Armenian Genocide 2010 petition launched

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to officially and publicly condemn the Armenian Genocide as such.

"Times change, but as other civilised nations recognise, the universal crimes of genocide and torture have no statute of limitations. Judge Balthazar Garzon, in opening his investigation of the crimes of the Franco era, declared that their perpetrators should have no posthumous impunity: the same might be said of the authors of the Armenian Genocide." - Geoffrey Robertson QC, Legal opinion on the Armenian Genocide, October 2009.

Please sign the petition online at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/genocide2010/

Robert Fisk on Geoffrey Robertson QC's legal opinion on the Armenian Genocide

"But while we're on the subject of Holocausts, let's turn to the unmentionable one, the Armenian Holocaust – yes, also a capital "H" – which our Foreign Office still claims to believe doesn't qualify as a genocide. A million and a half Armenian Christians were murdered or sent on death marches in 1915 by the Muslim Ottoman Turks, but the British Government doesn't want to upset the present-day Turks.

Denis MacShane, to his great credit, has long demanded an independent international commission to inquire into the massacres. Documents unearthed by Geoffrey Robertson QC under the Freedom of Information Act, however, show not only the hypocrisy and cynicism of the Foreign Office – cutting Armenians out of Holocaust Memorial Day and denying that there is "unequivocal evidence" of genocide (which of course there is), but admitting that "HMG is open to criticism in terms of the ethical question (sic)" in denying the Armenian Holocaust but should do so "given the importance of our relations (political, strategic and commercial) with Turkey...".

For the correspondence between "researcher analysts", "draftpersons" and ministers also betrays what I believe is a growing and hateful practice: sloppy grammar and spelling in emails. For some reason, we would never accept such a practice in a typewritten note. But here's a classic example of a letter to a minister which includes not only political dishonesty but also an inability even to reread and correct a printed communication.

The note, dated 21 January last year, refers to the Foreign Office's habit of dredging up three of Turkey's favourite historians – who, needless, to say, deny the Armenian Holocaust – and of the public's demand for a full list of historians consulted by the FO's "researchers". I leave it to readers to groan at the inadequacy of the text, let alone the mistakes of FO "draftsperson" Sofka Brown:

"We've had a response (which has taken its time getting round to u)s which very specifically requests a detailed list of all the evidence looked at wich leads us to believe that the evidence is not sufficiently unequivocal. We do not propose to provide a list is reply..."

The misplaced closing of brackets, the mis-spelling of "which" (as "wich") and "in" (as "is") would be regarded as poor English at an average school. But what are we to make of it when it's contained in a Foreign Office note to a minister?

I guess HMG's civil servant was just patrolling fertile zones of convergence at genre borders between Armenia and Turkey. I apologise for "any" offence caused to Sofka Brown."

New Statesman: "Genocide denied", Geoffrey Robertson QC

"There are few genocides more clearly established than that suffered by the Armenians in 1915-16, when half the race was extinguished in massacres and deportations directed by the Young Turk government. Today you can be prosecuted in France and other European countries for denying the slaughter. But the world's most influential genocide denier - other than Turkey itself - is the British government, which has repeatedly asserted that there is insufficient evidence that what it terms a "tragedy" amounted to genocide. Now, thanks to the Freedom of  Information Act, we learn that (in the words of Foreign Office memos) commercial and political relations with Turkey have required abandoning "the ethical dimension".

For the past ten years, various Foreign Office ministers, from Geoff Hoon to Mark Malloch Brown, have told parliament that "neither this government nor previous governments have judged that the evidence is sufficiently unequivocal to persuade us that these events should be categorised as genocide, as defined by the 1948 convention". This would have come as a shock to the architects of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide (for whom the Armenian genocide was second only to the Holocaust), as well as to the wartime British government, which accused the Turks of proceeding "systematically to exterminate a whole race out of their domain". (Winston Churchill described it as "an administrative holocaust . . . there is no reasonable doubt that this crime was executed for political reasons.)"

Djulfa Virtual Memorial and Museum

“There are thousands of khatchkars (cross-stones) here. Each khatchkar could very easily become a rare exhibit in any of the most famous European museums… If all of Europe’s millionaires were to enter the old Djulfa forest of khatchkars and come out bankrupt, the forest would not be endangered in any way.” – A European scholar on the Djulfa cemetery before the destruction

“A medieval cemetery regarded as one of the wonders of the Caucasus has been erased from the Earth in an act of cultural vandalism likened to the Taleban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.” - The Times, London

The Djulfa Virtual Memorial and Museum is dedicated to documenting and raising awareness about the intentional destruction of the largest medieval Armenian cemetery – located in Djulfa (Jugha) – and the entire Armenian cultural heritage in the region of Nakhichevan, Republic of Azerbaijan.

Visit the Museum online at www.djulfa.com