Remembering genocide in the twentieth century 23/1/01

DAVID SELLS:
How can anyone object to a Holocaust Memorial Day, pinned as it is to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz back in 1945? Auschwitz is the incarnation of evil in our time - the largest of the Nazi death camps, the hub of Hitler's bid to exterminate Europe's Jews. And yet when you ponder the idea of a Holocaust Memorial Day there are questions. Why a specifically British commemoration? We played no part in the Holocaust. And how do you choose among genocides to remember? The Government has sponsored a Memorial Day educational pack for schoolchildren. It is a mix of Sunday school moralising and pertinent history.

UNNAMED MAN:
This shoe, for me, in a way sums up the Holocaust. This is about the murder of innocents.

SELLS:
It's aimed at young people like those we encountered at the Imperial War Museum in London. The exhibition, like the Memorial Day, is designed to make people think. Mind you, the very concept of a Memorial Day has, from the beginning, been linked by the Blair government to a wider agenda - to its promotion of a tolerant and a just society. As for the exhibition, it is overwhelming, a blistering reminder of man's inhumanity to man.

UNNAMED MAN 2:
When you read that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, actually seeing it, seeing these bodies being thrown away and being told accounts of people who lived through that, you know it's really riveting, it does stick in your mind really well.

UNNAMED GIRL:
What stuck in my mind about the whole thing was the personal accounts, video footage of survivors today, and that was awful. I don't think I've been in an exhibition that actually made me nearly cry. I couldn't understand it. I didn't really know what to think. It was hard to comprehend how a race of people just like us could have done something to this whole other race of people and the extent of it is what I can't understand.

SELLS:
The exhibition focuses, as does the Memorial Day, on the murder of six million Jews - on the Holocaust with a capital "H". But, as we learned from a Jewish historian who sits on the Holocaust Memorial Day steering committee, the forthcoming commemoration professes a wider aim.

DAVID CESARANI:
PROFESSOR OF JEWISH HISTORY, SOUTHAMPTON UNIVERSITY
The ambition of all those involved in bringing about Holocaust Memorial Day has been to show where prejudice, bigotry, political intolerance, racism and anti-Semitism can lead - they can lead to mass murder, concentration camps, atrocities, abuse of human rights - and from understanding that to learn to value and to cherish democracy, tolerance, diversity.

SELLS:
Life, alas, rarely offers clear choices. And often the grubby realities of politics often seek to intrude. Take this exhibition, for example. The debate at the outset was whether to make it "20th Century Genocides " or, more narrowly specific, "The Holocaust Exhibition," centring on Hitler's annihilation of European Jews. The result was a partial compromise. Yes to the Holocaust, whose victims were primarily Jews, but with an agreement in 18 months' time to introduce an additional exhibit here, featuring other 20th-century genocides. The first and bloodiest of which was Ottoman Turkey's slaughter of the Armenians in 1915. It was the British government, with the help of the distinguished historian Arnold Toynbee, who first documented the massacres, bringing them to the world's attention. 86 years on, the Turks flatly deny genocide, deny that the Ottoman government decided to butcher its Armenian population. There was a war on, they say. There was chaos. Large numbers of civilians, Turkish and Armenian, unavoidably died. Winston Churchill had no doubts. He dubbed it a "holocaust", but today's British Government flinches at the word genocide. For Britain, as for the United States, Turkey remains a key regional ally - British and American warplanes need their air base, for instance, to patrol Iraq - so Turkey must not be upset by inconvenient truths. So much for "Remembering Genocides".

MARK LEVENE:
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, WARWICK UNIVERSITY
It's a tremendous paradox. In the First World War, the British government produced a remarkable report from Toynbee. Within a few years of that report, the British government was bending over backwards to ignore the very word Armenia. One has to ask, why is that? What has been going on? Why is it that for the last 80 years, British and other Western governments have been in effect colluding with another government - the Turkish government - to avoid this issue? And that's exactly the sort of unpleasant question which I think has to be asked in relation to this Holocaust Memorial Day. Why is it that we can look at one example of a genocide and pronounce this to be evil, yet with another example we actually find ourselves doing exactly the opposite, running away from it?

