Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect
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Independent Minds
The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones.
Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear.
On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience."
These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.
Taner Akcam, a prominent – and extremely brave – Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed.
Ottoman Turkey's attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the Middle East – the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 – is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen.
In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey's Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians – including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at Gallipoli – have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called "merciless fury".
Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province.
The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people – their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for me.
There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appear to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern Armenia – the present-day state of Armenia.
Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia – in what is now Turkey – lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their lands.
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Comments
Someone made a YouTube video of this article (Entitled, "Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust"). This is how I discovered it here in the pages of The Independent.
I find this article highly troubling.
It is not news that Robert Fisk has an axe to grind with the people he loves to hate, the Turks. That would not matter as much, if his words were confined to the facts, but an analysis of his claims presents a different picture.
The one that jumped out at me was Fisk's Sept 1915 "document" by Talaat Pasha ordering extermination without regard to "age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience." This happens to be a forgery prepared by Aram Andonian in his "Naim Bey" work. Hardly any Armenian propagandist goes near Andonian's terrible concoctions. They all know they are forgeries, as for example when Prof. Erich Feigl interviewed Gerard Libaridian, who headed the Zoryan Institute at the time, as related in Feigl's "The Myth of Terror." Only very few propagandists today try to give credence to Andonian, and one of them is Fisk's hero, the "prominent ? and extremely brave" Taner Akcam. Akcam has been carefully prepared and paid for by wealthy Armenian foundations and organizations such as the Zoryan Institute, as attested by the counsel of the previous university he worked for in Minnesota, and this hired Armenian agent is willing to go to any lengths to earn his Armenian money.
If Akcam has "used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide," it is very curious how such documents could have escaped the attention of one Haig Khazarian, who was put in charge of the Ottoman archives by the British occupiers of Istanbul immediately after the war, and tried to unearth the evidence the British were desperately seeking from 1919 to 1921. What Akcam is famous for is distorting and mistranslating materials, just like the man who guided him, Vahakn Dadrian.
If anything, some Ottoman archival materials that the British stole (today resting in the British archives) demonstrate how much the Ottomans tried to protect the Armenians. ("Shocking New Documents," 1970s.)
It is odd that Fisk would put in quotation marks the word "resettlement"; that is exactly what the Ottomans were forced to do, resettle a dangerous community that had allied itself with their Ottoman nation's enemies, enemies that had arranged through secret treaties to divide the Ottoman Empire between themselves. This was no less than a life-or-death war for the Ottomans, and once the Armenians took over Van and held it for their Russian allies, something drastic needed to be done. The idea was to temporarily (yes, temporarily, until the danger was past) resettle the Armenians in villages where they would not exceed 10% of the population. Things went wrong with the program, as it was a massive one, where casualties were sure to occur since it was poorly planned and resources were scarce. But at heart the solution was far more humanitarian than the way Britain treated their German men during the war, who were not resettled and free to move about, but imprisoned, or permanently deported to Germany. The difference was these Germans were not even guilty of disloyalty to Britain.
The reason why Fisk is resorting to sarcasm with his quotation marks is because to his frenzied mind, the extermination intent could not be clearer. If that were the case, however, how could 644,900 Armenians still be counted as alive and well within what was left of the postwar empire (out of an original population of 1.5 million, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica of those years, and with some 400,000-500,000 having moved away on their own during the war to regions beyond Ottoman control) by no less an authority than the Armenian Patriarch, in a 1921 report he prepared for the British?
(Continued in Part 2)
It is terrible of Fisk to write "In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey's Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia." Of course, the country's name was not "Turkey" but the "Ottoman Empire," but that is the least of Fisk's transgressions. The fact that Armenians allied themselves with the Entente is inarguable. See, for example, the letter of the Armenian leader Boghos Nubar, in the Jan 31, 1919 edition of the Times of London. For Fisk to write in the 21st century that the Turks simply "claimed" this, implying that the Turks were lying, is beyond the pale. Naturally, Fisk tries to present the notion that the Armenians were completely innocent. The 1948 U.N. Convention for Genocide, after all, disallows political groups, and on this count alone one cannot term the Armenian experience as a "genocide." Regardless, Fisk will try to make his baseless Holocaust parallels, comparing maps prepared by Armenian scholars (in this case, a misused word; a true scholar does not choose sides and allows truth to be the only motivating factor) with the "railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka."
