ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation

[Page 379]

10. Confronting Denial

By the late 1970s the main issue confronting the Armenian community world-wide was denial. This denial centred on the subject of what had happened to the Armenians in 1915. Independent eye-witness sources of that date agree to a great extent that the Ottoman Armenians, including women and children, were systematically driven to their deaths by the authorities, in a form of mass ethnic liquidation amounting to what was later connoted by the word 'genocide'. Yet Turkey refused to acknowledge that the Armenians died in this way, and preferred not to talk about the subject, even though the anti-Armenian measures had occurred under a superseded regime. The subject appeared to be largely taboo, and friends of Turkey were expected either not to raise it, or to follow the Turkish viewpoint on the matter––that the Armenians had been in revolt and got what they deserved; it had been an unfortunate chapter, which was now closed, and Armenians and their friends would be advised not to try to reopen it. Foreign academics friendly to Turkey writing about the events of the first world war were apt to ignore matters of internal Ottoman policy, and to disregard the dispatches and reports from German or neutral consuls and relief-workers which focused on the plight of the Armenians and on the attitude of the authorities.

But the Armenian voice became more persistent. This came about because a new generation of Armenians was growing up which was receiving education in American and other universities, and was naturally keen to know about the nation's history, and what had happened to their forebears. The time was one when minority cultures in the US were being asserted, rather than submerged. In this climate, the evidence that Armenians found, with only a minimum of effort, in accounts written by eye-witnesses at the time, or even in national archives (including those in the US), supported the version of events that they had been told about from members of their own families. American Armenians did not see why they should quietly and complicitly accept the versions to which aspects of late Ottoman history had been reduced, which appeared to avoid awkward issues and to ignore difficult documents, so as to keep perceptions of the past in line with current American regional political interests.

At the same time, there occurred a more fundamental radicalization of the Armenian youth in Lebanon and in Paris, a youth which was disillusioned with the inertia and in-fighting among the established Armenian political parties of the diaspora, and was angry at their failure effectively to pursue Armenian political claims on the international stage. They saw other minority groups who had legitimate but unheard political grievances gaining a hearing through the

[Page 380]

use of force, and they saw a possibility of using the same methods. This led to the phenomenon of Armenian terrorism. This form of terrorism was not aimed at extorting actual political concessions; it was directed at forcing remembrance of the Armenian genocide, and at bringing the issue of Armenia and the losses of 1915 somehow on to the political agenda. It aimed to overcome the worldwide denial about the subject––the bland assumption that the events in Armenia in 1915 had been no more than normal events in a normal war; it seemed to be a way of making the world community remember what it had chosen to forget. Part, too, of the motive force behind the terrorist campaign (which, as with all terrorism, often murdered shockingly inappropriate people, such as the wife of Zeki Kuneralp, whose family had been instrumental in seeking rapprochement between the different nationalities of post-Ottoman Turkey) was sheer crude revenge––the same counter-productive emotion which had stifled true political progress in the 1890s (see above, p. 130).

In the course of nine years, from 1974 to 1983, some 45 Turkish diplomats and state personnel were killed worldwide, in a series of operations executed usually with alarming precision. The deeds were in the main masterminded by two shadowy organizations: ASALA, or the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (which was Armenian and secret, but could have no pretensions to being an army or to having anything to do with liberation), and the JCAG, or the Justice Commandoes of the Armenian Genocide, which later re-styled itself the New Armenian Resistance. As with any organizations that employ secrecy and terror, they were a prey to internal splits and divisions, and after a particularly gruesome attack in 1983 at Orly Airport, Paris, even the hardened men of the bomb and gun were revolted, leading to a split in the main organization, and to the virtual end of Armenian terrorism.

In passing, it should be noted that one of the claims put about by the terrorists was that they had resorted to violence because Armenians had tried, by peaceful methods, to awaken the consciousness of the world, and these methods had failed. This is much less than the truth. No serious political campaign had ever been launched; no information was available in a coherent and scholarly form about the events which were central to the Armenian experience. The Armenians have only just, in the late 1980s, begun putting together the beginnings of a systematic account of the genocide of 1915–16. Nothing had been written in a mature manner, using proper archive sources, about those events at the time of the terrorist campaign. There was no detailed account of what happened, and why it happened, and who ordered it, and who carried out the orders. It was puzzling why this should be––why the Armenians should be keen to make it clear to the world that they have felt injustice and anger as a result of the mass-extermination of 1915, and yet find it difficult to describe and analyse the events. In a strange way the Armenians themselves appeared to be almost colluding with the denial that they opposed. It is possible that the exposed subjects of the cruel mass-death of their own people, and the cen-

[Page 381]

tralized unrelenting power of the imperial government which had sought to destroy them, are issues which even recently were too painful to face calmly and methodically. Outrage was easier; so was violence.

