From 2001: Point-Counter Point

[Joseph]

By Melik Kaylan

Whose Genocide?


Here’s a topic I’m loath to write about: the Armenian genocide. I did so for the first time ever in a Wall Street Journal op-ed some weeks ago. Result: An incendiary rain of ad hominem abuse and threats mailed to me at addresses I’d forgotten I had. But now my colleague Charles Glass, whom I admire enormously for his solitary courage on matters Middle Eastern, has forced the issue in these very pages. He took the position that both Clinton and Blair acted in cowardice by spurning support for Armenian genocide legislation in their respective countries. (The European Union, in the meantime, passed its version.) Such bills typically ask that the massacre and violent expulsion of Armenians in Eastern Turkey some 90 years ago be recognized today as official genocide. Anyone who reads the source material on the original events in 1915-’16 needs a cool head and a strong stomach. There’s no question that the vicious so-called "Young Turk" regime of the time visited horrors on the indigenous Armenian community. Turkish authorities today still suppress all discussion of the topic. And I’ve never been a fan of theirs. Yet Charlie Glass of all people should know to tread warily around Western views of the Muslim world. He knows about the demonizing and the "orientalist" bias. His good friend Prof. Edward Said literally wrote the book on it. Strangely, in Said’s Orientalism, Turks are almost never mentioned. We hear exhaustively about the West’s systematic, semantic and literary caricaturing of Arabs, Jews and Orientals of all stripes–yet almost never Turks, against whom the invective was chiefly directed for the last 500 years. The Ottoman Turks, after all, embodied the anti-West principle until the Red Scare took over. For Said and Glass, apparently, the Turks remain unredeemable, a common sentiment in the West. If you doubt its virulence, think of how the Serbs reified the Bosnians with the epithet "Turk," invoking it as self-incitement to more slaughter throughout their own recent minigenocide. Indeed, I could tell you deeply unpleasant personal stories of growing up as a Turk in the West. But I won’t. I’ve been in rooms where blacks, Jews and Arabs have fought over which group has suffered worse genocide over the years, and which should be more commemorated. I deplore this morbid "victimissimo" desire to be counted among the most wronged races of history. Not because, being Turkish-born, I carry a hardwired propensity to kill Armenians and Kurds and eat their babies. Though you’d be surprised how many people think so. Proponents of the victim sweepstakes will argue that official commemoration of their own suffering protects them and others, indeed the world, from further such incidents. Unfortunately, the historical record indicates the precise opposite, that the cycle of violence is instead perpetuated ad infinitum. Think of the Serbs and their self-justifying grievances dating back some 600 years to Kosovo. Think of Israel and the Palestinians, of Hutu ferocity against their Tutsi antagonists who ruled them a century or more. Finally, consider the Armenian purge of their neighbors, the Turkic Azerbaijanis, in the Nagorno-Karabagh wars of the early 1990s. Charles Glass, I notice, doesn’t mention this at all in his polemic. I have video footage from that particular slaughterfest. Whole Azeri villages were obliterated, including old women and children, and their livestock. Often the children were scalped. Many had their hands tied back to their ankles first. Old men with toes and toenails yanked off were left to walk over the mountain passes. Russian arms and special forces supported Armenian revanchistes in that conflict, as they have for several centuries. Naturally, neither the West nor Charlie Glass is anxious to counter-commemorate this turn in the cycle. And there’s the rub, because in such scenarios historical complexity is the first victim, and all the others follow from that. It’s easier to view Turks in stark profile as the great predatory Antichrist, the definitive barbarous Asiatic, before purging their allies, cousins and coreligionists in the name of humanity. This is exactly what the broad Christian supremacist alliance under the Czar did before the Young Turk regime took it out on the Armenians. With the Cossacks at the vanguard, a crusading tide of Armenians, Georgians, Russians and the like pogromed into the Caucasus and Central Asia, slaughtering as they went–an experience the Jews remember well. The Turks and Armenians had lived together in relative peace for centuries until then. Armenians had prospered mightily under the terrible Turk. They built the lushest Ottoman sultans’ palaces in the 19th century. Yet when the Russians occupied Turkish Armenia as "protectors of Eastern Christendom," the local Armenians helped them massacre more Turks. Where are the monuments to the Turks and Muslims murdered during that century of endless genocide, one that continues today with the decimation of Chechnya? Is there a Charlie Glass out there standing up bravely for their memory? Nobody in the "civilized" world has heard that side of the story, nobody cares to and nobody’s willing to tell it for fear of courting public abuse. Genocide is a black and white concept. Once acknowledged, it brooks no shades of gray. Nobody likes to remember that it was the local Kurds who mostly carried out the actual physical slaughter of Armenians and took their land. The Kurds, victims du jour, are too oppressed for that, though their current Marxist insurrection against their allies, the Turks, is also Russiansponsored from the north. The Kurds themselves forget that the Soviets simply "disappeared" 100,000 of their number when they recolonized and kept the briefly independent southern Caucasus in the 1920s and 1940s. It’s all so irritatingly complicated. Which is why Charlie should know better.

