Timely recognition of the Armenian genocide
The US Congress' foreign affairs panel created a stir this autumn when it agreed that the deportation of 2 million Armenians from Turkey, between 1915 and 1923, was genocide.
Some asked why Congress was provoking America's ally over something that happened so long ago. The answer relates to the nature of genocide - an attempt to destroy a particular national, racial, religious or ethnic group in whole or in part - which is so awful that it is hard to comprehend and confront.
Germany's slow, painful recognition of the scale and evil of the Nazi genocide of Jews and gypsies has been exceptional. Other genocides, smaller in absolute numbers of victims but still horrifying, have not had the recognition they demand. Denial and self-deception are common. Only televised video footage of the 1994 Srebrenica mass killing of Muslims finally convinced many Serbs that it was true, and not propaganda.
In 1803, France attempted to exterminate the rebellious former slave population of Haiti, tying people of all ages and both sexes to cannon-balls and throwing them into the sea.
In 1904, general Lothar von Trotha, commander of German forces in South West Africa (today's Namibia), issued his 'extermination order' to kill all the Herrero people - 65,000 of whom were killed before the outcry forced him to stop.
The Turkish genocide of the Armenians was in two phases, both on a bigger scale than Srebrenica, Haiti or the Herreros. The lack of international response to the first encouraged the second.
In 1894, Armenians in the Turkish empire seeking equal civil rights with Turks held a demonstration in Istanbul. Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid made this an excuse to use police and organised mobs to kill not just the demonstrators but at least 100,000 Armenians across Turkey - most dramatically at Urfa, where 3,000 were burned to death inside the cathedral.
In England and the United States, the public outcry put pressure on the governments to do something. Elsewhere there was little interest.
That lack of reaction encouraged the revolutionary Young Turks movement, which overthrew Abdul Hamid in 1908, to plan genocide on a bigger scale during the first world war. The Young Turks feared that Armenians would support Russia if it invaded, and decided to remove the threat by removing the Armenians. The entire populations of many Armenian villages were massacred.
Other Armenians were driven from their homes on forced marches of hundreds of kilometres without adequate food, and died of starvation or exhaustion; or were shot when they fell behind. Estimates of the numbers that died vary between 1 million and 1.5 million. There are virtually no Armenians today in their former heartland provinces. The Armenians' fate was widely reported by foreigners living in the affected areas and confirmed by detailed investigations after Turkey's defeat.
The main organiser, Young Turk leader Mehmet Talaat, was assassinated in Hamburg in 1921 by an Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian. A German jury, after hearing Talaat's telegrams ordering the genocide, acquitted Tehlirian of murder.
The Armenian genocide was a direct encouragement to Hitler to embark on the extermination of the Jews. In 1939, as German armies invaded Poland, he ordered them to ignore the laws of war and mercilessly kill civilians, with the words: 'Who remembers the Armenians?'
Turkey remains in denial about the Armenian genocide, and this April forced the closure of a United Nations exhibition about the Rwanda genocide because of references to it. Without recognition of what happened, a terrible injustice continues to the memory of the dead and their surviving relatives, and the prevention of future genocide is harder.
That is why it is particularly timely and appropriate that the US Congress panel voted to recognise the Armenian genocide - at last.
Paul Harris is a barrister and was the founding chairman of Human Rights Monitor
