The most controversial issue still arising from the First World War – was there an Armenian Genocide? – will come to a head on 24th April 2015, the day when Armenians around the world will commemorate it and Turkey will deny it ever happened. This question has an international impact; 20 parliaments in democratic countries have voted to recognise the genocide, but Britain prefers to equivocate while the US is torn between Congress, which wants to recognise, and President Obama who does not, for fear of alienating its ally Turkey.
In this important book, Geoffrey Robertson QC, a former UN appeals judge, sets out to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that that the massacres and deportations were a crime against humanity which amounted to genocide.
The book discloses recent secret policy memoranda prepared in the Foreign Office, showing how an unethical policy of ‘genocide equivocation’ has been developed behind the scenes by British diplomats in order to avoid alienating Turkey. The memoranda reveal how British policy on this issue has twisted and turned in order to avoid stating a truth of which Lloyd George and Winston Churchill were volubly certain, about massacres which Britain condemned in 1915 as ‘a crime against humanity and civilisation’.
The book makes a major contribution to the understanding of genocide, and to the steps the international community must take to prevent its recurrence.
Published ahead of the centenary year of one of the biggest crimes of the last century, this extraordinary book proves conclusively that what took place in Turkey was genocide.
