The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings

Sneaking a book out in silence

Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It’s from a letter from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation. The reason is a chapter entitled ‘The First Holocaust’, which records the Armenian genocide. It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read the following, fromtheir message tomy London publishers HarperCollins, remember it is written by a citizen of a country that seriously wishes to enter the European Union. Since I do not speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses in Mr Osman’s otherwise excellent English.

We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems, Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of April 2007… Therefore we would like to undertake the publication quietly, which

means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk’s book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to us if any trial [is]… held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk and HarperCollins can understand our reservations.

I can. Here is a publisher in a country negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds, Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) – even Turkey’s bid to join the EU – is reason enough to sneak my book out in silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book? Well, I can give you an example. When Taner Akçam’s magnificent A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was first published in Turkish – it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a terrifying historical fact – the Turkish historian experienced an almost identical reaction. His work was published ‘quietly’ in Turkey – and without a single book review.

Now I’m not entirely unsympathetic with my Turkish publishers. It is one thing for me to rage and roar about their pusillanimity. But I live in Beirut, not in Istanbul. And after Hrant Dink’s foul murder, I’m in no position to lecture my colleagues in Turkey to stand up to the racism that killed Dink. While I’m sipping my morning coffee on the Beirut Corniche, Mr Osman could be assaulted in the former capital of the Ottoman Empire. But there’s a problem nonetheless. My Turkish publishers want to bring my book out like illicit pornography – but still have me standing with them in the dock if right-wing lawyers bring charges under Law 301!

I understand, as they write in their own letter, that they do not want to be forced to take political sides in the ‘nonsensical collision between nationalists and neo-liberals’, but I fear that the roots of this problem go deeper. The sinister photograph of the Turkish police guards standing proudly next to Dink’s alleged murderer after his arrest shows just what we are up against here. Yet still our own Western reporters won’t come clean about the Ottoman Empire’s foul actions in 1915. When, for example, Reuters sent a reporter, Gareth Jones, off to the Turkish city of Trabzon – where Dink’s supposed killer lived – he quoted the city’s governor as saying that Dink’s murder was related to ‘social problems linked to fast urbanisation’. A ‘strong gun culture and the fiery character of the people’ might be to blame.

I wonder why Reuters didn’t mention a much more direct and terrible link between Trabzon and the Armenians. For in 1915, the Turkish authorities of the city herded thousands of Armenian women and children on to boats and set off into the Black Sea – the details are contained in an original Ottoman document unearthed by Akçam – where they were ‘thrown off to drown’. Historians may like to know that the man in charge of these murder boats was called Niyazi Effendi. No doubt he had a ‘fiery character’.

Yet still this denial goes on. The Associated Press this week ran a story from Ankara in which its reporter, Selçan Hacaoglu, repeated the same old mantra about there being a ‘bitter dispute’ between Armenia and Turkey over the 1915 slaughter, in which Turkey ‘vehemently denies that the killings were genocide’. When will the Associated Press wake up and cut this cowardly nonsense from its reports? Would the AP insert in all its references to the equally real and horrific murder of 6 million European Jews that right-wing Holocaust negationists ‘vehemently deny’ that there was a genocide?

But real history will win. Last October, according to local newspaper reports, villagers of Kuru in eastern Turkey were digging a grave for one of their relatives when they came across a cave containing the skulls and bones of around forty people – almost certainly the remains of 150 Armenians from the town of Oguz who were murdered in Kuru on 14 June 1915. The local Turkish gendarmerie turned up to examine the cave last year, sealed its entrance and ordered villagers not to speak of what they found. But there are hundreds of other Kurus in Turkey and their bones, too, will return to haunt us all. Publishing books ‘quietly’ will not save us.

The Independent, 17 March 2007

‘A conflict of interest’

I despise the internet. It’s irresponsible, and often a net of hate. And I don’t have time for Blogopops. But here’s a tale of two gutless newspapers which explains why more and more people are Googling rather than turning pages.

First the Los Angeles Times. Last year, reporter Mark Arax was assigned a routine story on the Armenian genocide. His report focused on divisions within the local Jewish community over whether to call the genocide a genocide. The Israeli government and its new Nobel Prize-winning president, Shimon Peres – anxious to keep cosy relations with modern Turkey – have adopted Istanbul’s mendacious version of events. However, many Jews, both inside and outside Israel, have bravely insisted that they do constitute a genocide, indeed the very precursor to the later Nazi Holocaust of 6 million Jews.

