The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings

Meanwhile, we are – on that very basis – ploughing on to war in Iraq, which has oil, but avoiding war in Korea, which does not have oil. And our leaders are getting away with it. In doing so, we are threatening the innocent, torturing our prisoners and ‘learning’ from men who should be in the dock for war crimes. This, then, is our true memorial to the men and women so cruelly murdered in the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.

The Independent, 4 January 2003

The wind from the East

I was sitting on the floor of an old concrete house in the suburbs of Amman this week, stuffing into my mouth vast heaps of lamb and boiled rice soaked in melted butter. The elderly, bearded, robed men from Maan – the most Islamist and disobedient city in Jordan – sat around me, plunging their hands into the meat and soaked rice, urging me to eat more and more of the great pile until I felt constrained to point out that we Brits had eaten so much of the Middle East these past hundred years that we were no longer hungry. There was a muttering of prayers until an old man replied. ‘The Americans eat us now,’ he said.

Through the open door, where rain splashed on the paving stones, a sharp wind howled in from the east, from the Jordanian and Iraqi deserts. Every man in the room believed President Bush wanted Iraqi oil. Indeed, every Arab I’ve met in the past six months believes that this – and this alone – explains his enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Many Israelis think the same. So do I. Once an American regime is installed in Baghdad, our oil companies will have access to 112 billion barrels of oil. With unproven reserves, we might actually end up controlling almost a quarter of the world’s total reserves. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

The US Department of Energy announced at the beginning of this month that by 2025, US oil imports will account for perhaps 70 per cent of total US domestic demand. (It was 55 per cent two years ago.) As Michael Renner of the Worldwatch Institute put it bleakly this week, ‘US oil deposits are increasingly depleted, and many other non-Opec fields are beginning to run dry. The bulk of future supplies will have to come from the Gulf region.’ No wonder the whole Bush energy policy is based on the increasing consumption of oil. Some 70 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves are in the Middle East. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

Take a look at the statistics on the ratio of reserve to oil production – the number of years that reserves of oil will last at current production rates – compiled by Jeremy Rifkin in Hydrogen Economy. In the US, where more than 60 per cent of the recoverable oil has already been produced, the ratio is just 10 years, as it is in Norway. In Canada, it is 8:1. In Iran, it is 53:1, in Saudi Arabia 55:1, in the United Arab Emirates 75:1. In Kuwait, it’s 116:1. But in Iraq it’s 526:1. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

Even if Donald Rumsfeld’s hearty handshake with Saddam Hussein in 1983 didn’t show how little the present master of the Pentagon cares about human rights or crimes against humanity, along comes Joost Hilterman’s analysis of what was really going on in the Pentagon back in the late 1980s. Hilterman, who is preparing a book on the US and Iraq, has dug through piles of declassified US government documents, only to discover that after Saddam gassed 6,800 Kurdish Iraqis at Halabja (that’s well over twice the total of the World Trade Center dead of 11 September 2001) the Pentagon set out to defend Saddam by partially blaming Iran for the atrocity. A newly declassified State Department document proves that the idea was dreamed up by the Pentagon – who had all along backed Saddam – and states that US diplomats received instructions to push the line of Iran’s culpability, but not to discuss details. No details, of course, because the story was a lie. This, remember, followed five years after US National Security Decision Directive 114 – concluded in 1983, the same year as Rumsfeld’s friendly visit to Baghdad – gave formal sanction to billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Baghdad. And this forthcoming war is about human rights?

Back in 1997, in the years of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a bunch of other right-wing men – most involved in the oil business – created the Project for the New American Century, a lobby group demanding ‘regime change’ in Iraq. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton, they called for the removal of Saddam from power. In a letter to Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the House, they wrote that ‘we should establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf – and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power’. The signatories of one or both letters included Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld’s Pentagon deputy, John Bolton, now undersecretary of state for arms control, and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s under-secretary at the State Department – who called last year for America to take up its ‘blood debt’ with the Lebanese Hizballah. They also included Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defence, currently chairman of the defence science board, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation oil industry consultant who became US special envoy to Afghanistan – where Unocal once tried to cut a deal with the Taliban for a gas pipeline across Afghan territory – and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed a special Bush official for Iraq.