A series of minor diplomatic breakthroughs helped the Armenian case throughout the 1980s. The first was of little or no international standing, but gave the Armenians a taste for the use of world fora for exploring the justice of their case. At a meeting in 1984 of the 'Permanent Peoples' Tribunal', the commission established by the Italian senator and jurist Lelio Basso, and with François Rigaux, of the Catholic University of Louvain, as its president, Turkey was found guilty of genocide, according to the terms of the UN Convention of December 1948. The jurists who delivered this verdict were a distinguished and impartial group of international lawyers and human rights' specialists; and the moderation, legal precision, and lack of political rhetoric in the judgement that they produced showed the seriousness with which they took their task.¹

Another success for the Armenians occurred in Geneva in 1985. On 29 August, the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities accepted for further study a report on genocide, prepared by Benjamin Whitaker of Great Britain. A footnote to Paragraph 24 of this report said that 'At least 1 million, and possibly well over half the Armenian population, are reliably estimated to have been killed or death-marched.' This seems fairly uncontroversial, and in line with the eye-witness accounts of the time, but the argument and lobbying by Turkish representatives against the wording had been powerful.²

The vote, taken in Geneva, was 14 in favour, one against, four abstentions and six absent. Britain, France and the USA were among the countries voting in favour; the USSR was the sole vote against. (It appeared that the USSR was against not on the Armenian issue, and on the terminology elsewhere in the document which might be taken to cast a dim light on the USSR's own treatment of minorities in Stalin's time.) The terms of the resolution were not that genocide against the Armenians had taken place; just that the sub-commission would accept the report for future reference. Nevertheless the topic, before the voting, aroused strong emotions. In an interesting form of words, which was used in the compromise formula, the Zambian representative noted that 'the Armenian massacre was not adequately documented'. If that means the notion that the Armenians were victims of genocide in 1915 lacks credibility because no explicit orders have been published, then the response should be that genocide is not necessarily carried out in this way, with written orders. Secrecy and word-of-mouth orders are the usual conveyers of orders for racial mass-death. There is sufficient eye-witness evidence of the events of 1915, especially of the behaviour of officials, to deduce the policies of the authorities. But if the representative meant that the Armenian side, claiming to have been the victim of the crime of genocide, had not prepared a full account of the events, then he was correct.

[Page 382]

The third and most significant, victory for Armenians occurred in Strasbourg, when on 18 June 1987 the European Parliament voted, by 68 votes to 60, with 42 abstentions, to recognise the Armenian Genocide.³

Opponents have castigated this resolution as pointless, and dealing with a matter which was outside the competence of the parliament. But it could easily be argued that since genocide is such a serious matter, any parliament of a body that refused to consider it, where it was seriously alleged against a prospective member of that body, was failing in its duty by ignoring such an allegation. Moreover, the resolution demonstrated that the fate of the Armenians mattered, and that they were not the negligible quantity to which Turkish power and international politics had attempted to reduce them. In one of the preambles of the bill, the ministers noted that the Turkish government, by refusing to recognise the genocide of 1915, 'continued to deprive the Armenian people of the right to their own history.' A further clause pointed out that such a recognition of genocide, if it occurred, would 'be viewed as a profoundly humane act of moral rehabilitation towards the Armenians' by the Turks. This is surely the language of the humane Europe that for many people is the one most worth building.

In clause after clause this resolution not only held up an accurate mirror to Armenia's history, but also emphasized some of the best European qualities and virtues. The resolution held that the Armenian question, and the question of minorities in Turkey, 'must be re-situated within the framework of relations between Europe and the Community', and pointed out 'that democracy cannot be solidly implanted in a country unless the latter recognizes and enriches its history with its ethnic and cultural diversity'––a fine assertion of the idea that diversity is an integral part of democracy, and a reminder that it is not a quality much in evidence in Turkey, whose polity is characterized by statist army-based monolithic notions, which are often argued in favour of the country (and paradoxically of Turkish democracy, even though they are the very negation of democracy) by militarists, ex-diplomats and certain academics and journalists who, for whatever reasons, continue to endorse the power of Turkey, and to follow almost uncritically the line of the government in Ankara.

