Robert Fisk Article

[Joseph]

If I lie, then put me in the dock
Published: Monday, 16 October, 2006, 10:28 AM The Independent
By Robert Fisk

THIS has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5mn Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks.

On Thursday, France’s lower house of parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And, within an hour, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk – only recently cleared by a Turkish court for insulting "Turkishness" (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres – won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence - the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of "civil war" – Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger.

Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes to save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in the Black Sea and the Euphrates rivers – mostly of women and children, so many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its course for up to half a mile.

But Dadrian, who speaks and reads Turkish fluently, has now discovered that tens of thousands of Armenians were also burned alive in haylofts.

He has produced an affidavit to the Turkish court martial that briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War, a document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army. He testified that, when he visited the Armenian village of Chourig (it means "little water" in Armenian), he found all the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that all were standing upright.

"In all the history of Islam," General Vehip wrote, "it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery." The Armenian Holocaust, now so "unmentionable" in Turkey, was no secret to the country’s population in 1918. Millions of Muslim Turks had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier – a few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and friends at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families – and, on October 19 1918, Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: "Let’s face it, we Turks savagely (‘vahshiane’ in Turkish) killed off the Armenians." Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued, Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for Armenian deportees but a parallel set instructed Turkish officials to "proceed with your mission" as soon as the deportee convoys were far enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to murder.

As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on November 19 1918: "The ‘mission’ in the circular was: to attack the convoys and massacre the population... I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman Empire, these criminal people..."

How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths in 1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide of the Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of the great crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how much more extraordinary that their successors today maintain that all of this is a myth, that anyone who says in present-day Istanbul what the men of 1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution under the notorious Law 301 for "defaming" Turkey.

I’m not sure that Holocaust deniers – of the anti-Armenian or anti-Semitic variety – should be taken to court for their rantings. David Irving is a particularly unpleasant "martyr" for freedom of speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis’s one-franc fine by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity to an elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.

But it’s gratifying to find French President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey will have to recognise the Armenian death as genocide before it is allowed to join the European Union

True, France has a powerful half million-strong Armenian community.

But, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Britain’s Tony Blair, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly commented that the new French Bill, if passed by the senate in Paris, will "prohibit dialogue" which is necessary for reconciliation between Turkey and modern-day Armenia.

What is the subtext of this, I wonder? No more talk of the Jewish Holocaust lest we hinder "reconciliation" between Germany and the Jews of Europe?

But, suddenly, last week, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes. Next month, my Turkish publishers are producing my book, The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language, complete with its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled The First Holocaust.

On Thursday, I received a fax from Agora Books in Istanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it "very likely that they will be sued under Law 301" – which forbids the defaming of Turkey and which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk – but that, as a foreigner, I would be "out of reach". However, if I wished, I could apply to the court to be included in any Turkish trial.

Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa Kamel Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned. – The Independent

[bell-the-cat]

Robert Fisk at the Maria Assumpta Centre
Saturday 14th October.

Robert Fisk, the Independents renound Middle East correspondent, came to the Maria Assumpta centre in Kensington on the 14th of October to talk about his new book "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East", the state of the modern Middle East and the Armenian Holocaust, which constitutes an entire chapter of his book. Fisk is best known for experiencing and reporting the on-the-ground realities of a region he has lived in for the past thirty years, and also a staunch campaigner for the recognition of the Armenian Holocaust. On the evening Fisk did not disappoint, giving a passionate and entertaining, yet sober and informative speech to a packed hall, before taking time to meet those present and to sign copies of his book.

