Now Peres has never cared much for historical accuracy; and he has in fact been a master of political duplicity and double-dealing -- which is why even his peers in the Knesset rebuffed him so badly last year turning him away from the Israeli Presidency for practically an unknown. But this time, in actually denying the Armenian Holocaust in a very transparent effort to buttress the Israeli-Turkey alliance, Peres has really undone himself, revealing in a more naked way than ever before his personal crassness and slimy (yes, that's the word we mean here) character.

[The Independent - 20 April]: One of Israel's leading scholars of the Jewish Holocaust has angrily compared the country's Nobel prize-winning Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, to a holocaust denier after an interview in which Mr Peres made the astonishing claim that the Armenians - 1.5 million of whom were slaughtered by Ottoman Turks in 1915 - never experienced a genocide.

Mr Peres' statement appeared in the Turkish Daily News prior to a recent state visit to Turkey; the paper says he went so far as to refer to the Armenian account of the mass slaughter as "meaningless".

Israel Charny, the editor of the distinguished new two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide, has written to Mr Peres, expressing his shame at the remarks and accusing Mr Peres of going "beyond a moral boundary that no Jew should allow himself to trespass".

Dr Charny, who is also executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, has reminded the Foreign Minister that Israeli academics signed a public declaration at a recent holocaust conference in Philadelphia stating that the Armenian genocide was factual.

To the fury of Armenians, and of Dr Charny, Turkey is funding a worldwide campaign to deny the facts of the Armenian holocaust which was unleashed by Ottoman rulers against Turkey's Christian minority in the First World War. Tens of thousands of Armenian men were executed by Turkish forces in 1915, and their families deported to the Syrian desert where they were systematically plundered, raped and butchered by Turkish gendarmes and marauding Kurds.

At the time, the British Foreign Office denounced the Armenian holocaust (Winston Churchill first used the word about the Armenians) although today's British Government, apparently fearing Turkish displeasure, initially tried to prevent Armenian participation in this year's Holocaust Memorial Day.

Dr Charny, who devotes 45 pages of detailed factual evidence and copies of documents on the Armenian holocaust in his encyclopedia, was among those Israeli historians who refused to give in to Israeli Foreign Ministry pressure when Turkey objected to the inclusion of the Armenian slaughter in a 1982 holocaust conference in Tel Aviv. Dr Charny says Mr Peres telephoned him then, urging him "not to insist on including the subject of the Armenians".

When Adolf Hitler was preparing the Nazi extermination of Europe's Jews, he asked his Wehrmacht generals if the world any longer remembered the Armenian genocide; but Israel has often adopted an ambiguous attitude towards the 20th century's first holocaust.

Unwilling to antagonise its present-day Turkish ally - and in some cases unwilling to compare Armenian suffering with that of European Jewry - the Israeli Foreign Office persuaded the Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to withdraw from the 1982 conference's debates on the Armenians.

In Dr Charny's unprecedented letter to Mr Peres, he says: "It seems that because of your wishes to advance very important relations with Turkey, you have been prepared to circumvent the subject of the Armenian genocide in 1915-1920 ... it may be that in your broad perspective of the needs of the state of Israel, it is your obligation to circumvent and desist from bringing up the subject with Turkey, but, as a Jew and an Israeli, I am ashamed of the extent to which you have now entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian genocide, comparable to denials of the Holocaust."

The Turkish newspaper states Mr Peres said Israel should not determine a "philosophical position" on the Armenian holocaust. "We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide."

If Mr Peres has been quoted accurately - and he has made no attempt to correct the newspaper - his remarks will deeply offend millions of Armenians. It is standard Turkish policy to refer with contempt to Armenian suffering as "allegations" and to downgrade the Armenian holocaust as a mere "tragedy". To the relief of the millions of Armenians descendants of the 1915 bloodbath, Dr Charny has never wavered. His encyclopedia states bluntly that both the Armenian and Jewish genocides were the products of state-initiated policies. "The Armenian genocide occurred under the circumstances of the Turkish revolution and the First World War," it says, "while the [Jewish] Holocaust was a product of the Nazi revolution and the Second World War."

Turkey maintains, despite US diplomatic evidence at the time, that the Armenians were mere victims of a "civil war". An American diplomat, Leslie Davis, the US consul at Harput, saw the bodies of thousands of Armenians in the Turkish countryside in 1915, many of them knifed to death. "A massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in comparison," he wrote.

NEW YORK - 22 April: The 24th of April marks the anniversary of the first holocaust of the 20th century - the near destruction of Armenians, an ancient Christian mountain people of Asia Minor.

