Monday, December 14, 2009

Realpolitik

In 1939, Adolf Hitler exhorted his generals to show no mercy to the Polish people they were preparing to blitzkrieg because, "After all, who now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?"

In the ethics-free zone not the British Foreign Office

There are few genocides more clearly established than that suffered by the Armenians in 1915-16, when half the race was extinguished in massacres and deportations directed by the Young Turk government. Today you can be prosecuted in France and other European countries for denying the slaughter. But the world's most influential genocide denier - other than Turkey itself - is the British government, which has
repeatedly asserted that there is insufficient evidence that what it terms a "tragedy" amounted to genocide.Foreign Office ministers insist that the "interpretation of events is still the subject of genuine debate among historians".

Various Foreign Office ministers have told parliament that "neither this government nor previous governments have judged that the evidence is sufficiently unequivocal to persuade us that these events should be categorised as genocide, as defined by the 1948 convention".
Foreign Office officials have discouraged ministers from attending memorial services for Armenian victims and from including any reference to this genocide at Holocaust Memorial Day.The government's only policy has been to evade giving any truthful answer about the Armenian genocide.

The UK cannot recognise this particular genocide, not because it had not taken place, but because realpolitik makes it inconvenient.

"...given the importance of our relations (political, strategic and commercial) with Turkey . . . the current line is the only feasible option."

Taken from New Statesman

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