“Holocausts will always have their deniers. But try to imagine a world in which every post-Nazi German government for the last six decades refused to assume any national responsibility for war crimes committed against the Jews, arguing that &‘lives were lost on both sides,’ denying that there had been a policy of genocide in the first place and even prosecuting and jailing German historians who wrote about it,” reads the article by journalist and lawyer Michael Bobelian in The Washington Times. NEWS.am posts the extracts.

Bobelian says, “Also to imagine that a world in which western apologists for such a patently dishonest and immoral stance would argue that Germany's value as a strategic NATO ally outweighed any claims of historic justice. Absurd? Of course … yet for close to a century now, an earlier holocaust has been denied by another NATO member, with similar excuses made by its apologists. First the facts. In 1915, after having entered World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman government, dominated by militant Young Turk nationalists, engaged in a systematic program of extermination. The target was Turkey's Christian Armenian minority, members of a race that had inhabited parts of the Ottoman Empire for centuries — in some cases, thousands of years — before the arrival of the first Turkic invaders from the Asian steppes. Around 2 million Armenians were rounded up by the authorities and driven from their ancestral homes without compensation, allowed only to take what they could carry on their backs…”

“In 1915 alone, the New York Times ran more than 100 articles on the subject, including eyewitness accounts; a typical headline was &‘Wholesale Massacres of Armenians by Turks.’ In all, between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians died. Although war crime trials were held in Istanbul immediately after World War I, and despite the fact that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish republic, referred to the state-organized slaughter of the Armenians as a &‘shameful act,’ the Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge the historic facts. You can even be tried and jailed for writing about them, as nearly happened to Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk.”