the Armenian Community. Armenians were playing this
difficult role, being neither with the Christian Falange nor with the Moslem
and Palestinian militia. So I started to meet Armenians, at that stage - in
`76. There were still Armenian Genocide/ Holocaust survivors then. I call it
Holocaust with capital H, just like I call the Jewish Holocaust with capital
H. At that stage the Armenian Genocide was not my main issue. I was
covering the civil war. But then I went to Anjar. I saw this Armenian city.
I learnt about Mousa Dagh, and gradually while covering the Lebanese war,
the Iraq-Iran war, the Iranian Revolution, I noticed that always there were
Armenians on the periphery. The Armenian Community invited me to visit their
community centres in Tehran and in Northern Syria, in Kamishly. As the years
went by I learnt more and more about the Armenian Genocide and came to
realize clearly it prefigured the Jewish Holocaust, as well. It was a while
before I realized how closely it prefigured the Jewish Holocaust . . . the
fact that the rail cars, the box cars to transfer the Armenians by rail, the
fact that German diplomats had seen the Armenian Genocide, and later the
same scenes popping up in Eastern Europe - the killing of the Jews by the
Wehrmacht or the SS . . . it is clear lines of direct contact between that
Armenian Genocide and the second genocide of that century.

Then I went to the Syrian Desert and to Deir ez Zorr. This was in 1993. It
was a major photo story. I went with French photographer, to do pictures on
the Genocide and what had happened in the northern Syrian Desert. The story
is in the book. We went looking for this hill called Halgada. We knew about
it from an old Armenian lady . . . the location of where her family was
killed, next to the Khabur River. But there was nothing next to the Khabur
River. It was only when we got to the top of the hill that we realized the
Khabur River has moved about a mile to the east since 1915. Perhaps because
of the number of bodies in it. There must have been heavy rainstorms; I was
wondering around what must have been once an island in the river. Isabel
[the photographer] was walking down a newly cut hillside. She said: `Robert,
Robert come here.' I went across the top of the hill. At first I thought
she was in trouble. As I walked towards her I saw the side of the hill was
lined with skeletons. Some of them with bits of materials on the bones. They
were tied together. I used my car key to pull the skull . . . there were
teeth of young people, of women and children, as well as men. So, we found
the killing fields.

Later on they took me up to these caves where the Turks had lit bonfires
outside to set the smoke into [the caves] and to asphyxiate Armenians in the
world's first gas chambers. We made a huge report on this and, off course,
endured the usual hate mail from Turkey. At that time, we are talking about
1993, it wasn't normal for British newspaper or any newspaper to do a big
investigation on the Armenian Holocaust. I saw it as an outrageous
injustice. You know the Jews of Europe have quite rightly received
compensation for their Holocaust. The Germans have owned up and constantly
apologized for that Holocaust. But the Turks don't want admit to the
Armenian Genocide. They paid nothing, and they went on saying that it was
the fault of the victims and that there was no Genocide, anyway. I still
think that unless there is full acknowledgment by the Turkish authorities
that their Ottoman Turkish predecessors carried out the Holocaust/Genocide .
. . I think the outrageous nature of the denial of this Genocide--as a
political issue - is almost as deplorable as the actual genocide originally.

It's outrageous that the American press, which exposed the original
Genocide, should have spent so many years recently giving the Turkish point
of view and denials. It is a shameful piece of journalism. Can you imagine
running a story saying that 6 million Jews died in Europe and many Germans
say it did not happen. We will never write that; we will never dream of
that.

AB : As a journalist, why you think that the international media has a
double standard when it comes to the Armenian Genocide - even though some of
these newspapers, you mentioned the New York Times, and here in Canada the
Globe and Mail, have plenty of archives on this issue.

RF: You know, the Globe and Mail carried an article by me about the Genocide
and deleted the word `Genocide' and included `tragedy.' When I talked to
them I was told that it was done by an editor... as if that is an excuse.

AB: Why do you think so much of the international media has a double
slandered on this topic?

RF: Because Turkey is in NATO and because the media have this balancing act.
They don't associate the Genocide with the Holocaust. That is why I call it
the Armenian Holocaust. Also, because journalists think they are giving
balance to everything. Anyone who denied anything gets in the newspaper his
denial. He gets 50% of the story. Which is ridiculous. We wouldn't allow the
Germans to deny the Jewish Holocaust; why would we allow the Turks to deny
the Armenian Holocaust? And it is also the gutless sense of American
journalism, to go along with the authorities. The attitude is this: since
the U.S administration is not prepared to call it a Genocide that's
sufficient for us not mess with our Turkish allies our, NATO ally. Right? We
need them for their air bases. So, why upset them? Look what happened to
France. The moment the National Assembly brought the Armenian Genocide to
the table and said it happened, they lost so much, so many economic
agreements [between Turkey and major French companies] including weapon
agreements were cancelled. Lockheed and Boeing are not going to support the
recognition of the Armenian Genocide. So it is very much an economic thing.
The fact that the New York Times, which exposed the Armenian Genocide in the
first place, should now spend so many paragraphs to Turkish denials is
amazing.