[Joseph]

Response

*
Denial Redux


by Charles Glass,

The New York Press - January 24, 2001


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.

[Joseph]

Further Response

Armenian Holocaust Denial

Why Does Melik Kaylan Hate Those Pesky Armenians?
by Christopher Atamian

The New York Press
January 17, 2001

Rarely in the annals of recent journalism has such an
intellectually dishonest and historically bogus article appeared as
Melik Kaylans thinly veiled invective against Armenians, "Whose
Genocide?" ("Takis Top Drawer," 12/27). Kaylan announces his
loathsome views in a rebuttal of sorts to Charles Glass article on
the Armenian genocide that ran two weeks earlier in the pages of
"Top Drawer." Kaylan first admits the reality of the Armenian
massacres, which he describes as so gruesome that he has trouble
reading about them, yet he then spends the better of 1000 words
telling readers why commemoration of the Armenian genocide is
unimportant and historically biased.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of Kaylans denialist gestalt is
that he seems to want to portray himself as part of a
misunderstood, oppressed group, one that is unjustly attacked and
perpetually misunderstood: the Turks. Yes, the Turks. If one
listens to Kaylan, the Turks are a defenseless civilization unable
to bear the unjustified attacks they must endure from everyone:
Orientalizing Europeans, Armenians, Arabs, even usually
"courageous" journalists such as Glass.

Kaylans main strategy, as a denier, is to turn the oppressor into
the oppressed, no mean feat in the case of Turkey - a country with
a huge military presence that in 1974 invaded Cyprus and regularly
threatens its neighbors Greece, Syria and Armenia. No mean feat
either for a country that shares the worlds worst human rights
record with China, and whose prisons just several weeks ago saw
some of the worst police violence in recent history.

Beginning in 1915 Turkey committed not one but three genocides.
>From 1915 to 1923, the Turkish government effectively planned and
systematically annihilated 90 percent of its Christian population:
1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered and forced on death marches,
along with three-fourths of the worlds Assyrian community, as well
as the Pontic Greek community that lived around the Black Sea for
several thousand years. All told, 2.5 to 3 million people were
slaughtered in an orgy of killing the likes of which the modern
world would not see again until the Nazi extermination camps.
Entire villages were burned to the ground, Armenian women abducted
and raped; priests flogged and flayed to death, the men horseshoed
and bayoneted by the thousands. With no gas chambers, hundreds of
thousands of Armenians were herded into churches and caves that
were set on fire, or drowned on barges in the Black Sea. On April
24, 1915, the date on which the Armenian genocide is now
commemorated annually, the Armenian intellectual elite of
Constantinople was rounded up, sent to Anatolia and executed. The
heart-rending details are documented in any library the world over.

Yet, as with most Turks brought up in or influenced by a repressive
neo-fascist military regime and subjected to historical
revisionism, the suffering of the Armenians makes little difference
to Kaylan. As he states it, the Kurds actually killed the
Armenians, not the Turks. This is technically true in many cases:
the Turkish government, to absolve itself of direct responsibility,
goaded local Kurds to carry out the actual killing of Armenians.
Kaylan also implies that Kurds should not complain about the
continued policy of cultural and physical genocide that has been
unleashed against them by the modern-day Turkish "democracy,"
because they, too, participated in genocide in the past.

