Australian barrister, writer and former international judge Geoffrey Robertson, who lives in London and wrote a devastating critique of the British government's recent attitude towards the issue of the Armenian genocide (2009), has recently authored An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians. He was interviewed by "Lateline," the ABC (Australian Broadcast Corporation) program on October 20, about his efforts to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, his views on the Armenian genocide, and the Islamic State atrocities and killings in Iraq and Syria. Below is the excerpt of the interview that deals with the Armenian genocide.
EMMA ALBERICI: Let's change gears now. I want to talk about your latest
book, The Inconvenient Genocide. It's about the massacre of Armenians
during the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Is it still illegal in Turkey to
recognise this as a genocide?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Pretty much.
It's the crime of insulting Turkishness under rule 301 of the Criminal
Code and you can go to prison for it and some people do and there've
been - it's quite ludicrous. You go to prison if you affirm the genocide
in Turkey and you can go to prison if you deny it in places like France
or Switzerland. So it's a hot topic and it's going to get hotter as we
move up to the centenary, which has a particular resonance for
Australians.
EMMA ALBERICI: Indeed. You mention [Australian Foreign Minister] Julie Bishop in the book, and in fact, you call her foolish.
GEOFFREY
ROBERTSON: Yeah, she was - well, the drafting of her letter on the
subject was foolish because she said, "The Australian Government doesn't
recognise the genocide." Now that's a very provocative thing to say.
She went on to say that the Australian Government doesn't get involved
in this sensitive debate, which is an acceptable thing to say and a
contradictory thing to say, but of course it was relished by the Turkish
press, which had screaming headlines, "Australia denies genocide,"
which was not, I suspect, the impression that she wanted to give at all.
The Parliament of New South Wales has recognised the genocide and been
threatened with exclusion from Gallipoli on the centenary next year. So
it is an interesting and controversial question and a damaging question,
I think, for reasons I'll explain. But we should be aware that the
trigger for the killing of over half the Armenian race was in fact the
landing at Gallipoli. The genocide began on 24th April, 1915 when the
boats were seen, the ANZACs huddled in the landing craft and that is
when they went out and rounded up all the intellectuals, the Armenian
community leaders, school teachers, MP, journalists, took them away and
killed them. And that was the beginning of a set of of massacres,
deportations, death matches of women and their children and old men
through the deserts and at least a million Armenians were killed in the
course of the next few months.
EMMA ALBERICI: Am I right to say
that in the book you seem to point out a contradiction between what was
written in the letter by Julie Bishop in June of this year and what had
previously been said by the Prime Minister?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON:
Oh, yes, [Australian Prime Minister] Tony Abbott when in opposition every year and the Armenians
commemorate the killing of their people on 24th April, the day before we
commemorate ANZAC Day, and Tony Abbott every year would condemn the
Armenian genocide. But of course, like President Obama, who when he was
on the campaign trail said it was a genocide, "And when I'm President,
I'm going to recognise it." Of course, when he became President, the
importance of Turkey as a NATO ally with its bases that we're currently
using in the battle against ISIS became too important. The Turks were
neuralgic about it. They threatened to close down the American use of
the bases. So, President Obama refers to it each year as "Medz Yeghern",
which is Armenian for "the great crime", but doesn't mean pronouncing
G-word. He says, "If you want to know my views, they haven't changed.
You'll have to Google them." And if you Google them back to 2008, you
find that he declared it was a genocide.
And in this book, I -
the first thing I want to do is to clear up any confusion and to explain
and I've been an international judge, that applying the law, the
genocide convention, which our own Dr Evert introduced to the United
Nations in 1948, that what happened - the massacres, the death marches
in 1915 were certainly genocide. And the problem with the Turkish denial
is that they say, "Well, this wasn't genocide, it wasn't a crime at
all. It was relocation." Well it wasn't relocation. It was death
marching. And it's important to establish that you can't claim military
necessity as some sort of defence to genocide, otherwise you find
Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka justifying the killing of 40,000 civilians get at
the Tamil Tigers. You find the Pakistanis justifying the killing of
three million Bengalis in the war in 1971. These are genocides pure and
simple and there is no defence of military necessity of anything else to
the destruction of a race or part of it.
EMMA ALBERICI: I want
to talk about the mass killings that are currently going on in Iraq and
Syria, which many people think amount to genocide. How easy do you think
it's going to be to prosecute Islamic State fighters, because of
course, the world was a different place when Nazi war criminals were
brought to justice?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: But the crimes are the
same - the crime against humanity, genocide. I think what we've seen of
Islamic State is that they are a terrorist group that is committed - it
certainly has genocidal intentions. In the Nazis we base our claim of
genocide on the conference of Wannsee and the - Eichmann's minutes of it
where they talk in these extraordinary euphemisms about "evacuating"
Jews, by which they mean - to the east, by which they mean killing them
in Auschwitz, just as the Ottoman Empire talked about "relocating" the
Armenians, by which they meant having them die on death marches through
the desert. And so, we can - through inference from the facts, we can
draw a conclusion of genocidal intent and I think we can do that in
relation to ISIS because of the way in which they've singled out
religious communities who won't convert to their particularly extreme
fundamentalist view to be killed.
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