http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=67223
Peres stands accused over denial of 'meaningless'
Armenian Holocaust
By Robert Fisk in Jerusalem,
Independent
20 April 2001
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.