The signatories also included our old friend Elliott Abrams, one of the most pro-Sharon of pro-Israeli US officials, who was convicted for his part in the Iran–Contra scandal. Abrams it was who compared Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to Winston Churchill. So this forthcoming war – the whole shooting match, along with that concern for ‘vital interests’ (i.e. oil) in the Gulf – was concocted five years ago, by men like Cheney and Khalilzad who were oil men to their manicured fingertips.

In fact, I’m getting heartily sick of hearing the Second World War being dug up yet again to justify another killing field. It’s not long ago that Bush was happy to be portrayed as Churchill standing up to the appeasement of the no-war-in-Iraq brigade. In fact, Bush’s whole strategy with the odious and Stalinist-style Korean regime – the ‘excellent’ talks which US diplomats insist they are having with the Dear Leader’s Korea which very definitely does have weapons of mass destruction – reeks of the worst kind of Chamberlain-like appeasement. Even though Saddam and Bush deserve each other, Saddam is not Hitler. And Bush is certainly no Churchill. But now we are told that the UN inspectors have found what might be the vital evidence to go to war: eleven empty chemical warheads that just may be twenty years old.

The world went to war eighty-eight years ago because an archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. The world went to war sixty-three years ago because a Nazi dictator invaded Poland. But for eleven empty warheads? Give me oil any day. Even the old men sitting around the feast of mutton and rice would agree with that.

The Independent, 18 January 2003

CHAPTER TWO

Publish and be damned? Or stay silent?

The Armenian genocide of 1915 – the systematic murder of one and a half million Christian Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War – was one of the most terrible atrocities visited upon humanity in the twentieth century. Yet modern-day Turkey is permitted by its Western allies – who fully acknowledged these crimes against humanity at the time – to deny that this Holocaust ever took place. To our peril – and our shame – we refuse to condemn the Ottoman Turks for what proved to be the testing ground for Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry in the Second World War. Little did I realise, when I first researched the Armenian genocide, that my own writing would become entangled in Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge history.

So let me denounce genocide from the dock

This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France’s lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And within an hour, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk – only recently cleared by a Turkish court of insulting ‘Turkishness’ by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres – won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence – the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of ‘civil war’ – Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H, since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger.

Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes to save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in the Black Sea and the Euphrates river – mostly of women and children, so many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its course for up to half a mile. But Dadrian, who speaks and reads Turkish fluently, has now discovered that tens of thousands of Armenians were also burned alive in haylofts. He has produced an affidavit presented to the Turkish court martial that briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War, a document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army. He testified that when he visited the Armenian village of Chourig (it means ‘little water’ in Armenian) he found all the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that all were standing upright. ‘In all the history of Islam,’ General Vehip wrote, ‘it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery.’

The Armenian Holocaust, now so ‘unmentionable’ in Turkey, was no secret to the country’s population in 1918. Millions of Muslim Turks had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier – a few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and friends at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families – and on 19 October 1918 Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: ‘Let’s face it, we Turks savagely [vahshiane in Turkish] killed off the Armenians.’ Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued, Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for Armenian deportees; but a parallel set instructed Turkish officials to ‘proceed with your mission’ as soon as the deportee convoys were far enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to murder. As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on 19 November 1918: ‘The “mission” in the circular was: to attack the convoys and massacre the population… I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman Empire, these criminal people…’

How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths in 1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide of the Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of the great crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how much more extraordinary that their successors today maintain that all of this is a myth, that anyone who says in present-day Istanbul what the men of 1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution under the notorious Law 301 for ‘defaming’ Turkey.

I’m not sure that Holocaust deniers – of the anti-Armenian or anti-Semitic variety – should be taken to court for their rantings. David Irving is a particularly unpleasant ‘martyr’ for freedom of speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis’s one-franc fine by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity to an elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.

