Holocaust National Day - Turkish Daily News, 31 January 2002 by Gunduz Atan (former TARC member)

I participated in the meetings held at British Parliament and the London University SOAS center to commemorate the Holocaust National Day, which was launched by the United Kingdom last year. Armenian professor V. Dadrian made long presentations during both meetings. The handout for the SOAS meeting indicated that the Armenian genocide would be taken up in addition to the Holocaust. Most of the speakers at the meetings accepted the Armenian genocide as a fact. Furthermore, this happens in a country, where the government officially declares at least once a year in British Parliament that the Armenian incidents do not conform to the genocide definition of the Convention.

This is the bad news. But there is also news that could be interpreted as good.

genocides (I first understood 15) after World War II. Hence it's obvious why the Armenian incidents are so easily qualified as genocide. For those who are not jurists, especially for the sociologists and NGO members, every incident that involves important numbers of civilian deaths is genocide. If they themselves made research, wrote or lived the incident, it becomes a somewhat personal interest to coin it as genocide.

Levene pointed out that genocide is generally carried out by those, who have been subjected to it. He meant that in cases where the communities which were attacked, killed and driven away from their homeland, treated other communities in the same manner. Hatred and rage that had accumulated because of helplessness in the first event, were directed towards a people in weaker position in the second event, through a mechanism called "displacement." He noted that the Jews which were subjected to the Holocaust, have been persecuting the Palestinians. He claimed that the Circassians, who had been resettled in the Balkans, following a genocide perpetrated against them by the Russians in the Caucasus were forced to immigrate to Anatolia as a result of an ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars. And it was these Circassians who showed exceptional violence to the Armenians. He barely said that the Armenian genocide was not the first genocide of the 20th century, having in mind possibly the Boer or Balkan wars. This means that the Armenian incidents could not have inspired Hitler because of impunity.

In fact, it can be claimed that by the standards accepted at the meeting, at least 100 genocides might have been committed in the first half of the 20th century and especially the 19th century when colonialism was a dominant factor. Besides, as indicated in the "Black Book" published in France, many grave genocides have been committed, starting with the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union in the interwar period. The bad part of the story is that the 200-300,000 Armenian deaths, which we also recognized, might be called "genocide."

In both British Parliament and SOAS, I told Prof. Dadrian that Turkey recognized the Armenian incidents as a tragedy, but since there was no way to reach an agreement on the genocide issue, we could perhaps take the issue to a third party legal conflict resolution mechanism, and asked his opinion. He said something irrelevant in response, but everybody, including the British deputies, understood that he wanted to avoid this method. At SOAS, he proposed that we could appeal to a group of independent scientists. In other words, this greatest expert on Armenian genocide who had made international law studies in Zurich, knows full well that their chance of losing the case is high at the court of law. However, he insisted that Turkey should pay compensation, if not land. He seems not to think that compensation is impossible without a court verdict, and that the Lousanne Treaty does not provide compensation.

Do you think that Turkey would lose, in view of the fact that the horrible ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Turks and Muslims during the Balkan and Caucasus wars were genocide, by the same standards, provided that the post-war treaties could not annul individual compensation rights?