Kaylan further neglects to tell his readers that Turkeys campaign
of genocide has continued unabated to this day. Slogans in
post-WWI Turkey such as "Citizen, speak Turkish!" and references
in all media to Kurds as "Mountain Turks" have all been attempts to
forge an ethnically pure identity in Turkey, and more specifically
in Anatolia, a land that according to the Turkish
military/government must be Muslim and monoethnically Turkish.

(Speaking of the Kurds, it is an historical fantasy of Kaylans that
their rebellion is Russian-"sponsored." While Russia - like any
good antagonist - may indeed aid Kurdish separatists, just as Turks
aid Chinese separatists of Turkic origin as far off as the Northern
Chinese provinces, the Kurdish uprisings are as homegrown as the
ones in Quebec, Corsica or the Basque region. Kaylan rationalizes
the Kurdish uprisings like his brethren in the Turkish government
do, when they accuse everyone from Syria to Armenia, Russia and
Iran of creating the PKK and the Kurdish "problem" - anyone but
Turkey itself, a country that has killed more than 30,000 Kurds
with military equipment largely bought from the United States, and
which has prohibited the teaching and broadcasting of the Kurdish
language, even in Diyarbakir and Southern Kurdistan.)


As for todays few remaining Armenians and Assyrians in Turkey, the
message that the Turkish government continues to send is clear:
shut up or we will repeat what happened in 1915. If Mr. Kaylan
needs any convincing of this, he need only look at the recent
pressure put on Istanbuls small remaining Armenian community after
Armenian genocide resolutions were passed in France and Italy, or
at the unfortunate fate of Assyrian priest Yusuf Akbulut, who stood
trial last month in Turkey for simply mentioning the Armenian
genocide in public.

Or he may want to screen the recent film Salkim Hanims Necklace,
which depicts the Varlik Vergisi (wealth taxes) imposed on
Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Turkey as early as the 1930s, which
subjected non-Muslims to exorbitant rates. These laws effectively
drove many Armenian, Greek and Jewish businessmen into poverty or
emigration; and, when they were unable to pay such onerous debts,
they were sent to work camps in Anatolia, where they toiled in
stone quarries. In the process, a whole class of ethnic Turks
exploited the fate of these minorities and became many of todays
wealthy Turkish families, whom you can read about in the Forbes
400.

And although Turks like to portray their relations with Jews as
being all but perfect since Turkeys recent alliance with Israel,
they seem to have selective amnesia when it comes to the massacre
and expulsion of 50,000 Jews in the Rumeli region earlier this
century, or the constant outflow of Jews from Turkey until the past
decade, when relations between the two communities eased somewhat.

To this day, the remaining Armenian community, reduced to 70,000,
is not free to renovate its own properties or to buy new real
estate without special approvals from the Turkish government -
approvals that often, mysteriously, never arrive.

As for history, Kaylan first creates a new historical category, the
"Christian supremacist...Armenians, Georgians, Russians" who swept
down into Anatolia, displacing Turks. Even if Kaylan has been
educated in Turkey, he must know that by the 10th century, it was
in fact the Turks, or more exactly Turkic and Mongolian/Tatar
tribes, who swept through Anatolia, quite literally on horseback,
raping and pillaging everything in sight. From Tamerlane and
Genghis Khan to the Seljuks and others, one wave after another
conquered, raped and killed Armenians, Russians and a host of
native peoples. In the 12th century the Armenians fled to the
Mediterranean, where they founded the wealthy Kingdom of Cilicia,
eventually succumbing to Turkish dominion there as well.

Kaylans acceptance of the Turkish propaganda that Armenians have
unconditionally supported Russia at Turkeys expense is laughable.
In fact, the Armenians were known in the Ottoman Empire as the
"sadik milleti," or "faithful community." If Kaylan knew anything
about Armenian history, he would know that Armenians have suffered
tremendously at the hands of Russian and Soviet domination as well.

