Robert Fisk

Independent Online Edition > Robert Fisk:

"All the while, new diplomatic archives are opening to reveal the smell of death - Armenian death

Published: 20 May 2006

A letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the Court of Saint James arrived for me a few days ago, one of those missives that send a shudder through the human soul. 'You allege that an 'Armenian genocide' took place in Eastern Anatolia in 1915,' His Excellency Mr Akin Alptuna told me. 'I believe you have some misconceptions about those events ...'

Oh indeedy doody, I have. I am under the totally mistaken conception that one and a half million Armenians were cruelly and deliberately done to death by their Turkish Ottoman masters in 1915, that the men were shot and knifed while their womenfolk were raped and eviscerated and cremated and starved on death marches and their children butchered. I have met a few of the survivors - liars to a man and woman, if the Turkish ambassador to Britain is to be believed - and I have seen the photographs taken of the victims by a brave German photographer called Armen Wegner whose pictures must now, I suppose, be consigned to the waste bins. So must the archives of all those diplomats who courageously catalogued the mass murders inflicted upon Turkey's Christian population on the orders of the gang of nationalists who ran the Ottoman government in 1915.