The resolution went on to say that it held that the tragic events in 1915–17 involving the Armenians 'constituted genocide within the meaning of the convention on the prevention and the punishment of the crime of genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948'. It also, significantly, recognized that the Turkish Republic cannot be held responsible for those events, and that no claims against Turkey today can be derived from the recognition of genocide in the past.

What the resolution sought was an acknowledgement of the genocide, and the promotion of a political dialogue between Turkey and representatives of the Armenians. A clause followed saying that Turkey's refusal to acknowledge the genocide of Armenians, together with its reluctance to apply standards of international law to its dispute with Greece, along with the maintenance of

[Page 383]

Turkish troops on Cyprus, the denial of the existence of a Kurdish question, and the general lack of individual freedom in Turkey, constituted obstacles to Turkey's joining the European Community.

Nine clauses contained the rest of what the Community was seeking from Turkey, on the matter: fair treatment for Armenians within Turkey, and protection of the Armenian historical monuments there. It reminded Turkey of the provisions of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne concerning minorities. It also pointed out the difficulties experienced by Armenians in Iran and the USSR, and condemned Armenian terrorism, calling for reconciliation between Armenians and Turks.

The resolution perhaps became somewhat too diffuse and ill-focused in its targets in its concluding clauses; but the basic notion which animated it––that the past, when it contains terrible deeds, cannot be forgotten, merely because it is past––surely represents an important part of the idea of post-Hitler Europe; and the concept that minorities are admirable in themselves, and that diversity is to be encouraged, as an expression of something that is among the finest flowers of European history and culture, can be seen as a praiseworthy expression of the spirit of Europe. It was a triumph, and not just for the Armenians, when it was passed.

Turkey's response was a veiled hint at pulling out of NATO––a modern version of the Ottoman tactic that, when all else failed, the sultan would remind the powers of the strategic importance of Turkey, and this would bring them to heel.⁴ It was also claimed that the resolution 'encouraged terrorism'. This idea, that pro-Armenian (or pro-Kurdish) resolutions encourage terrorism, is one that needs to be looked at.

All three Armenian diplomatic successes––that of the verdict of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, that of the UN sub-commission on the prevention of genocide, and the vote at the Strasbourg parliament––were said by Turkey, with great foreboding, to be encouragements of terrorism. Yet no Armenian terrorism occurred. There was, it is true, a fairly gruesome attack by the Kurdish PKK, doctrinaire marxists with politics of the out-of-sight variety, after the June 1987 vote; but this attack cannot fairly be laid at the door of the one reference to Kurds, in a resolution which was basically about Armenians. Not a single Armenian attack occurred after any of these three decisions. Indeed, by taking the Armenian question into the arena of political discussion and dialogue, the pressure that had built up by the denial, not only of the genocide, but of the fact that the Armenians even had any serious grievances, has been reduced, and the matter has been given a legal articulation. Armenians are now finding legitimate ways to express their grievances, and this has naturally reduced the demand for illegitimate or terroristic expression. Turkey's claim that pro-Armenian verdicts and resolutions encourage terrorism is no more than a tactic to try to maintain its failing control on the silence and denial which have surrounded substantial discussion of the topic of Armenia.

At the same time, in the United States, a campaign developed to pass a

[Page 384]

resolution in the House of Representatives declaring April 24h to be a day of remembrance for the victims of genocide. The implication was that the Armenian genocide would thereby be recognised by the US Congress. To many members of Congress, the idea seemed a reasonable and humane one, in line with good American humanitarian traditions. But the opposition was fast and furious, especially from the US administration. Much of the anti-Armenian lobbying was low key in 1985 and 1986, but in 1987 US Secretary of State George Shultz came out with a forthright assertion of the administration's viewpoint.