As for the Russians themselves, for centuries they fought defensive
wars against the Mongols and Tatars, who among other things
ransacked and burned Moscow to the ground several times, once in
1237 (Batu Khan) and later in 1382 (Khan Togtamitch). Later on, it
is true that Russia fought an expansionist war with Turkey, Britain
and others, known as the Great Game, for control over the Caspian
Sea. These may not have been innocent pastimes, but they were par
for the course in an age of conquest. The Armenian genocide, Melik
Kaylan to the contrary, was not.

Kaylan misuses historical facts on yet another level when he
confuses the terms "Turkish" and "Muslim" and asks, "Where are the
monuments to the Turks and Muslims murdered?" Is he speaking of
Muslims in Indonesia or Egypt? Or how about the thousands of Arabs
slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks over several centuries of Turkish
domination? Are those the Muslims he refers to?

Had Kaylan visited his homeland lately, he would know that the
Turks have in fact erected several obscene monuments to their own
imagined dead. In Van, an historically Armenian city defended
until the very end in 1915, the Turkish government has built a
museum commemorating the "Turkish Genocide" that goes so far as to
desecrate history by showing skulls of dead Armenians and claiming
that they are in fact ethnic Turks killed by Armenians. Farther
north, near the Armenian border, in the city of Igdir, the Turkish
government has erected a tall monument to the supposed 80,000 Turks
killed, once again, in a fictive Turkish genocide that even Turkish
scholars find risible.

As for those Turks who actually did die during WWI, one would like
to remind Kaylan that they perished during a war waged by Turkey,
which allied itself with the Germans, against the rest of Europe.
That is quite a different story from the state-sponsored Armenian
genocide, whose victims were innocent civilians, many of whom had
actually fought for the Ottoman Empire during several wars against
their supposed "allies," the Russians and Europeans.

Kaylan seems to revel in historical reversals, making the victim
into the oppressor and vice versa. Since for most of history, with
a few exceptions, the Armenians were a subject people (to Persians,
Arabs, then Turks), he is hard-pressed to find overt examples of
organized Armenian terror - not because, to be fair, Armenians are
less inclined to violence than anyone else, but simply because,
like the Jews, theirs has been a history of oppression and
survival. So, with no other alternative, Kaylan picks on the
recent conflict in Nagorno-Karabagh, portraying the native
Armenians as the aggressors.

Since most Americans dont know the difference between a Czech and a
Slovak, and less so between an Armenian and an Azeri, Kaylan is
perhaps hoping to play on public ignorance. In point of fact,
Nagorno-Karabagh - partitioned to Azerbaijan after WWI by none
other than Josef Stalin - voted for independence from Azerbaijan in
1991, after the wish to be reattached to Armenia had been ignored
for decades by the Soviet leadership. The other region thus
partitioned by Stalin, a sliver of land called Nakhichevan, located
in between Armenia and Turkey - so that it has no physical borders
with Azerbaijan itself - was, over the span of 75 years, ethnically
cleansed of its entire Armenian population. Armenian monuments in
Nachichevan were so mistreated that UNESCO intervened two years
back to protect Armenian graveyards, which were still being
desecrated and destroyed on a regular basis.

Back in Turkeys proclaimed "Turkic cousin" Azerbaijan, the
government responded to Nagorno-Karabaghs independence movement
with pogroms of the Armenians in Sumgait and Baku. World Chess
Champion Garry Kasparov, an ethnic Armenian, was airlifted out of
Baku in a helicopter to escape rioting described by observers as
similar to that unleashed against Jews during Czarist Russia.
Azerbaijan then proceeded to attack Nagorno-Karabagh militarily,
causing the refugee issues that now plague both Armenia and
Azerbaijan. Until then, no violence against Azeris by Armenians
was ever recorded. The Armenians - who represented more than 75
percent of the population in Nagorno-Karabagh - fought back and
won. Turkey, instead of staying neutral out of diplomatic tact, or
perhaps because of its own past debt to Armenians, instead imposed
a blockade on the fledgling Republic of Armenia.


