19th March 2024
Archbishop Krikoris Balakian Lecture at the Armenian Church St. Yeghiche Church, Cranely Gardens: March 2024. “Ethnic Cleansing: Does International Law Still Matter?”
David Alton. (Professor the Lord Alton of Liverpool)
Bishop Hovakim Manukyan has set me quite a task in inviting me to deliver the first lecture named for Archbishop Krikoris Balakian and in turn I doubt that I will do justice to either the subject matter “Ethnic Cleansing: Does International Law Still Matter?”or to the illustrious and holy man after whom the lecture is named.
Archbishop Balakian’s own story is, of course, rooted in the Armenian Genocide – of which he was a survivor. In 1915, in Constantinople, he was arrested with 250 other leading Armenians who were forced onto the death march into the Syrian desert. On learning from one of his captors of the Ottoman government’s plan to exterminate the whole Armenian population, Balakian took part in a hair-raising escape and was just one of sixteen who survived. His memoir – Armenian Golgotha – is a crucial first-hand account of the horrific genocide which occurred – and a rebuke to those who so easily forget – or fail to keep records and witness statements. When we fail to remember we are doomed to repeat the same atrocities all over again. Every bad thing which happens in the world – and there is no shortage of them at this present time – those bad things start with forgetting the bad things that happened before.
So let me divide my remarks into first recalling the Armenian Genocide and why I believe that what has happened in Nagorno-Karabakh is an extension of those events which began in 1915, and which were prefigured by atrocities to which the world turned a blind eye. I will then say something about the use of the phrase ethnic cleansing, about definitions and international law and I will touch on some of the other situations involving ethnic cleansing.
- The Armenian Genocide.
On 24 September 1896, at the age of 86, and having been elected Prime Minster four times, William Ewart Gladstone returned to the city of Liverpool to give his last public speech. To the thousands who had gathered to hear him at Hengler’s Circus – which was in a Liverpool neighbourhood where 80 years later I would be Member of Parliament – Gladstone said they might wonder what had brought an old man out of his quiet retirement at Hawarden Castle in North Wales. He then provided the answer: ‘two Armenian gentlemen.’
In 1876, Gladstone had published his ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.’ In a tirade against the tyranny of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans Gladstone used all his powers of rhetoric:
Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves… from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This… is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah to the moral sense of mankind at large. (…) That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!
Of course, repetition of those atrocities is precisely what did happen.
Gladstone turned his moral indignation into a nationwide clarion call, the Midlothian Campaigns calling on civilised nations to stand together; for Britain to assert a doctrine of ‘equal rights of all nations’; and, in particular, for Britain to condemn the brutality of the Ottoman Empire against its Christian subjects and to defend their right to believe and worship freely.
The Hengler’s Circus speech came after a series of pogroms throughout Turkey’s Armenian provinces – and even in the capital, Istanbul. The Armenians – and other Christian minorities – were forced to pay ‘double taxes’ and were denied many civil rights.Their protests against this discrimination led to their wholesale slaughter.
At Hawarden, Gladstone had carefully taken first-hand accounts from his two visitors, and he began his remarks by saying ‘The powers of language hardly suffice to describe what has been and is being done, and exaggeration, if we were ever so much disposed to it, is in such a case really beyond our power.’
He declared ‘We are not dealing with a common and ordinary question of abuses of government. We are dealing with something that goes far deeper (…) four awful words – plunder, murder, rape, and torture.
In describing the ‘horribly accumulated outrages’ he demanded a non-sectarian and non-partisan approach, and he also emphasised that ‘this is no crusade against Mohammedanism’; that, whatever faith had been held by the Armenians, ‘it would have been incumbent upon us with the same force and the same sacredness’ to speak out on their behalf. With precision, Gladstone identified and named the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II – ‘The assassin’ – as responsible for the order to massacre the Armenians; and he roundly condemned the European powers for giving the Sultan ‘The assurance of impunity.’ While believing that ideally, Europe should act together, he bitterly criticised their failure to do so: ‘Collectively, the powers have undergone miserable disgrace.’ But, when Europe failed to act, Gladstone said Britain had the right to act alone and not ‘make herself a slave to be dragged at the chariot wheel of other powers of Europe.’