Shultz's framing of his department's views came about in reply to a letter from Alex Manoogian, the Armenian millionaire philanthropist and benefactor of Detroit, Michigan. Manoogian had said that concern for Turkey's position in NATO 'cannot and should not deter us from seeking the historic truth and exercising our sense of justice about the Armenian genocide, the truth of which has been affirmed by 10 US presidents and fully documented by the US State Department archives including reliable eye-witness accounts…'. Shultz's reply was a crude raspberry of political expediency. After referring to 'intercommunal strife' during the first world war, which resulted in 'massive suffering among the mixed populations of the area', phrases which are instantly recognizable as a denial of debate on the policies and intentions behind the events, and a crumbling submissiveness to Turkish power of the past and present, Shultz continued by saying, 'There is no doubt that HJR 132 [the resolution before Congress] would very seriously damage US-Turkish relations. The Resolution is seen in Turkey as an endorsement of Armenian terrorism and a precursor of demands for repatriations and eventual territorial dismemberment. So perceived, HJR 132––like its predecessor in 1985 and like the European Parliament's recent resolution––generates anger, resentment and hostility across the political spectrum in Turkey.'⁵

What was extraordinary about Shultz's reply was its lack of an expression of an American perspective. The views of Americans, reflecting the reports of past generations of Americans on the spot at the time, and American standards of truthfulness, objectivity and impartiality, were by their omission entirely subjected to the overriding aim of not offending Turkey, and maintaining denial. The modern Turkish version of the events of 1915 was accepted by the State Department unquestioningly. Turkey's right to feel anger, resentment and hostility was similarly not questioned. The only matter at issue was how the resolution was seen in Turkey. Nowhere was there even a hint that the United States, the leader of the Western alliance, might be able to assess the subject independently, or that the Turkish government version might not be the last word on the events of 1915, and that impartial eye-witnesses might have had something important to say about it. All was subjected to the fundamental principle that Turkey was right, and to the craven notion that it must not be offended by showing it a mirror of its own history. The idea that governments are sometimes less than fully committed to the

[Page 385]

truth about the past apparently did not occur to Shultz. Moreover, by talking apocalyptically about territorial dismemberment, the administration was raising bogies that were not in the original resolution. Many Armenians would be satisfied with a simple acknowledgement by the Turks of what happened; some want a territorial adjustment (not necessarily a large one); only a few extremists seek 'dismemberment' of Turkey.

In the event, the administration had its way, and the resolution was defeated in the House on 7 August 1987 by 189 votes to 201.

The American administration appears to have accepted fairly uncritically the Turkish arguments that have developed in recent years about the events of 1915, so perhaps it is worth looking at them.⁶

Turkish discussion of 1915 omits all reference to the power, structure and decisions of the Committee of Union and Progress, which was the party in power at the time, or to the Special Organization (Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye), the organized brigands who despoiled and killed Armenians. It ignores eye-witness accounts, even if they came from neutral or pro-German sources. It claims, by contrast, that many of the Armenians were in a state of revolt in 1915, that there was a 'limited form of civil war' going on in Anatolia in 1915 (a parallel has been drawn with the situation in Lebanon from 1974 to 1989); and that in particular the Armenians of Van were in a state of revolt which led to the Ottoman government's anti-Armenian measures. Apologists also indicate that many Muslims died as well as Armenians in the world war. They further point out that the Bryce/Toynbee Blue Book (published by the British government as Miscellaneous no. 31 (1916) and published commercially as The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire), which constituted a major piece of evidence of Ottoman mass ethnic liquidation, was later admitted by Toynbee to have been published as war propaganda.

These claims, propounded in Ankara, and accepted virtually uncritically in Washington, are either fallacious, irrelevant, or ignore the vital matter of intention. There was no revolt in Van; the actions of the citizens of that town were just acts of self-defence against a harsh governor, who was acting with great violence in the town and province of Van. The defence of Van began on 20 April 1915, the day after widespread slaughter of Armenian villagers throughout the province by government forces, and fully two weeks after the start of the deportations of Armenians in Cilicia. The action was thus a reaction to policies being instigated by the authorities, not a self-motivated rebellion.

The claim that there was a 'limited form of civil war' going on in the region, or as the Shultz document has it, 'intercommunal strife', is a curious invention. There is no reference to any 'civil war' in either of the standard military histories of the period, that by Commandant Larcher (La Guerre turque dans la guerre mondiale, Paris, 1926), or the magisterial work by W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields, Cambridge, 1953. No new impartial evidence has been adduced to support this claim; indeed its claimants (who in-

[Page 386]

clude a number of American academics) appear unfamiliar with the standard texts on the military history of the period. The idea of a small-scale civil war is one that avoids having a hard look at the position of the party, the army and the gendarmerie at the time, as well as at an outgrowth of the party such as the Special Organization. 'Civil war' is an idea which ignores, and thereby negates, the massive state power of the Ottoman empire, and the policies and decisions of the Ministry of the Interior. In Lebanon there has been no powerful central state power; the war has continued between conflicting militias of approximately equal fire-power. The situation was quite different in the Ottoman empire in 1915, where a massive access of state power was arrayed against the Armenian civilian population; the few isolated armed groups of Armenians, who (except briefly in Cilicia) sought to defend themselves only did so when provoked or threatened with death by the government. The most famous of their acts of self-defence, that at Musa Dagh in September 1915, led to the freedom of about 4,000 Armenian villagers, who would otherwise have been murdered on a death-march. To describe such self-defence as an act of civil war, or even as 'terrorism', is a gross abuse of language.