One last fantasy of Kaylans: the happy Ottoman Armenian. Kaylan
implies that Armenians had nothing to complain about under the
Ottomans since, as an industrious and annoyingly persistent race,
they were all prospering and building "the lushest Ottoman sultans
palaces." Kaylan seems as resentful of Armenian wealth as Germans
were of Jewish wealth before WWII. It is an historical fact that
Armenians were better educated and successful than Turks during the
Ottoman Empire. The reasons for this are numerous and have to do
mainly with Armenian culture and literacy, their position as a
minority, and the Ottoman system of rule. The sultans, for
example, excluded Muslims from serving as Janissaries, the elite,
Christian corps of young boys and war captives who were trained at
court in various professions.

Yes, the most brilliant architects, bankers, doctors and writers in
Constantinople and other urban areas were Armenians. But the vast
majority of Armenians, still living in rural Anatolia, remained
poor. They were subjected to overtaxation and countless pogroms by
Kurdish overlords, encouraged by Ottoman governors. Starting in
1894 Abdul Hamid, dubbed "The Bloody Sultan," massacred more than
200,000 Armenians. In 1909, in the heavily Armenian city of Adana,
30,000 more were massacred with the acquiescence of local
governors. Throughout much of the 18th and 19th centuries, disease
was rampant in Anatolian villages and life expectancy poor.
Throughout the Empire, Armenians were being quickly assimilated.
By 1915 most could no longer speak Armenian, and Armenian schools
and newspapers were subjected to constant raids and closings. In
many areas, terror reigned. Are these the happy Armenians, I
wonder, that Melik Kaylan imagines?

Most official Turkish deniers are more subtle. They blame the
"events" of 1915 on the Young Turks and absolve themselves of
responsibility. "What does that have to do with us?" they ask
indignantly. "We are not the Turks of 1915." Go ask a Kurd whose
village the Turkish military just blew up, or an Armenian currently
suffering under the Turkish blockade.

Kaylan professes to being tired of hearing about the Armenian
genocide, although it is one of the lesser-known episodes of
20th-century history. One wonders what Kaylan would do if he were
German and had to watch the profusion of films on the Nazis and the
Holocaust. Surely that injustice would drive him insane.

The modern Turkish Republic was founded by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 on
the ashes of the genocide - that is to say, the obliteration of the
native Anatolian Armenian population that had lived there for more
than 3000 years, long before the first Turk galloped through and
pitched the first yurt on Armenian territory. The modern Turkish
Republic has been referred to as "genesis in genocide," a heavy
burden to bear for Turkey, and crucial to its understanding of
itself and its modern culture. The day that Turkey, like Germany,
faces its past honestly, apologizes, compensates and builds
memorials to the Armenian dead, will be the day that Turks no
longer carry the self-imposed burden of being viewed as cruel or
backward. But the more denialist or exculpatory articles people
like Kaylan write, the more uncivilized his treasured Turkish
culture will appear to the world.

[Joseph]

The article that started it all

Armenian Holocaust

by Charles Glass (London Desk) - The New York Press - December 13, 2000

Back from Jerusalem, I read that the British government has remained true to form and caved into Turkish demands that it exclude all mention of the Armenian genocide from Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27. On that day, Britain is to honor the victims of the 20th century's acts of genocide, mainly of the Jews in Europe during World War II and the Tutsis of Rwanda in 1994.

Tony Blair's right-on regime understandably excluded the 19th century, which might have meant bringing up the Tasmanians. Though thanks to British efficiency, there is no Tasmanian lobby to bring up that old peccadillo. And if the Nazis and Turks had achieved their goals, there would be no troublesome Jews and Armenians around to remind us what happened to them.


It fell to a civil servant in the Home Office Race Equality Unit, whatever Orwellian arm of bureaucracy that may be, to explain to American Armenians the government's oversight. Writing to the Armenian Assembly of America, the unit's unlucky Neil Frater disclosed that the only people to be remembered in January will be those killed in "the Nazi Holocaust and more recent atrocities." How convenient that Britain has chosen to draw the line at the 1940s, excluding its own genocides and those of its Turkish NATO allies who consume vast quantities of British weapons, riot control equipment and, worst of all, television programs. How lucky that the Armenians just didn't quite fit the profile and, thus, jeopardize Britain's relations with Ankara.


