Sir, It has always been fascinating to see Kevin Myers kill one sacred Irish cow after another. However, as a longstanding scholar of Armenian affairs and a human rights defender, I was less. amused when coming across my favourite Irish columnist's remarks (February 1st) on genocide in general and the annihilation of Armenians during the first World War in particular.
It is simply untrue that "nobody can know how many Armenians died". According to an authoritative estimate, given by the German ambassador for the Ottoman Empire on October 4th, 1915, out of the Armenian pre-war population of two and a half million one and half million had been killed during massacres or literally walked and starved to death. Although Germany was Turkey's ally at the time, the German ambassador's estimate fully corresponds with Armenian figures. Secondly, it is not true that the atrocities against the male population and death marches of women, children and elderly people "had not the concerted and centralised purpose" of the holocaust of European Jews. The Armenian genocide had been as efficiently planned, organised and realized by the Teskilat-i mahsusa ("Special organization"), a secret body of the ruling Young Turks or Unionists (Ittihat ve terakki - Committee for Union and Progress).
Comparing the numerous state crimes of this century, one cannot ignore the many striking parallels between the Armenian genocide of 1915/16 and the holocaust of the European Jewry, although similarities do not lessen Germany's responsibility for the holocaust. Both occurred during World Wars and their authors belonged to authoritarian ultra-nationalist parties. "Annihilation by labour" was first implemented by the Young Turks in 1914/15. Nearly all Armenians who worked as road builders or carriers of heavy loads in one of Turkey's 12,0 units of slave labour, were killed after the completion of their tasks, if they had not already succumbed to malnutrition or epidemics.
Armenian soldiers and officers, used as guinea pigs in medical experiments, were infected with typhoid fever. The first gas chamber stood, disguised as a steam bath, in the Black Sea harbour city of Trabzon and Armenian children were poisoned there. During the final stage of the genocide, sheep wagons of the Bagdad railway were used to deport the last Armenians of Asia Minor to the Mesopotamian deserts (previously, deportees had to make this Journey "without return" by foot). The Nazis used cattle wagons for similar purposes.
The least we can do for surviving victims and their descendants is to save them from further sufferings. And, next to genocide, nothing hurts them more then the denial or minimisation of their sufferings as a historical fact. Protective, although not always fully efficient, laws exist in Germany and France and hopefully soon in Britain. As to legal practice, it was not at all "absurd" when French. and Armenian organisations sued the Jewish-American scholar Bernard Lewis for his denial of the Armenian genocide in an interview with Le Monde.
Mr Myers pleads for unlimited freedom of opinion. In its judgement against Mr Lewis the French court had this to say: "The freedom of interpreting history ends where ignorance of historical facts causes pain to members of victim groups." Unlike Jews, Armenians never received any moral or financial compensation. There was no equivalent in Turkey of that moment when the German chancellor Willy Brandt knelt at the Warsaw ghetto memorial in silent reverence for Jewish and Polish victims, pleading for forgiveness and reconciliation between Germany and Poland.
Since 1921, all Turkish governments have even denied the very fact of genocide. The acknowledgment of Armenian sufferings in the Paris court decision of June 21st, 1995, restored a little of the justice Armenians had looked for in vain over decades.
Annually, Armenians commemorate April 24th as the day when their holocaust began with the nation's decapitation, i.e. the arrest and subsequent murder of their intellectual leaders. April 24th would, perhaps, be an appropriate day to reflect on intellectual freedom and ethics, or to discover how much Irish and Armenian history have in common. - Yours etc.
Society for Threatened Peoples Coordinating Group Armenia, Mainauer Str. 9, II, D 12161 Berlin