It is peculiar that Fisk would turn to a notorious Turcophobe as Winston Churchill, who has suddenly attained the status of a "historian," to affirm the reality of genocide. Of course Churchill would go on to prove himself a great man later in history, but Churchill was fully in step with Britain's WWI policy which served to demonize the enemy. To that end, the government of Great Britain created Wellington House, the Ottoman branch of which was operated by Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee (whose Blue Book is still being pointed to today as valid genocide evidence). At the time, the Russians were conducting pogroms against their Jews, and the British were concerned that the influential Jewish groups of the USA would deter their nation from entering the war. It certainly served a great political purpose for those as Churchill to sidetrack from Russian crimes and to create a greater criminal. Not to say that those as Churchill did not believe the Turks were the worst barbarians -- the British prime minister, Lloyd George, felt the Turks were a "human cancer" -- centuries of deep racist prejudice will do that to people. However, one must ask, what did Churchill base his theories on? Did he witness anything firsthand? Of course not. He simply took the propaganda that derived from the hearsay (and even the forgeries that to this day men like Robert Fisk still point to as valid) of the Armenians and their missionary allies.
It is this hearsay propaganda that Robert Fisk relies on for his evidence, as when he writes a line such as "The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages." What is he basing that statement on? This is not to say abuses against Armenians did not occur. But there is not a single reliable firsthand eyewitness whom we can point to. It is very easy to just "say" things, but that is no substitute for sound evidence. Contrast with the firsthand eyewitnesses whose word we can believe, the Armenians' own Russian and French allies, who have left written testimonies on the staggering cruelties committed by the Armenians, as they went about their extermination policy of Ottoman Muslims, Jews and anyone who was different.
(Continued in Part 3)
Fisk relies entirely on propaganda, and that makes him a propagandist. He does not care about accuracy; he has chosen sides. This is why one must pause before accepting at face value his having "discovered... thousands of skeletons." One would think the wealthy Armenian genocide machinery would have jumped at the chance to examine this site in an Arab country outside the control of Turkey. Even if we allow this claim as true, how do we know (beyond the word of a 100-year-old...!) that the skeletons were Armenians? Fisk's genocide-frantic reply may be to the tune of "who else would they be," but that is hardly very scientific. And even if we come across a mass grave for thousands who indeed were Armenians, in order to prove a genocide, we would need to determine who killed them. If Kurdish or Arab tribes killed Armenians, as they often did, how would that implicate the Ottoman government? Moreover, is it not unethical of someone like Robert Fisk to offer his own speculation as a fact, for such a serious crime?
Beyond his capacity for using the most corrupt information, such as the Andonian forgeries, Fisk also discredits himself by omitting information that goes against his agenda. For example, the British were not initially concerned with the rule of law at the end of the war, and were anxious to condemn the Turks, one reason why their postwar Ottoman lackeys cooperated in setting up kangaroo courts. Muslim subjects from India caused the British leaders to think twice, however, and the British decided to conduct their version of Nuremberg, the Malta Tribunal (1919-21) cleanly. All the British discovered were how much the Armenian Patriarch and other Armenians had lied to the British, Ottoman documents that proved safeguarding the Armenians was what the Ottomans had in mind, and that everything the British researched -- even the U.S. archives, in the summer of 1921 -- amounted to "personal opinions," or hearsay. Armenian propaganda tries to belittle the importance of the Malta Tribunal, naturally, but the truth fully rests in the British archives. The British refused to use as evidence the mock trials held by the postwar Ottomans (that Fisk's heroic Taner Akcam prefers) and were forced to release all of their Ottoman prisoners by 1921's end. We have the British to thank for the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever for the genocide allegation.
By avoiding the real facts, and by concentrating on the corrupt propaganda makes Robert Fisk rather unconscionable. What he is doing is propagating hatred and racism toward the Turkish people Fisk feels a strange antipathy toward. On "Part 2" of the Armenian YouTube pages that transformed this article into a series of adoring videos, a comment by "YerevanGrl" reads:
"I feel like killing a turk now!"
That says it all. Hatred is what unifies many Armenians, with the collusion of their genocide-propelled parents, teachers and churches. Robert Fisk ought to be proud to keep adding fuel to this destructive fire.
.