Yet Arax’s genocide report was killed on the orders of managing editor Douglas Frantz because the reporter had a ‘position on the issue’ and ‘a conflict of interest’. Readers will already have guessed that Arax is an Armenian-American. His sin, it seems, was that way back in 2005 he and five other writers wrote a formal memo to LA Times editors reminding them that the paper’s style rules meant that the Armenian genocide was to be called just that – not ‘alleged genocide’. Frantz, however, described the old memo as a ‘petition’ and apparently accused Arax of landing the assignment by dealing with a Washington editor who was also an Armenian.

The story was reassigned to Washington reporter Rich Simon, who concentrated on Turkey’s attempt to block Congress from recognising the Armenian slaughter – and whose story ran under the headline ‘Genocide Resolution Still Far From Certain’. LA Times executives then went all coy, declining interviews, although Frantz admitted in a blog (of course) that he had ‘put a hold’ on Arax’s story because of concerns that the reporter ‘had expressed personal views about the topic in a public manner…’ Ho ho.

Truth can be dangerous for the LA Times. Even more so, it seems, when the managing editor himself – Frantz, no less – once worked for the New York Times, where he referred to the Armenian massacres as, yes, an ‘alleged’ genocide. Frantz, it turns out, joined the LA Times as its Istanbul correspondent. Well, Arax has since left the LA Times after a settlement which forestalled a lawsuit against the paper for defamation and discrimination. His employers heaped praise upon his work while Frantz has just left the paper to become Middle East correspondent of the Wall Street Journal based in – of course, you guessed it – Istanbul.

But now let’s go north of the border, to the Toronto Globe and Mail, which assigned columnist Jan Wong to investigate a college murder in Montreal last September. Wong is not a greatly loved reporter. A third-generation Canadian, she moved to China during Mao’s ‘cultural revolution’ and, in her own words, ‘snitched on class enemies and did my best to be a good little Maoist’. She later wrote a ‘Lunch With’ series for the Globe in which she acted all sympathetic to interviewee guests to catch them out. ‘When they relax, that’s when their guard is down,’ she told a college newspaper. ‘It’s a trick, but it’s legit.’ Yuk!

Wong’s take on the Montreal Dawson College shooting, however, was more serious. She compared the killer to a half- Algerian Muslim who murdered fourteen women in another Montreal college shooting in 1989 and to a Russian immigrant who killed four university colleagues in Montreal in 1992. ‘In all three cases,’ she wrote, ‘the perpetrator was not “pure laine”, the argot for a “pure” francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial purity is repugnant. Not in Quebec.’ Painfully true, I’m afraid. Parisians, who speak real French, would never use such an expression – pure laine translates literally as ‘pure wool’ but means ‘authentic’ – but some Montrealers do. Wong, however, had touched a red-hot electric wire in ‘multicultural’ Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper complained. ‘Grossly irresponsible,’ said the man who enthusiastically continued the policy of sending Canadian troops on their suicidal mission to Afghanistan.

The French-Canadian newspaper Le Devoir – can you imagine a British paper selling a single copy if it called itself ‘Duty’? – published a cartoon of Wong with exaggerated Chinese slanted eyes. Definitely not pure laine for Le Devoir. The hate mail was even more to the point. Some contained excrement. But then the Globe and Mail ran for cover. Its editor-in-chief, Edward Greenspon, wrote a cowardly column in which he claimed that the offending paragraphs ‘should have been removed’ from Wong’s story. ‘We regret that we allowed these words to get into a reported [sic] article,’ he sniffled. There had been a breakdown in what he hilariously called ‘the editorial quality control process’.

Now I happen to know a bit about the Globe’s ‘quality control process’. Some time ago I discovered that the paper had reprinted an article of mine from The Independent about the Armenian genocide. But they had tampered with it, altering my word ‘genocide’ to read ‘tragedy’. The Independent’s subscribers promise to make no changes to our reports. But when our syndication folk contacted the Globe, they discovered that the Canadian paper had simply stolen the article. They were made to pay a penalty fee. But as for the censorship of the word ‘genocide’, a female executive explained to The Independent that nothing could be done because the editor responsible had ‘since left the Globe and Mail’.

It’s the same old story, isn’t it? Censor then whinge, then cut and run. No wonder the bloggers are winning.

The Independent, 21 July 2007

This column provoked a blizzard of mail from Québécois (French- Canadians), accusing me of calling them racists, misunderstanding their minority status, demeaning their French-language paper Le Devoir (whose Middle East coverage I had praised in earlier articles) and abusing them for not speaking ‘proper’ French. The fact that the purpose of ‘Conflict of Interest’ was to condemn the gutlessness of English-language newspapers somehow got lost along the way.