Fisk's speech focused on the Armenian genocide, although he maintained his objectivity by insisting he was not pro Armenian per se, something that can only heighten his standing as an international commentator and make him more of a powerful force as an ally of the Armenian community. He spoke out against the recent French law which makes denial of the holocaust a criminal offence, arguing that making the issue a matter for legislation would open the floodgates for other legal claims from other genocides, allowing such tragic events to become legal weapons in trivial political brinkmanship. Tellingly, in the wake of the French law, a motion was put forward in Turkey to make the denial of the Algerian "genocide" at the hands of the French a criminal offence. Fisk also broached the idea that Armenians, in order to make it even harder for denial of their tragedy to take place, they should compile a list of those Turks whose brave actions they wished to commend during the genocide, some of who took great risks to protect and provide for those Armenians that they could. He importantly spoke of the challenge for Armenians, no matter how arduous a task it may be, to fight for the recognition of their Holocaust themselves, as the current state of the Middle East does not give the international community the luxury of engaging in revisionist history of events 95 years prior, while the current world continues to burn.

His analysis of the current state of the middle east also made for fascinating listening, as in his worlds: "in thirty years of living in Beirut and reporting from the Middle East, I have never witnessed so much incandescent anger in the Arab street". He elaborated on this with an amusing yet starkly disturbing anecdote about the difficulties of reporting in present day Iraq: "the reason journalists cannot report accurately how bad the situation is in Iraq, is because to go out and do so would involve one getting their throat slit". Rarely can someone convey such grave sentiments in such an amusing yet moving way, and this witty delivery was characteristic of Fisk throughout the evening. This was even evident in the closing question and answer session where he made several insightful comments on the state of current journalism. When referring to the historically de-contextualised reporting often found in today's tabloids and broadsheets, he quipped that: "the journalist today should discard the notebook from his top pocket, and replace it with the history book".

Joseph Downing

http://www.caia.org.uk/news/newsitem040.htm

[Gavur]

Thank you Bell

[Joseph]

Weekend Edition
October 14-15, 2006
"Suddenly, Those Armenian Graves Opened Up Before My Own Eyes"
Confronting Turkey's Armenian Genocide

By ROBERT FISK

This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I'm talking about
those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenian
Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France's lower house of
parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians
suffered genocide. And, within an hour, Turkey's most celebrated
writer, Orhan Pamuk--only recently cleared by a Turkish court for
insulting "Turkishness" (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody
in Turkey dared mention the Arm! enian massacres--won the Nobel Prize
for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and
beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been
comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence--the
systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of
their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of "civil
war"--Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth
new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve
its capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish
Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with
all the energy of a gravedigger.

Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes to
save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in the
Black Sea and the Euphrates rivers--mostly of women and children, so
many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its
course for up ! to half a mile. But Dadrian, who speaks and reads
Turkish fluently, ha s now discovered that tens of thousands of
Armenians were also burned alive in haylofts.

He has produced an affidavit to the Turkish court martial that briefly
pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War, a
document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the
Turkish Third Army. He testified that, when he visited the Armenian
village of Chourig (it means "little water" in Armenian), he found all
the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that
all were standing upright. "In all the history of Islam," General
Vehip wrote, "it is not possible to find any parallel to such
savagery."

The Armenian Holocaust, now so "unmentionable" in Turkey, was no
secret to the country's population in 1918. Millions of Muslim Turks
had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier--a
few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and friends
at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families--and, o! n 19
October 1918, Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate
and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the
genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: "Let's face it, we Turks
savagely (vahshiane in Turkish) killed off the Armenians."

Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued,
Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set
solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for
Armenian deportees but a parallel set instructed Turkish officials to
"proceed with your mission" as soon as the deportee convoys were far
enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to
murder. As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on 19 November
1918: "The 'mission' in the circular was: to attack the convoys and
massacre the population... I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as
an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman
Empire, these criminal people..! ."

How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths in
1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide of the
Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of the great
crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how much more
extraordinary that their successors today maintain that all of this is
a myth, that anyone who says in present-day Istanbul what the men of
1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution under the
notorious Law 301 for "defaming" Turkey.