AB: Do you think that the concept of uniqueness of the Holocaust in certain
circles within the Jewish community and the Jewish diaspora has anything to
do with the issue of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide?

RF: We know that Shimon Perez has publicly stated it was not Genocide. It is
in my book. He was admonished, quite rightly so, by Israel Charny, the
Holocaust scholar. He [Charny] does not want to be associated with the Perez
statement. Mr. Charny is a very moral man. Over and over again, even the
Israeli ambassador to Yerevan announced that it was not Genocide.

The Armenian Genocide issue is very straightforward. It happened, and people
are denying it and those who deny it are wrong. I told the San Francisco
Bay Area Armenian Community four, five years ago, that there was one way to
turn the story around - changing the narrative back to reality. It's for
Armenians to honour those brave Turks who helped Armenians during the
Genocide. Here are these brave Turks . . . we dare the Turks to honour their
brave men...

AB: You are right. Many Turks did help Armenians during the Genocide.

RF: I have suggested to Armenians to do what the Israelis do - honour brave
Gentiles who saved Jews. Let's honour Turks who helped the Armenians, who
upheld the honour of the Turkish nation when the Turkish Government was
destroying its own Armenians. I don't know what the Armenians have done
[about this idea]. The Turkish Government will have a big problem if this
becomes a major issue. Are they to honour brave Turks who upheld the honour
of their nation or are they to despise them and honour the men who destroyed
the honour of the nation by killing the Armenians? These are major moral
issues. I don't think at the moment that Armenians have really looked on
this issue the way they might. But again, it's for Armenians to decide. I am
not Armenian.

AB: When it comes to Armenian Genocide denial, you least expect the Israeli
state to be a party to denial. Their policy on such a moral issue is ironic,
considering the Jewish Holocaust and its deniers.

RF: Israel puts Israel first as Armenians put Armenians first. But the fact
that you have someone like Shimon Perez adopting the Turkish line on the
Armenian Genocide is astonishing. It is not astonishing because the Israelis
demand the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. It is unique in terms of
numbers but in terms of structural, political, direct physical relationship
the Armenian Genocide is Genocide as is the Holocaust. It was a clear
attempt to eliminate the Armenian people as a people, as a nation. It was
similar to the Holocaust. Turks managed to do their best to thrash
Morgenthau. But look at all the other reports. Look at the photographs. Look
at Armin Wagner's pictures. I point, in my book, documents never quoted
before - from Britons, showing the women walking naked to Deir ezz Zor.
British readers wrote to me, with their long-dead fathers' notebooks,
written in their handwriting about this material. They were never published
before. They did not tell a lie. They were not dreaming when they wrote in
their notebooks.

AB: Is it the economic, military, intelligence alliance between Turkey and
Israel that makes Israel join Turkey in denying the Armenian Genocide?

RF: And Turkey and the United States.

AB: There are many righteous Jews in support of Armenian Genocide
recognition.

RF: Yes there are. Armenians who live in Jerusalem and speak Hebrew call it
the Armenian Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust. The Jerusalem Post wrote
fine articles about the Armenian Genocide. And The Jerusalem Post being
pretty right wing Israeli paper.

AB: You now see many countries coming forward, acknowledging the fact of the
Genocide. Even Germany recently passed a very strong resolution, even though
they did not use the word Genocide.

RF: You are getting there. You are getting there, slowly but surely.

AB: Can we conclude that these current alliances and denials are not based
on moral or historical facts but on short-term political and economic
factors?

RF: Of course. Of course.

AB: There are some Europeans who are using the issue of Armenian Genocide as
a pretext to block Turkey's entry to the European Union. Under the
circumstances, wouldn't it be wiser for the Turkish Government to come to
terms with the Armenian Genocide issue?

RF: Of course it would. You know, an increasing number of Turks are
admitting it. I gave a lecture in Sabanci University [Istanbul] a year ago
and mentioned the Armenian Genocide. A former Turkish army colonel stood up
at the end and said: `You are right.' When I was covering the Turkish
earthquake, in 1999, I talked to large number of seismologists and civil
servants. During a big dinner gathering in Istanbul, I raised the Genocide
issue. `You are absolutely right. It happened. We did it. We should
acknowledge it,' they all said.

