‘Armenians want acknowledgment that 1915 massacre was crime’ | Geoffrey Robertson

In 1915 Britain was determined to expose the Armenian genocide, so why have we since downgraded it to a ‘tragedy’?

Just before the invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler urged his generals to show no mercy towards its people – there would be no retribution, because “after all, who now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?” As the centenary of the Armenian genocide approaches – it began on 24 April 1915, with the rounding up and subsequent “disappearance” of intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople – remembrance of the destruction of more than half of the Armenian people is more important than ever. Although, as Hitler recognised in 1939 (and it is still the case today), the crime against humanity committed by the Ottoman Turks by killing the major part of this ancient Christian race has never been requited, or, in the case of Turkey, been the subject of apology or reparation.

The “Young Turks” who ran the Ottoman government did not use gas ovens, but they did massacre the men, and sent the women, children and elders on death marches through the desert to places we only hear of now because they are overrun by Isis. They died en route in their hundreds of thousands from starvation or attack, and many survivors died of typhus in concentration camps at the end of the line. The government ordered these forced deportations in 1915, and then passed laws to seize their lands and homes and churches on the pretext that they had been “abandoned”.

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