On the matter of Turkish/Kurdish losses in 1915–17, there are two points to make. The first is the comment of Joseph Pomiankowski, Austrian military attaché in the Ottoman capital during the war. In his book Der Zusammenbruch des ottomanischen Reiches, (Zurich, 1928), he says: 'The gruesome annihilation of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor by the Young Turk regime was a barbaric act, arousing all human feelings to the highest extent … The cost of this war was carried in the first place by the Turkish army operating in Asia Minor … hunger caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of Turkish soldiers in Armenia. The Armenian caravans, totally devoid of any cleaning facilities and hygiene, became the carriers of diseases … a general epidemic of typhus broke out from which at least a million Muslims died. This was the vengeance of the deported murdered Armenians on their executioners.'⁷

Similarly, in his biography of Atatürk, Lord Kinross makes the following point about the Ottoman campaign in Anatolia during the winter of 1916–17: 'Nor could an army any longer subsist here on the country, for the ironical reason that in the earlier stages of the campaign the Armenians had been massacred or deported en masse, leaving the land a virtual desert, without peasants to grow food or artisans to provide service … and, following blizzards, whole detachments were found in caves, dead from hunger and cold.'⁸

Both quotations make it clear that, where the Turks and Kurds suffered, they suffered as a result of anti-Armenian decisions taken by the authorities in the Ottoman capital.

The Armenians were massacred intentionally, and the Turko-Kurds died unintentionally at this stage. Armenians cannot be made responsible for Ottoman war losses in Anatolia. Later, with the advance of the Russian army in the north in late 1916 and early 1917, Armenians did carry out revenge Killings of Turkish villagers, but the numbers they killed were to be counted in hundreds,

[Page 387]

or at most thousands, rather than in the hundreds of thousands which were the number of the Armenians whom the Ottoman authorities had intentionally destroyed in 1915 and 1916.

Was the volume entitled The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, produced in 1916 by Viscount Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, propaganda or not? Its publication as a British government Blue Book was certainly a propaganda act, designed to discredit the chief ally of Germany. In the same way, accounts of the sufferings of the Belgians had been published early on in the war. But no one has ever subsequently said that the Belgians did not suffer as they were said to have done, merely because their sufferings were made public in this way. Similarly with the Armenians. Although the volume was published as part of a propaganda campaign, the origin of each of the documents was unimpeachable. Nothing was invented, or empty hearsay gossip. All the documents stand up as historical documents today. So far as I know, no effort has ever been made to challenge the origin and trustworthiness of any of the documents individually.

The weakness of the Turkish arguments exemplifies the essential defensiveness of their position; and there appears to be an underlying assumption that most representatives of nations friendly to Turkey will automatically and uncritically accept any arguments that Turkey proposes, in view of the axiomatic notion of old-fashioned Western diplomacy that the process of soothing Turkey (which is not treated as a mature state, able to take criticism) is a prime concern.

In these circumstances, as hard truth has gradually become known about the nature of the events of 1915, the official arguments have slowly started to crumble, although there has been enormous rearguard action by Turkey and its supporters. History has seldom been a helpful handmaid to regimes, especially to statist, dirigiste ones offering a quasi-ideological version of government success.

Up to the present moment, Armenians have not been very successful in projecting an effective challenge to Turkey's denial about 1915. Vested interests, and individual self-censorship, backed by a massive Turkish campaign working through public relations agencies and funded by budgets of millions of dollars, have largely been able to keep the lid pressed down on the objective, impartially recorded facts of 1915. But as more reliable material is published from the archives of the USA, Germany and Austria, even the massed public relations experts of Messrs Hill and Knowlton of Washington DC, and Saatchi and Saatchi of London, both of whom have been taken on to handle Turkey's public relations, will find it difficult to continue to ignore the observed reality of the fate of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915–16.

