“In the autumn of 1915, an Austrian engineer called Litzmayer, who was helping build the Constantinople-Baghdad railway, saw what he thought was a large Turkish army heading for Mesopotamia. But as the crowd came closer, he realized it was a huge caravan of women, moving forward under the supervision of soldiers,” the article by Robert Fisk published in The Independent daily reads.

"The 40,000 or so women were all Armenians, separated from their men — most of whom had already had their throats cut by Turkish gendarmerie — and deported on a genocidal death march during which up to 1.5 million Armenians died. Subjected to constant rape and beatings, some had already swallowed poison on their way from their homes in Erzerum, Serena, Sivas, Bitlis and other cities in Turkish western Armenia. “Some of them,” Bishop Grigoris Balakian, one of Litzmayer's contemporaries, recorded, “had been driven to such a state that they were mere skeletons enveloped in rags, with skin that had turned leathery, burned from the sun, cold, and wind. Many pregnant women, having become numb, had left their newborns on the side of the road as a protest against mankind and God,” the author continues.

“Every year, new evidence emerges about this mass ethnic cleansing, the first holocaust of the last century; and every year, Turkey denies that it ever committed Genocide. Yet on Saturday – to the horror of millions of descendants of Armenian survivors – the President of Armenia, Serg Sarkissian, plans to agree to a protocol with Turkey to re-open diplomatic relations, which should allow for new trade concessions and oil interests. And he proposes to do this without honouring his most important promise to Armenians abroad – to demand that Turkey admit it carried out the Armenian Genocide in 1915.”

Fisk quotes the Diaspora representative in Lebanon, protesting against Armenian authorities: “The Armenian Government is trying to sweeten the taste for us by suggesting that Turkish and Armenian historians sit down to decide what happened in 1915. But would the Israelis maintain diplomatic relations if the German government suddenly called the Jewish Holocaust into question and suggested it all be mulled over by historians?”

The author claims that Barack Obama is the third U.S. President promising Armenians to recognize Genocide if he is elected. “Betrayal has always been in the air,” Robert Fisk says.