The Independent (London)

January 28 , 2000 , Friday

REMEMBER THE FIRST HOLOAUST

by Robert Fisk

Who now remembers the armenians? Hitler asked , just before he embarked on the destruction of European Jewry. Precious few, it seems. As the memorial day for the Nazi genoide against the jews was proclaimed by Mr Blair this week, there was not a single reference to the slaughter of one and a half million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. The world´s first holocaust - and Hitler´s inspiration for the slaughter of the Jews -was ignored.

Why, I wonder? Mr Blair did not mention it. President Chirac is frightened of the very subject, refusing even to condemn the slaughter when he last visited Beirut, where the grandchildren of the victims live in their tens of thousands. The United States government prefers to forget the holocaust of Armenians, while Turks - the inheritors of the empire that committed the worst atrocities of the First World War - are studiously denying the genocide. And we let them get away with it.

Who, I wonder, chooses wich holocaust we should remember and wich we should not? The six million jews who were murdered by the nazis must always have a place in our history, our memory, our fears. Never again. But alas, the armenians who perished in the rivers of southern Turkey, who were slaughtered in their tens of thousands in the deserts of northern Syria, whose wives and daughters were gang-raped and knifed to death by the gendarmerie and their Kurdish militiamen - they have no place in our memory or our history. Turkey is our friend. Turkey might one day join the European Union. Turkey is an ally of Israel .

History, of course, is hard taskmaster, veined with inconvenient facts and corrupted heroes as well as the massacre of innocents. The armenian community in Turkey as well as its Allied sympathisers when the Ottoman army was fighting the British and French in the First World War, and the armenians also fought in the tsarist Russian army against Turkey. But the proof of the genocide is intact. The Young Turk movement - once a liberal organisation which the Armenians had supported - had taken control of the dying empire an adopted a "pan-Turkism" which espoused a Turkish-speaking Muslim nation from Constantinopel to Baku.Within weeks of their victory over the Allies at the Dardanelles in 1915, they fell upon the Armenians. Churchill was to refer to the "merciless fury" unleashed upon the christian minority.The US ambassador in Constantinopel - himself a Jew - wrote heart-wrenching reports back to Washington of mass slaughter.Near the Turkish village Mus, hundreds of men were inled up on bridges and shot into the rivers, serb-style.

Behind the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland , I was once taken by camp guideto series of small lakes in which the Nazis dumped the ash of the crematoria.Beneth the water and ice lay the powdered white boned of whole cities of people. Yet in the noth Syrian deserts there are till skulls and bones in caves and in the lay of river banks. This plase of martyrdom is visited one a year by the loal Armenian communty to commemorate their holocaust. They even have a local holocaust memorial day.Yet I wonder if a single non-armenian reader of the independent knows what that date is?

Denial of the holocaust is in some countries a crime. I´m talking , of course, about the jewish Holocaust- beacuse denial of he Armenian holocaust is not only perfecly legal , it is big business. No American company selling weapons to Turkey will discuss the holocaust of 1915. Chairs of Ottoman studies are behind funded by the Turkish government at American universities in wich US academics - who have to prove they have used Ottoman archives to get their jobs and thus must never have condemned the 1915 slaughters - propagate the lie that the armenians were merely victims of "civil war" and that turks also dies in the chaos of 1915.

Turks did. But not on the armenian scale. Anoyone who was to write that the Jews were victims of a Europen cicil was and that, anyway ,"Germans also died" , would be regarded as cracked or a Neo Nazi. Not so if you deny the Armenian holocaust.

Take following letter , for example: "The myth of the ´Armenian Holocaust´ was created immediately after World War I with the hope that the armenians could be rewarded for their sufferings with a peice of the disintegrating Ottoman state. As such, the main aims of the inventors were political and territorial". Now substitute the word Armenian with the word Jew. Who would ever get away with a letter about the myth of Jewish "Holocaust"as an invention of Jews who wanted to be rewarded for "sufferings" (the quotation marks suggesting their falsity) ? Who would ever publish such lies?

But we Europeans are just as mendacious, if more discreetly so. Take Mr Chirac in Beirut. The French assembly had just comdemned the Armenian holcaust of 1915 - there are men of principle in French politics. But not Chirac. When asked less than two years ago fo his views on the resolution, he replied : "I do not comment on a matter of domestic (sic) politics when I´m abroad". Would that have been his response if the Assembly had just denounced the jewish Holoaust?

Mr Blair said this week that as the jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust "age and become fewer in number, it becomes more and more our duty to take up the mantle and tell each new generation what happened and what could happen again".

But there are a few Armenian survivors left .Why weren´t they asked this week about their memories? At musa Dagh, and later at Smyrna in 1920, British , French, and American warships rescued a few of the pitiful Armenian survivors of that earlier Holcaust. But Mr Blair was silent this week. And silence gives consent.

I am all for memorial days. Especially one that marks the Jewish Holoaust. And especially mememorial days for other holoausts. Armenians too. But Hitler´s ghost can have a little laugh this week. After all , who now remembers the Armenians?