But it’s gratifying to find that French president Jacques Chirac and his interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey will have to recognise the Armenian deaths as genocide before it is allowed to join the European Union. True, France has a powerful half-million-strong Armenian community. And, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly commented that the new French bill, if passed by the senate in Paris, will ‘prohibit dialogue’ which is necessary for reconciliation between Turkey and modern-day Armenia. What is the subtext of this, I wonder? No more talk of the Jewish Holocaust lest we hinder ‘reconciliation’ between Germany and the Jews of Europe?

But, suddenly, last week, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes. Next month my Turkish publishers are producing my book, The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language, complete with its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled ‘The First Holocaust’. On Thursday, I received a fax from Agora Books in Istanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it ‘very likely that they will be sued under Law 301’ – which forbids the defaming of Turkey and which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk – but that, as a foreigner, I would be ‘out of reach’. However, if I wished, I could apply to the court to be included in any Turkish trial. Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned.

The Independent, 14 October 2006

You’re talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador

A letter from the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St 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 indeedydoody, I have. I am under the totally mistaken conception that hundreds of thousands of 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.

What would have been our reaction if the ambassador of Germany had written a note to the same effect? ‘You allege that a “Jewish genocide” took place in Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945… I believe you have some misconceptions about those events…’ Of course, the moment such a letter became public, the ambassador of Germany would be condemned by the Foreign Office, our man in Berlin would – even the pusillanimous Blair might rise to the occasion – be withdrawn for consultations and the European Union would debate whether sanctions should be placed upon Germany.

But Mr Alptuna need have no such worries. His country is not a member of the European Union – it merely wishes to be – and it was Mr Blair’s craven administration that for many months tried to prevent Armenian participation in Britain’s Holocaust Day. Amid this chicanery, there are a few shining bright lights and I should say at once that Mr Alptuna’s letter is a grotesque representation of the views of a growing number of Turkish citizens, a few of whom I have the honour to know, who are convinced that the story of the great evil visited upon the Armenians must be told in their country. So why, oh why, I ask myself, are Mr Alptuna and his colleagues in Paris and Beirut and other cities still peddling this nonsense?

In Lebanon, for example, the Turkish embassy has sent a ‘communiqué’ to the local French-language L’Orient-Le Jour newspaper, referring to the ‘soi-disant [so-called] Armenian genocide’ and asking why the modern state of Armenia will not respond to the Turkish call for a joint historical study to ‘examine the events’ of 1915. In fact, the Armenian president, Robert Kotcharian, will not respond to such an invitation for the same reason that the world’s Jewish community would not respond to the call for a similar examination of the Jewish Holocaust from the Iranian president – because an unprecedented international crime was committed, the mere questioning of which would be an insult to the millions of victims who perished.

But the Turkish appeals are artfully concocted. In Beirut, they recall the Allied catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915 when British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops suffered massive casualties at the hands of the Turkish army. In all – including Turkish soldiers – up to a quarter of a million men perished in the Dardanelles. The Turkish embassy in Beirut rightly states that the belligerent nations of Gallipoli have transformed these hostilities into gestures of reconciliation, friendship and mutual respect. A good try. But the bloodbath of Gallipoli did not involve the planned murder of hundreds of thousands of British, French, Australian, New Zealand – and Turkish – women and children.

But now for the bright lights. A group of ‘righteous Turks’ are challenging their government’s dishonest account of the 1915 genocide: Ahmet Insel, Baskin Oran, Halil Berktay, Hrant Dink,* Ragip Zarakolu and others claim that the ‘democratic process’ in Turkey will ‘chip away at the darkness’ and they seek help from Armenians in doing so. Yet even they will refer only to the 1915 ‘disaster’, the ‘tragedy’ and the ‘agony’ of the Armenians. Dr Fatma Goçek of the university of Michigan is among the bravest of those Turkish-born academics who are fighting to confront the Ottoman Empire’s terror against the Armenians. Yet she, too, objects to the use of the word genocide – though she acknowledges its accuracy – on the grounds that it has become ‘politicised’ and thus hinders research.