Bravery, tears and broken dreams

There is nothing so infinitely sad – so pitiful and yet so courageous – as a people who yearn to return to a land forever denied them; the Poles to Brest Litovsk, the Germans to Silesia, the Palestinians to that part of Palestine that is now Israel. When a people claim to have settled again in their ancestral lands – the Israelis, for example, at the cost of ‘cleansing’ 750,000 Arabs who had perfectly legitimate rights to their homes – the world becomes misty-eyed. But could any nation be more miserably bereft than one which sees, each day, the towering symbol of its own land in the hands of another?

Mount Ararat will never return to Armenia – not to the rump state which the Soviets created in 1920 after the genocide – and its presence to the west of the capital, Yerevan, is a desperate, awful, permanent reminder of wrongs unrighted, atrocities unacknowledged, dreams never to be fulfilled. I watched Ararat all last week, cloud-shuffled in the morning, blue-hazed through the afternoon, ominous, oppressive, inspiring, magnificent, ludicrous in a way – for the freedom which it encourages can never be used to snatch it back from the Turks – capable of inspiring the loftiest verse and the most execrable commercialism.

There is a long-established Ararat cognac factory in Yerevan, Ararat gift shops – largely tatty affairs of ghastly local art and far too many models of Armenian churches – and even the Marriott Ararat Hotel, which is more than a rung up from the old Armenia Two Hotel where I stayed fifteen years ago, an ex-Soviet Intourist joint whose chief properties included the all-night rustling of cockroach armies between the plaster and the wallpaper beside my pillow.

Back in the Stalinist 1930s, the architect Aleksander Tamanian built an almost fascistic triumphal arch at one side of Republic Square through which the heights of Ararat, bathed in eternal snow, would forever be framed to remind Armenians of their mountain of tears. But the individualism of the descendants of Tigran the Great, whose empire stretched from the Caspian to Beirut, resisted even Stalin’s oppression. Yeghishe Charents, one of the nation’s favourite poets – a famous philanderer who apparently sought the Kremlin’s favours – produced a now famous poem called ‘The Message’. Its praise of Uncle Joe might grind the average set of teeth down to the gum; it included the following: ‘A new light shone on the world./Who brought this sun?/… It is only this sunlight/ Which for centuries will stay alive.’ And more of the same.

Undiscovered by the Kremlin’s censors for many months, however, Charents had used the first letter of each line to frame a quite different ‘message’, which read: ‘O Armenian people, your only salvation is in the power of your unity.’ Like the distant Mount Ararat, it was a brave, hopeless symbol, as doomed as it was impressive. Charents was ‘disappeared’ by the NKVD in 1937 after being denounced by Tamanian – now hard at work building Yerevan’s new Stalinist opera house – the moment Charents’s schoolboy prank was spotted. Then Tamanian fell from the roof of his still unfinished opera house, and even today Armenians – with their Arab-like desire to believe in ‘the plot’ – ask the obvious questions. Did the architect throw himself to his death in remorse? Or was he pushed?

Plots live on in the country that enjoyed only two years of post-genocide independence until its 1991 ‘freedom’ from the decaying Soviet Union. Its drearily re-elected prime minister, Serzh Sargsian, permits ‘neutral’ opposition but no real political debate – serious opponents would have their parties and newspapers closed down – and he recently told the local press that ‘the economy is more important than democracy’. Not surprising, I suppose, when the corrupt first president of free Armenia, Ter-Petrosian, is rumoured to be plotting a comeback. Sargsian even tried to throw the American Radio Liberty/ Free Europe station out of Armenia – though I suppose that’s not necessarily an undemocratic gesture.

Nonetheless, interviewed by Vartan Makarian on an Armenian TV show this week, I found it a bit hard to take when Vartan suggested that my Turkish publisher’s fear of bringing out my book on the Middle East was a symbol of Turkey’s ‘lack of democratisation’. What about Armenia’s pliant press, I asked? And why was it that present-day Armenia seemed to protest much less about the twentieth century’s first Holocaust than the millions of Armenians in the diaspora, in the US, Canada, France, Britain, even Turkish intellectuals in Turkey itself? The TV production crew burst into laughter behind their glass screen. Guests on Armenian television are supposed to answer questions, not ask them. Long live the Soviet Union.