Turkey's offer, made in January 1989, to open its state archives, is an interesting one, and one that all who strive to gain a clearer understanding of what happened in the Ottoman Empire in the years when the Armenian Question was a matter of significance will welcome.⁹ But some words of caution are in

[Page 388]

order. One is that, according to some reports, the archives of 1894–1923, the critical years for Ottoman Armenians, are to remain closed. If that is so, the opening of the archives will solve nothing as regards the Armenians. Secondly, the archives are reported to have already been examined by Turkish scholars of strong nationalist sympathies, and it appears that possibly compromising documents have been removed from public view. This operation was apparently done under the auspices of the Turkish army, which provided space in army buildings in Ankara for the purpose. Thirdly, if permission is ever granted for Ottoman archives of the first world war to be examined, the important ones are not so much the state archives, but the party archives of the Committee of the Union and Progress, which, although the party of government, had established a para-government, working alongside official government employees, and which was acting as a ginger group imbued with chauvinist extremism.¹⁰ Without the party archives, any account of the behaviour of those in power in the Ottoman empire towards the Armenians is incomplete.

Turkish sensitivity on the Armenian issue is manifestly still very high, and on the surface it is rather difficult to see why this should be. If Turkey were to accept what happened in 1915, and make some sort of statement about it, a much calmer atmosphere would be created, where dialogue was possible, and such an action might even set the matter to rest as a live political issue, as opposed to a mild, unimportant dispute between specialists. It is unlikely that the Republic of Turkey would, through serious and mature discussion of the Armenian question, lose massive areas of Eastern Turkey, although some sort of border rectification is probably desirable. (The region anyway was 'Ottoman' as opposed to 'Turkish'; and some of it, the region of Surmalu, between Mt Ararat and Yerevan, was Persian/Russian and not Ottoman.) What we are confronting here appears to be not so much fear for the safety, viability and integrity of the Turkish state, as the massive pride of Turkey in the achievements of its state and army, even though many of these achievements run rather counter to present-day ideas about democracy and human rights. This is what blocks sensible analysis of Armenia. Until Turkey can find pride in human rights and human diversity, rather than in the conquest of territory by its armies, there will be little chance of movement on the subject of Armenians. Western diplomats and Western journalists, publicists and some scholars who collude with Ankara in promoting the glories of the Turkish army and state without sparing a thought for the fate of the people who lived or live there, are keeping alive the notions of militarism, conquest and suppression of dissidents and ethno-religious minorities, which may have been part of the Ottoman achievement (and the achievement of other empires), but which today are entirely out of fashion as desirable political objectives. In the light of Turkey's intention to join the European Community, it might be beneficial for Turkey and her supporters to place less stress on armies and conquest, and more on human qualities and ethnic and cultural diversity. With such a change of emphasis, a clear, objective and unbiased approach to the Armenian question would be possible, and dialogue would be created.

[Page 389]

* * *

Nevertheless, the Armenian cause (in the form principally of recognition of what happened to the Armenians) has made some progress. Some serious collections of documents have been published. But there are still large gaps, and the most important of those is the essential need for the Armenians themselves to face the experience of 1915 in detail in a clear and objective manner. But with the Armenian case a live issue now at the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights, and at the European Parliament (which has recently achieved a higher profile and significance), there is a better hope of the possibility of sound and clear-headed discussion on the historical, legal and moral aspects of the Armenian question.

Notes

1. See Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, A Crime of Silence (London and New York, 1985).

2. Erebouni, September 1985, p. 7.

3. Armenian Mirror-Spectator (Watertown, Mass.), 27 June 1987; California Courier (Glendale, Calif.), 25 June 1987. Text in Armenian Mirror-Spectator, 18 July 1987, p. 3.

4. The Guardian, The Independent (London) both of 23 June 1987.

5. Armenian Mirror-Spectator, 25 July, 15 August 1987.

6. See for example the full-page advertisements appearing in the New York Times and the Washington Post of 18 May 1985.

7. Joseph Pomiankowski, Der Zusammenbruch des ottomanischen Reiches (Zurich, 1928), p. 165.

8. Lord Kinross, Atatürk: the Rebirth of a Nation (London, 1964), p. 100.

9. Asbarez (Glendale, Calif.), 7 January 1989.

10. See Count von Wolff-Metternich's dispatch, quoted on p. 235 above; also E. H. Keeling, Adventures in Turkey and Russia (London 1924), p. 226.

<< Back Home Next >>