When is murder genocide?

Dec 17, 2005
Hamilton Spectator

Turkish conservative nationalists are hoping a high profile trial will deflect attention from the Armenian massacres of 1915-16.
By Gwynne Dyer
Independant
More articles by this columnist

"Thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it," said celebrated Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk during an interview with a Swiss newspaper last February.

He was charged with "public denigration of Turkish identity" by an Istanbul public prosecutor and his trial opened yesterday. He could face up to three years in jail.
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As the respected American historian Guenter Lewy writes in this month's Commentary: "The historical question at issue is premeditation -- that is, whether the Turkish regime intentionally organized the annihilation of its Armenian minority.
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Many were robbed and murdered by the Kurdish irregular soldiers who escorted the columns of deportees in their terrible journey; many more died of hunger or exposure. And they never went home again: Anatolia today has almost no Armenian population.

What happened to the Armenians was dreadful, but as Lewy documents in his new book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, which will become the standard work on the subject, both premeditation and an intention to annihilate, two preconditions for genocide, were either absent or at least open to considerable dispute.
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Does one word matter all that much? Armenians think so, feeling that their tragedy is being played down unfairly if they are denied the word "genocide." Turks think so, too, believing there is no legitimate comparison between the crimes committed by their ancestors during the First World War and the cold-blooded atrocity of Hitler's Holocaust.

But after three generations of what one observer called "fossilized venom" on both sides, the argument is at last coming out into the open.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.