AB: Why is it that they do not come forward?

RF: Because of ultra-nationalist arrogance. Because the ultra-nationalist
elements in the Turkish society, which identify with Moustafa Kamal Ataturk,
altough Ataturk himself, in interviews, said that the people responsible for
the Genocide should be hanged. He knew it had happened. `Our Christian
citizens,' he called Armenians. There is a newspaper interview with him
which I have a copy in English.



AB: Is it the Los Angeles Examiner interview?

RF: Yes.

AB: You know, some Turks now deny that Ataturk did give such an interview.

RF: I have the original. I have seen the original newspaper and I have a
photocopy. It is real, of course.

AB: Recently we have witnessed some Turkish scholars and intellectuals
questioning the Turkish Government's policy of denial. Some have been
threatened, blackmailed . . .

RF: They have suffered for it. They have suffered for it.

AB: What do you think of this phenomenon? How far it will go?

RF: They cannot be stopped. Once you open the door to discussion, you cannot
close the door again. People lose their fear. If any element loses its fear
you can not inject fear into it again. Once historical scholarship loses its
fear . . . you cannot lock it back again. So, it is out of the bag. The door
is open. You can only move forward. You can not go back. Even if you lock up
all the scholars it becomes bigger strain and there will be more scholars.
It is little bit like water coming under the door. You can seal the bottom
of the door, but eventually it will come from the top of the door. Why it
happened [Turkish scholars researching the Armenian Genocide]? I don't know.
I hate journalists who talk through the top of their heads on subjects like
that. I am sure it's like the situation in the U.S. where Turkish
scholarship has contaminated American universities through the system of
Turkish Government sponsorship of chairs of Turkish studies. So more and
more Turkish academics, younger academics, have been trained to work abroad
and learn the necessity of starting scholarship outside the politically
accepted dogma. I will give you practical example. A young Turkish girl who
must remain anonymous. She was a student who came to work in America. And by
chance she lived in a U.S. city with a large Armenian community. She started
to take an interest in the Genocide. Until then she had believed that what
had happened in 1915 was a civil war. Armenians had suffered; Muslims had
suffered. Then she started interviewing Armenians. And talking to Armenians
she realized that there was a genocide. She started cataloguing the stories
of the Armenians in Turkish. Two years ago she turned out in southeast
England, to talk to a very old lady who had seen children set on fire by
Turkish gendarmes. I interviewed her. She is in my book. In the book I
mentioned the letter she had received from a Turkish woman who said that she
was so sorry for what her people had done. That Turkish woman is preserving
the Genocide records in Turkey in Turkish.

So it is out. You cannot go back no matter how the nationalist opposition
fights it.

AB: What do you think of the Turkish integration into the European Union?
Will the Genocide recognition play a big role whether Turkey is admitted?


RF: The problem around the European issue is this: Europeans who don't want
Turkey in the European Union will use the issue of the Armenian Genocide not
for your view but for there's. You might think they would stand up for
freedom of information and force the Turks to indulge in the truth. They
will be working from the principle that the Turks will not recognize the
truth. Therefore, they will keep them out of the European Union. That is a
big danger for Armenians. You will have `friends' of the Armenians who
demand Turkish recognition of the Armenian Genocide as a condition of entry
to the European Union, in the hope that the Turks would refuse to recognize
and thus Europeans will be able to keep Muslim Turkey out. That's about
their interests. My theory is that if Turkey joins the European Union many
Armenians, who have European passport, can claim compensation for the
property taken from their ancestors.

AB: Did you receive complaints about your writings on the Armenian Genocide?

RF: Yes. I have received anonymous phone calls from Turks; probably calling
from London, saying `why do you hate the Turkish people?' I had one or two
complaints from the Turkish Embassy sent to my paper. But we reply most
vigorously to them, saying `don't waste our time writing letters and saying
the truth isn't the truth.'

AB: Armenians in the diaspora are facing an uphill struggle, lobbying to
bringing this matter to the attention of the international community.

RF: You have done a lot better than the Palestinians. The Armenian diaspora
is very wealthy, compared to other minorities whose history has been denied.

AB: What do you think of the reconciliation talks between Turks and
Armenians, without Turkish Government's acknowledgment of the Genocide?

RF: It sounds strange to me. Unless the Turkish Government recognizes the
Genocide what you got to reconcile about?

[Gavur]

Exclusive interview of Robert Fisk, reporter for "The Independent"

http://www.hairenik.com/HairenikTV/HA_TV_Clip19.htm