In 1915, at the height of World War I, Turkey deported some 2 million Armenians from their homes in Anatolia to Syria. Bandits and marauders attacked the long columns of Armenian civilians, torturing, raping, and killing. Bashi bazooks (Turkish irregulars), wild Kurdish tribesmen, and common criminals sacked Armenian towns, slaughtering the inhabitants.

According to Armenian historians, two out of three Armenians - 1.5 million - were murdered or died from hunger or disease from 1915-1920. In the 1940's, two out of three European Jews met the same fate at the hands of Germany's National Socialists(Nazis). Like Jews, still traumatized Armenians are demanding the world recognize and remember their national calamity.

Turkey, heir to the Ottoman Empire, denies there was ever a planned genocide of Armenians. Turkey was under attack from Britain, France, and Russia. Eastern Anatolia, where most Armenians lived, was being invaded by Russian armies. Some Armenians had rebelled against Ottoman rule and were helping the Russian invaders. Other Armenian nationalist groups had battled Turks and Kurds since the 1870's.

According to Turks, deportation of rebellious Armenians turned into a bloodbath because there were not enough government troops to guard the caravans from raiders. Turks were also suffering at the time. In 1915-16, according to Turkish historians, 2.5 million Turkish and Kurdish civilians perished from war, hunger, and disease in chaotic eastern Anatolia. Turkish scholars insist no more than 600,000 Armenians died

Armenians, like Jewish groups, are well-organized, have financial clout, and are very good at promoting their cause. In recent years, Armenian lobbying groups have gotten the United States and France to recognize the Armenian Holocaust, acts that have enraged Turkey, a bulwark of the NATO alliance.

Armenians have whipped the Turks at public relations and political lobbying. Turkey retaliated by canceling arms contracts and reminding censorious France that 500,000 to one million civilians were killed by French police and troops during Algeria's 1950's bloody war of independence from France.

Last week, Israel's Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, enraged Armenians by asserting their slaughter by the Turks was ` a tragedy but not a genocide.' Peres rejected any similarities between the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Peres was obviously catering to Israel's important, new ally, Turkey, and reflecting the view held by most Jews that that the Jewish Holocaust was a unique event.

Having long studied the events of 1915-20, my own conclusion is that there was, in fact, a genocide, in which a million or more Armenians were murdered or died from disease and exposure. True, Turkey was losing the war. Armenians had rebelled and were aiding the invading Russians, who had long stoked Armenian nationalist fervor. Christian Armenians and Muslims committed atrocities against one another. Still, nothing the Armenians had done could possibly justify their barbarous treatment.

The Turks committed a terrible crime. Modern-day Turkey should stop denying it, apologize to Armenians, and close this tragic chapter.

But let us also put this crime in historic context. Deportation of rebellious peoples was common in those days. The expanding Russian Empire had deported 1.3 million Muslims from the Caucasus from 1827-1878 alone, and committed genocide against the Cherkass, Ingush, Dagestanis, and Chechen, slaughtering over one million of these Muslim mountaineers. Great numbers of Greeks, Turks, and Albanians were driven from their homes in Turkey or the Balkans in the 1920's.

The 20th century's worst crime - by now virtually forgotten - was Stalin's Red Holocaust in Eastern Europe in the 1930's and 40's. Over seven million Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were murdered, starved to death, or died in Stalin's death camps.

Stalin also destroyed the Tatars, the remaining Caucasian Muslims, Volga Germans, and one million Muslim Kazaks. As late as 1949, 95,000 Baltic people were deported to Siberian death camps . In 1945, at least 2 million ethnic Germans of East Europe were slaughtered, two million were raped, and 12-15 million ethnically cleansed.

Ironically, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the newly independent state of Armenia went to war with neighboring Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia captured the enclave and created a `cordon sanitaire' around it, expelling 800,000 Muslim Azeris from their homes - roughly the same number of Palestinians driven from their homes in 1947-48 by the new state of Israel. Victims of oppression can turn all too quickly to inflicting suffering on others.

Each and every one of these horrors deserves to be recognized and commemorated. Each crime was unique, but, in the end, they were all expressions of totalitarian brutality, evil ideology, or religious-racist hatred. Armenians had the grim distinction of being the 20th century's first victims of mass murder - but alas, 1not the last.

Armenians are a remarkably gifted and productive people. Yet many remain prisoners of their frightful past. It's time for them to move on from the nightmare of 1915, end their century-old vendetta against the Turks, and devote their energies to the present. A good way to start would be to rebuild Armenia, which is in shambles today. A prosperous, democratic, well-run Armenia would help to put the ghosts of World War I to rest.

* Mr. Margolis is a Syndicated Columnist from Canada with considerable experience covering foreign affairs.

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/4/170.htm