I have some sympathy with this argument. Why make the job of honest Turks more difficult when these good men and women are taking on the might of Turkish nationalism? The problem is that other, more disreputable folk are demanding the same deletion. Mr Alptuna writes to me – with awesome disingenuousness – that Armenians ‘have failed to submit any irrefutable evidence to support their allegations of genocide’. And he goes on to say that ‘genocide, as you are well aware, has a quite specific legal definition’ in the UN’s 1948 Convention. But Mr Alptuna is himself well aware – though he does not say so, of course – that the definition of genocide was set out by Raphael Lemkin, a Jew, in specific reference to the wholesale mass slaughter of the Armenians.

* Hrant Dink’s fate is recorded in the next pages.

And all the while, new diplomatic archives are opening in the West which reveal the smell of death – Armenian death – in their pages. I quote here, for example, from the newly discovered account of Denmark’s minister in Turkey during the First World War. ‘The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate the Armenian people,’ Carl Wandel wrote on 3 July 1915. The bishop of Karput was ordered to leave Aleppo within forty-eight hours ‘and it has later been learned that this Bishop and all the clergy that accompanied him have been killed between Diyarbekir and Urfa at a place where approximately 1,700 Armenian families have suffered the same fate… In Angora… approximately 6,000 men… have been shot on the road. Even here in Constantinople [Istanbul], Armenians are being abducted and sent to Asia…’

There is much, much more. Yet now here is Mr Alptuna in his letter to me: ‘In fact, the Armenians living outside Eastern Armenia including Istanbul… were excluded from deportation.’ Somebody here is not telling the truth. The late Mr Wandel of Copenhagen? Or the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James?

The Independent, 20 May 2006

Armenia’s 1,500,001st genocide victim

Hrant Dink became the 1,500,001st victim of the Armenian genocide yesterday. An educated and generous journalist and academic – editor of the weekly Turkish–Armenian newspaper Agos – he tried to create a dialogue between the two nations to reach a common narrative of the twentieth century’s first Holocaust. And he paid the price: two bullets shot into his head and two into his body by an assassin in the streets of Istanbul yesterday afternoon. It was not only a frightful blow to Turkey’s surviving Armenian community but a shattering reversal to Turkey’s hope of joining the European Union, a visionary proposal already endangered by the country’s broken relations with Cyprus and its refusal to acknowledge the genocide for what it was: the deliberate mass killing of an entire race of Christian people by the country’s Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. Winston Churchill was among the first to call it a holocaust, but to this day the Turkish authorities deny such a definition, ignoring documents which Turkey’s own historians have unearthed to prove the government’s genocidal intent.

The 53-year-old journalist, who had two children, was murdered at the door of his newspaper. Just over a year ago, he was convicted under Turkey’s notorious Law 301 of ‘anti- Turkishness’, a charge he strenuously denied even after he received a six-month suspended sentence from an Istanbul court. The EU has demanded that Turkey repeal the law under which the country also tried to imprison Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk. At the time of his trial, Dink appeared on Turkish television in tears. ‘I’m living together with Turks in this country,’ he said then. ‘And I’m in complete solidarity with them. I don’t think I could live with an identity of having insulted them in this country.’

It is a stunning irony that Dink, in one of his articles, had accused his fellow Armenians of allowing their enmity towards the Turks for the genocide to develop to the point where it had a ‘poisoning effect on your blood’ – and that the court took the article out of context and claimed he was referring to Turkish blood as poisonous. Dink told news agency reporters in 2005 that his case had arisen from a question on what he felt when, at primary school, he had to take a traditional Turkish oath: ‘I am a Turk, I am honest, I am hard-working.’ In his defence, Dink said: ‘I said that I was a Turkish citizen but an Armenian and that even though I was honest and hard-working, I was not a Turk, I was an Armenian.’ He did not like a line in the Turkish national anthem that refers to ‘my heroic race’. He did not like singing that line, he said, ‘because I was against using the word “race”, which leads to discrimination’.

Pamuk had earlier faced a court for talking about the 1915 genocide in a Swiss magazine. Leading Turkish publishers say that there is now an incendiary atmosphere in Turkey towards all writers who want to tell the truth about the genocide, when vast areas of Turkish Armenia were ‘cleansed’ of their Christian populations.

The Independent, 20 January 2007