I'm not sure that Holocaust deniers--of the anti-Armenian or
anti-Semitic variety--should be taken to court for their
rantings. David Irving is a particularly unpleasant "martyr" for
freedom of speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis's
one-franc fine by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in
a November 1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity
to an elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.

But it's gratifying to find French President Jacques Chi! rac and his
interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey will
have to recognise the Armenian death as genocide before it is allowed
to join the European Union. True, France has a powerful
half-million-strong Armenian community.

But, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Lord Blair of
Kut al-Amara, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly
commented that the new French Bill, if passed by the senate in Paris,
will "prohibit dialogue" which is necessary for reconciliation between
Turkey and modern-day Armenia. What is the subtext of this, I
wonder. No more talk of the Jewish Holocaust lest we hinder
"reconciliation" between Germany and the Jews of Europe?

But, suddenly, last week, those Armenian mass graves opened up before
my own eyes. Next month, my Turkish publishers are producing my book,
The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language, complete with
its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled "The ! First
Holocaust". On Thursday, I received a fax from Agora Books in Is
tanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it "very likely that they
will be sued under Law 301"--which forbids the defaming of Turkey and
which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk--but that, as a
foreigner, I would be "out of reach". However, if I wished, I could
apply to the court to be included in any Turkish trial.

Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to
touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock
with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa
Kamel Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the
Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book is The Conquest of the
Middle East.

[Joseph]