SELLS:
Armand Keshishian is 95, an Armenian survivor from 1915. A youngster at the time, he fled Kayseri in central Anatolia with his family. Mr Keshishian recalls girls jumping to their deaths rather than submit to rape. Turkey, he feels, should own up. The choice is simple.

ARMAND KESHISHIAN:
It is to tell the truth. You can't hide it. I have lived in it. In the end they have massacred. My uncle, I can show you the pictures, my uncle, from my family seven people have been killed.

A GIRL SINGS IN ARMENIAN

SELLS:
For young Armenians, too, the genocide is a potent memory, passed down the generations. Many are keen to remind the world of what happened to their forefathers. This Armenian band call themselves Hokis, which means "my soul". Their song is entitled "Genocide", and tells the story of a young man who, in a dream, seeks revenge against the Turks for 1915. Hokis have been touring around the world with their new album, and the most popular song is the one about genocide. Why, all these years on, write such a song?

HARRY BOZADJLAN:
It's something which I feel very strongly about, being Armenian. It's a topic which is always around in the Armenian community. I just wanted to express my views on it.

NATALIE MANUKYAN:
The Jews have been apologised to. Everybody knows about the genocide. It was a mass genocide. The Armenian genocide was on the same scale. And, you know, no-one's apologised. No-one's even accounted for it, no-one's recognised that it exists. That's what makes us so angry, that nobody's recognising it, acknowledging it.

SELLS:
When the French parliament voted last week to recognise the 1915 killings as genocide, Turkey was furious. It recalled its ambassador for consultations. Ankara screams blue murder whenever the subject comes up. And most of Turkey's allies keep quiet, and look the other way. Choices about what a nation should commemorate tend to be arbitrary. Morality and politics become intertwined. And piety, like patriotism, is not enough. The issue is complicated and sensitive. By using the Jewish Holocaust as its focus for the Memorial Day, as its emblematic atrocity, the Government is in danger of narrowing the debate on such evils, rather than widening it. Jewish critics fear too that it helps to paint them into history, as Hitler saw them, as pariahs. And then, of course, there are the political shibboleths of the day that are kowtowed to, as the Armenians know to their cost. And while the Government, in its education pack, refers to Rwanda and Bosnia as modern genocides - dubiously, some may feel, in the Balkan case - it ignores such tricky holocausts as the 1937 rape of Nanking, when inside six weeks Japanese troops slaughtered at least 260,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians in the then Chinese capital. The Japanese today, like the Turks, still cannot bring themselves to face the truth of history. Our own government is selective. It remains invidious about the Armenians. It overlooks, too, the murder of more than a million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot in the mid-1970s. A genocide indeed.

NICK COHEN:
NEW STATESMAN AND OBSERVER
In all seriousness, I hope that this day, which I regarded as misconceived and hypocritical, does teach some people to think about tyrannies in history. The danger of all this is that if you take the Holocaust as your benchmark for moral outrage, it's such an extreme event, modern injustices seem paltry in comparison.

SELLS:
When you said "misconceived and hypocritical", what did you have in mind?

COHEN:
I think the British state just simply isn't good enough, morally or intellectually, to handle these issues. It should back off. It should leave it alone. It should leave it to families of those who were killed to commemorate in their way, and should leave it to historians and others, to try and come to terms with this. It is really not the role of government to get engaged in professional and vapid mourning.

SELLS:
Auschwitz endures, a name to haunt the ages, but it is not alone in the litany of genocide. In selecting the Holocaust for remembrance, rather than genocides plural, or simply leaving commemoration to the individual, the Blair government is being seen to have made a moral choice. But, as it found when it promoted foreign policy with an ethical dimension, it is politics that calls the tune.