In Jerusalem the other day, I visited the Armenian Museum in Armenian Patriarchate Road between the Jaffa Gate and the Western Wall of the Old City. Its dusty shelves and overgrown garden testify to the fact that it receives few tourists or scholars, but it is worth seeing. It is not a holocaust museum, but a collection of artifacts from the first Christian kingdom in history: Armenia's icons, altar pieces, embroidered clerical robes, paintings, swords, armor and chalices. Midway through the many vaulted rooms of the stone palace housing the treasures, the genocide takes over. "On 24 April 1915," a card announces next to photographs of murdered Armenians, "prominent Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople were rounded up and massacred."


In fact, the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1918 began much like the Russian and German destruction of Polish society, with the killing of officers. The Ottomans were fighting a war for the survival of their empire, because the Young Turks had foolishly entered the Great War on the German side.

Armenians in the Ottoman army were taken out of their units in Feb. 1915, their hands bound, and slaughtered. Next came the intellectuals, clergy, teachers, rich traders and politicians in the prosperous Armenian colony that had thrived, like the Jews of Vienna until the Anschluss, in Constantinople.

They were massacred on April 24, 1915, the date that Armenians have commemorated ever since as the beginning of their annihilation. Loyal subjects of the Sultan, Constantinople's Armenians were shocked to be singled out for murder. Due to Ottoman fear of Armenian demands for Allied assistance in establishing their own state in Turkish territory-the same demand made by Zionists and Arab nationalists-the Sublime Porte accused all Armenians of treason. Hitler later made a similar accusation of disloyalty against Jews in the Reich, calling them Bolsheviks, with about as much justification.


With 300 of the Armenian elite out of the way, the Ottomans turned on the rest of the population. The first to go were about 5000 poorer Armenians in the imperial capital. Other Armenians in the big towns were deported, again like the Jews in Germany, to the provinces-in this case to the deserts of Mesopotamia. Some of those who did not die of exhaustion or hunger were burned alive. In one incident at Deir ez-Zour on the Euphrates, the Turkish Governor tied up 2000 Armenian children, all of whose parents had already died, and set them alight on gasoline-soaked pyres. The American Military Mission estimated that the Turks killed between 500,000 and one million Armenians in 1916, a year after the massacres began and two years before they came to an end.


A month after the Constantinople killings of 1915, the Allied Powers, admittedly engaged in a war with Turkey, declared the genocide "crimes against humanity and civilization," the former a term they would use against another defeated power at the end of the next world war. Winston Churchill and other British leaders wanted the Turkish officials responsible put on trial for war crimes. Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador, wrote to Washington, "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eyewitnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion." At the end of the war, Morgenthau and Herbert Hoover prepared a memorandum that said 750,000 Armenians had taken refuge in Russia and were in desperate need of humanitarian care. Little was forthcoming, because newly Sovietized Russia was under an Allied embargo.


Most American presidents have recognized that the Armenians suffered what Morgenthau called "race extermination." The most recent was Bill Clinton, who on Armenia's memorial day every year lamented "the deportations and massacres of roughly one and a half million Armenians..." His concern, however, in a way that can only be described as Clintonesque, allowed him to persuade Congress to drop its resolution condemning the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Clinton put the truth, that unwelcome visitor to the Lincoln bedroom during his tenure, underneath a big bucket whose contents included American arms sales to Turkey, Turkey's permission for American planes to fly bombing runs over the Iraqi plains where so many Armenians died in 1916 from Incirlik Air Base, and Turkey's "strategic alliance" with Israel.


By refusing even to include the murders of Armenians among the official genocides, Tony Blair is imitating once again his mentor in Washington. Alas, poor Tony. Upon whose lack of integrity will he model his own when Bill departs? I suppose either Al or GWB is up to the job.