Who would have thought that the governments of
>Britain, Israel and Iran had so much in common?" asks
>Robert Fisk in his new, December 16, 2006, column
>published by the Independent (UK):
>
>http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...cle2079304.ece
>
> Robert Fisk: Different narratives in the Middle East
>No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of
>war crimes
>Published: 16 December 2006
>
>Oh how - when it comes to the realities of history -
>the Muslims of the Middle East exhaust my patience.
>After years of explaining to Arab friends that the
>Jewish Holocaust - the systematic, planned murder of
>six million Jews by the Nazis, is an indisputable fact
>- I am still met with a state of willing disbelief.
>
>And now, this week, the preposterous President Mahmoud
>Ahmadinajad of Iran opens up his own country to
>obloquy and shame by holding a supposedly impartial
>"conference" on the Jewish Holocaust to repeat the
>lies of the racists who, if they did not direct their
>hatred towards Jews, would most assuredly turn
>venomously against those other Semites, the Arabs of
>the Middle East.
>
>How, I always ask, can you expect the West to
>understand and accept the ethnic cleansing of 750,000
>men, women and children from Palestine in 1948 when
>you will not try to comprehend the enormity done the
>Jews of Europe? And, here, of course, is the wretched
>irony of the whole affair. For what the Muslims of the
>Middle East should be doing is pointing out to the
>world that they were not responsible for the Jewish
>Holocaust, that, horrific and evil though it was, it
>is a shameful, outrageous injustice that they, the
>Palestinians, should suffer for something they had no
>part in and - even more disgusting - that they should
>be treated as if they have. But, no, Ahmadinajad has
>neither the brains nor the honesty to grasp this
>simple, vital equation.
>
>True, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem shook
>hands with Hitler. I met his only surviving wartime
>Palestinian comrade before he died and it is perfectly
>true that the intemperate, devious Had al-Husseini
>made some vile anti-Jewish wartime speeches in German,
>in one of which he advised the Nazis to close Jewish
>refugee exit routes to Palestine and deport Jews
>eastwards (why east, I wonder?) and helped to raise a
>Muslim SS unit in Bosnia. I have copies of his
>speeches and his photograph hangs in the Yad Vashem
>Museum. But the downtrodden, crushed, occupied,
>slaughtered Palestinians of our time - of Sabra and
>Chatila, of Jenin and Beit Yanoun - were not even
>alive in the Second World War.
>
>Yet it is to the eternal shame of Israel and its
>leaders that they should pretend as if the
>Palestinians were participants in the Second World
>War. When the Israeli army was advancing on Beirut in
>1982, the then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin,
>wrote a crazed letter to US president, Ronald Reagan,
>explaining that he felt he was marching on "Berlin" to
>liquidate "Hitler" (ie Yasser Arafat, who was busy
>comparing his own guerrillas to the defenders of
>Stalingrad).
>
>That courageous Israeli writer Uri Avneri wrote an
>open letter to Begin. "Mr Prime Minister," he began,
>"Hitler is dead." But this did not stop Ariel Sharon
>from trying the same trick in 1989. By talking to the
>US State Department, Arafat was "like Hitler, who also
>wanted so much to negotiate with the Allies in the
>second half of the Second World War", Sharon told the
>Wall Street Journal. "... Arafat is the same kind of
>enemy."
>
>Needless to say, any comparison between the behaviour
>of German troops in the Second World War and Israeli
>soldiers today (with their constantly betrayed claim
>to "purity of arms") is denounced as anti-Semitic.
>Generally, I believe that is the correct reaction.
>Israelis are not committing mass rape, murder or
>installing gas chambers for the Palestinians.
>
>But the acts of Israeli troops are not always so easy
>to divorce from such insane parallels. During the
>Sabra and Chatila massacres - when Israel sent its
>enraged Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias into
>the camps after telling them that Palestinians had
>killed their beloved leader - up to 1,700 Palestinians
>were slaughtered. Israeli troops watched - and did
>nothing.
>
>The Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua observed that, even
>if his country's soldiers had not known what was
>happening, "then this would be the same lack of
>knowledge of the Germans who stood outside Buchenwald
>and Treblinka and did not know what was happening".
>
>After the killings of Jenin, an Israeli officer
>suggested to his men, according to the Israeli press,
>that, with close quarter fighting, they might study
>the tactics of Nazi troops in Warsaw in 1944.
>
>And I have to say - indeed, it needs to be said -
>that, after the countless Lebanese civilian refugees
>ruthlessly cut down on the roads of Lebanon by the
>Israeli air force in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and again
>this summer, how can one avoid being reminded of the
>Luftwaffe attacks on the equally helpless French
>refugees of 1940? Many thousands of Lebanese have been
>killed in this way over the past 25 years.
>
>And please spare me the nonsense about "human
>shields". What about the marked ambulance of women and
>children rocketed by a low-flying Israeli helicopter
>in 1996? Or the refugee convoy whose women and
>children were torn to pieces by an equally low-flying
>Israeli air force helicopter as they fled along the
>roads after being ordered to leave their homes by the
>Israelis?
>
>No, Israelis are not Nazis. But it's time we talked of
>war crimes unless they stop these attacks on refugees.
>The Arabs are entitled to talk the same way. They
>should. But they must stop lying about Jewish history
>- and take a lesson, perhaps, from the Israeli
>historians who tell the truth about the savagery which
>attended Israel's birth.
>
>As for the West's reaction to Ahmadinajad's antics,
>Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was "shocked" into
>disbelief while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
>responded with more eloquent contempt. Strangely, no
>one recalled that, the holocaust deniers of recent
>years - deniers of the Turkish genocide of 1.5 million
>Armenian Christians in 1915, that is - include Lord
>Blair, who originally tried to prevent Armenians from
>participating in Britain's Holocaust Day and the then
>Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who told Turks
>that their massacre of the victims of the 20th
>century's first Holocaust did not constitute a
>genocide.
>
>I've no doubt Ahmadinajad - equally conscious of
>Iran's precious relationship with Turkey - would
>gutlessly fail to honour the Armenian Holocaust in
>Tehran. Who would have thought that the governments of
>Britain, Israel and Iran had so much in common?

[Joseph]

The truth should be proclaimed loudly

by Robert Fisk; The Independent; March 21, 2007


Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It's from a letter from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation. The reason, of course, is a chapter entitled "The First Holocaust", which records the genocide of one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, a crime against humanity that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara tried to hide by initially refusing to invite Armenian survivors to his Holocaust Day in London.

