‘Who remembers the Armenians?’, Hitler is supposed to have asked
scornfully as he prepared to invade Poland in 1939, referring to the deaths of
perhaps 1m people during the First World War at the hands of the Ottoman
Empire, now Turkey.
Now for the first time, the Turkish Prime Minister,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has offered his ‘condolences’ over the mass killings. The
Turks still reject the idea that they constituted genocide, and Mr Egoyan
talked instead of the ‘shared pain’ of the Turkish and Armenian peoples for
their losses in World War One.
Even so, the comments are a marked step
forward. In 2006, Orhan Pamuk, the first Turk to win the Nobel Prize, was
threatened with prosecution for insulting ‘Turkish identity’ when he drew
attention to the killings.
At the start of the First World War, after
years of inter-communal tension the Turks feared the Christian Armenians might
help their enemy, Russia. They began a mass deportation during which perhaps
600,000 were murdered, while another 400,000 died from hardship.
*Tomorrow at Shoe Lane Library, London EC4, 1230 my talk on Flood: Nature and Culture
http://disasterhistorian.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/talk-on-flood-nature-and-culture.html
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