But you have to hand it to the journalists of Yerevan. Each August they all go on holiday. At the same time. Yup. Every editor, reporter, book reviewer, columnist and printer packs up for the month and heads off to Lake Sevan or Karabakh for what is still called, Soviet-style, a ‘rest’. ‘We wish all our readers a happy rest-time and we’ll be back on August 17th,’ the newspaper Margin announced this week. And that was that. No poet may die, no Patriotic War hero expire, no minister may speak, no man may be imprisoned, lest his passing or his words or incarceration disappear from written history. I encourage the management of The Independent to consider this idea; if only we had operated such a system during the rule of the late Tony Blair… But no doubt a civil servant would have e-mailed him that this was a ‘good time’ to announce bad news.

In any event, a gloomy portrait of the poet–martyr Charents now adorns Armenia’s 1,000-dram note and Tamanian’s massive arch still dominates Republic Square. But the dying Soviet Union constructed high-rise buildings beyond the arch and so today, Ararat – like Charents – has been ‘disappeared’, obliterated behind the grey walls of post-Stalinist construction, the final indignity to such cloud-topped, vain hopes of return. Better by far to sip an Ararat cognac at the Marriott Ararat Hotel from which, at least, Noah’s old monster can still be seen.

The Independent, 4 August 2007

A holocaust denier in the White House

How are the mighty fallen! President George W. Bush, the Crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only ‘them or us’, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against ‘world terror’ on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multi-million-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a diminutive little creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I think not.

The ‘story so far’ is familiar enough. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true. Even movie film is now emerging – real archive footage taken by Western military cameramen in the First World War – to show that the first Holocaust of the twentieth century, perpetrated in front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their extermination of 6 million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few Armenian survivors still claim.

But the Turks won’t let us say this. They have blackmailed the Western powers – including our own British government, and now even the United States – to kowtow to their shameless denials. These (and I weary that we must repeat them, because every news agency and government does just that through fear of Ankara’s fury) include the canard that the Armenians died in a ‘civil war’, that they were anyway collaborating with Turkey’s Russian enemies, that fewer Armenians were killed than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as Armenians. And now President Bush and the United States Congress have gone along with these lies. There was, briefly, a historic moment for Bush to walk tall after the US House Foreign Relations Committee voted last month to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenians as an act of genocide. Ancient Armenian-American survivors gathered at a House panel to listen to the debate. But as soon as Turkey’s fossilised generals started to threaten Bush, I knew he would give in.

Listen, first, to General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish armed forces, in an interview with the newspaper Milliyet. The passage of the House resolution, he whinged, was ‘sad and sorrowful’ in view of the ‘strong links’ Turkey maintained with its NATO partners. And if this resolution was passed by the full House of Representatives, then ‘our military relations with the US would never be as they were in the past… The US, in that respect, has shot itself in the foot.’

Now listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish general staff. ‘We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people… But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.’ I loved the last bit about the ‘global war on terror’. Nobody – save for the Jews of Europe – has suffered ‘terror’ more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that NATO should matter more than the integrity of history – that NATO might one day prove to be so important that the Bushes of this world might have to equivocate over the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany – beggars belief.

Among those men who should hold their heads in shame are those who claim they are winning the war in Iraq. They include the increasingly disoriented General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, and the increasingly delusionary US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, both of whom warned that full passage of the Armenian genocide bill would ‘harm the war effort in Iraq’. And make no mistake, there are big bucks behind this disgusting piece of Holocaust denial. Former Representative Robert L. Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has already picked up $12 million from the Turks for his company, the Livingston Group, for two previously successful attempts to pervert the cause of moral justice and smother genocide congressional resolutions. He personally escorted Turkish officials to Capitol Hill to threaten US congressmen. They got the point. If the resolution went ahead, Turkey would bar US access to the Incirlik air base through which passed much of the 70 per cent of American air supplies to Iraq which transit Turkey. In the real world, this is called blackmail – which was why Bush was bound to cave in. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was even more craven – although he obviously cared nothing for the details of history. Petraeus and Crocker, he said, ‘believe clearly that access to the airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes…’

How terrible an irony did Gates utter. For it is these very ‘roads and so on’ down which walked the hundreds of thousands of Armenians on their 1915 death marches. Many were forced aboard cattle trains which took them to their deaths. One of the railway lines on which they travelled ran due east of Adana – a great collection point for the doomed Christians of western Armenia – and the first station on the line was called Incirlik, the very same Incirlik which now houses the huge air base which Mr Bush is so frightened of losing. Had the genocide which Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place – as the Turks claim – the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik. There is still alive – in Sussex if anyone cares to see her – an ageing Armenian survivor from that region who recalls the Ottoman Turkish gendarmes setting fire to a pile of living Armenian babies on the road close to Adana. These are the same ‘roads and so on’ which so concern the gutless Mr Gates.