It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read the following, from their message to my London publishers HarperCollins, remember it is written by the citizen of a country that seriously wishes to enter the European Community. Since I do not speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses in Mr Osman's otherwise excellent English.

"We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems, Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of April 2007... Therefore we would like to undertake the publication quietly, which means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk's book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to us if any trial [is] ... held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk and HarperCollins can understand our reservations."

Well indeedydoody, I can. Here is a publisher in a country negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds, Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) - even Turkey's bid to join the EU, for heaven's sake - is reason enough to try to sneak my book out in silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book? Well, I can give you an example. When Taner Akcam's magnificent A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was first published in Turkish - it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a terrifying historical fact - the Turkish historian experienced an almost identical reaction. His work was published "quietly" in Turkey - and without a single book review.

Now I'm not entirely unsympathetic with my Turkish publishers. It is one thing for me to rage and roar about their pusillanimity. But I live in Beirut, not in Istanbul. And after Hrant Dink's foul murder, I'm in no position to lecture my colleagues in Turkey to stand up to the racism that killed Dink. While I'm sipping my morning coffee on the Beirut Corniche, Mr Osman could be assaulted in the former capital of the Ottoman empire. But there's a problem nonetheless.

Some months earlier, my Turkish publishers said that their lawyers thought that the notorious Law 301 would be brought against them - it is used to punish writers for being "unTurkish" - in which case they wanted to know if I, as a foreigner (who cannot be charged under 301), would apply to the court to stand trial with them. I wrote that I would be honoured to stand in a Turkish court and talk about the genocide. Now, it seems, my Turkish publishers want to bring my book out like illicit pornography - but still have me standing with them in the dock if right-wing lawyers bring charges under 301!

I understand, as they write in their own letter, that they do not want to have to take political sides in the "nonsensical collision between nationalists and neo-liberals", but I fear that the roots of this problem go deeper than this. The sinister photograph of the Turkish police guards standing proudly next to Dink's alleged murderer after his arrest shows just what we are up against here. Yet still our own Western reporters won't come clean about the Ottoman empire's foul actions in 1915. When, for example, Reuters sent a reporter, Gareth Jones, off to the Turkish city of Trabzon - where Dink's supposed killer lived - he quoted the city's governor as saying that Dink's murder was related to "social problems linked to fast urbanisation". A "strong gun culture and the fiery character of the people" might be to blame.

Ho hum. I wonder why Reuters didn't mention a much more direct and terrible link between Trabzon and the Armenians. For in 1915, the Turkish authorities of the city herded thousands of Armenian women and children on to boats, set off into the Black Sea - the details are contained in an original Ottoman document unearthed by Akcam - "and thrown off to drown". Historians may like to know that the man in charge of these murder boats was called Niyazi Effendi. No doubt he had a "fiery character".

Yet still this denial goes on. The Associated Press this week ran a story from Ankara in which its reporter, Selcan Hacaoglu, repeated the same old mantra about there being a "bitter dispute" between Armenia and Turkey over the 1915 slaughter, in which Turkey "vehemently denies that the killings were genocide". When will the Associated Press wake up and cut this cowardly nonsense from its reports? Would the AP insert in all its references to the equally real and horrific murder of six million European Jews that right-wing Holocaust negationists "vehemently deny" that there was a genocide? No, they would not.

But real history will win. Last October, according to local newspaper reports, villagers of Kuru in eastern Turkey were digging a grave for one of their relatives when they came across a cave containing the skulls and bones of around 40 people - almost certainly the remains of 150 Armenians from the town of Oguz who were murdered in Kuru on 14 June 1915. The local Turkish gendarmerie turned up to examine the cave last year, sealed its entrance and ordered villagers not to speak of what they found. But there are hundreds of other Kurus in Turkey and their bones, too, will return to haunt us all. Publishing books "quietly" will not save us.