A German newspaper, The Hamburger Nachrichten, took Mr. Gladstone to task and responded: ‘For us [Germans] the sound bones of a single Pomeranian [German] grenadier are worth more than the lives of 10,000 Armenians.’
Many of these same arguments have relevance and application in our own times but so does the challenge which comes at the culmination of his Hengler’s Circus address: he demands no ambiguity, no neutrality but condemnation of crimes against humanity ‘which have already come to such a magnitude and to such a depth of atrocity that they constitute the most terrible, most monstrous series of proceedings that have ever been recorded in the dismal and deplorable history of human crime.’
Gladstone was right to prophesy that indifference would lead to catastrophic consequences. We will see the same response and the same consequences in other examples which I will cite later.
He told his audience in 1896 that if they were indifferent when people in faraway provinces were slaughtered it would only be a matter of time before the same horrors were visited upon them.
Seventeen years after Gladstone’s death, the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 would become the second genocide of the twentieth century (after the Herero and Nama genocide).
Over one million men, women and children were killed as the Ottoman Turks sought to entirely erase the Armenian identity from eastern Turkey.
1.5 million ethnic Armenians were arrested, deported, or murdered by the Ottoman Empire. Geoffrey Robertson KC, in “Was There An Armenian Genocide?” concluded that:
the evidence is compelling… their deliberate fanning of racial superiority theories in the Turkification programme; the deportation orders and their foresight of the consequences; their failure to protect the deportees or to punish their attackers, some of whom were state agents. They instigated, or at very least acquiesced in, the killing of a significant part of the Armenian race – probably about half of those who were alive in Eastern Turkey at the beginning of 1915… if these same events occurred today, in a country with a history similar to Turkey’s in 1915, there can be no doubt that prosecutions for genocide would be warranted and indeed required by the Genocide Convention.
In the 1950s, as a child, my dying grandfather gave me pictures of Armenians, which he had collected during the capture of Jerusalem where he served as a soldier with General Edmund Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force. The pictures were of Armenians executed by the Ottomans during their retreat, after the capture of Jerusalem.
I would see some of the same pictures again in 2007 when, with my daughter, Marianne, and my parliamentary colleague, and friend, Baroness Caroline Cox, I travelled to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. In Yerevan, we took the opportunity to visit the Memorial to the Genocide victims and to spend time in the genocide museum.
The museum has collated the memories, photographs, and records into a damning indictment of both the objectives of the Ottoman Turks and the abject failure of the international community to act on the information which its own diplomats had assembled – and which in an overwhelming number of countries has not been recognised as a genocide.
To this day, in pandering to Recep Erdogan, rather than upholding the truth and seeking the healing of history, the UK’s Foreign Office defends Turkey as a potential ally in the ‘fight against terror’ as a ‘NATO ally’ and as a post-Brexit target trading partner.
Although the US has often taken much the same position as the UK, in 2019 the US House of Representatives decided that truth mattered more. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat Congresswoman from California, the only Armenian-Assyrian member of Congress said:
I’ve been waiting for this moment since I first came to Congress 27 years ago… Members of my own family were among those murdered, and my parents fled with my grandparents to America. What all the persecuted had in common was that they were Christians.
The evidence is there for all to see.
Hayk Demoyan, the Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, showed me letters written by three women who had been deported to Brazil, and which had recently been given to the museum. One pregnant woman whose experiences led to a miscarriage wrote: ‘These eyes saw things the world should never see.’
I was struck by the first-hand accounts of Christian relief workers and missionaries working with the Armenians at the time of the genocide.
Maria Jacobsen, a Danish missionary, wrote in her diary that the atrocities had their beginning in June 1915:
It was proclaimed from all mosques today that all Armenians are to be sent into exile. They are to be given four days in which to dispose of their possessions, to be ready for their journey to an unknown destination for an indefinite period. It is said that they will be sent to the desert south of Ourfa. If this is true, then it is obvious that the whole meaning behind this movement of the Armenian people is their extermination.
On 24 July, she noted ‘Any Turk who hides an Armenian will be hanged and his house burnt. All houses from the poorest to the richest are to be searched.’[1] By 14 August, she was writing ‘Poor, poor Armenians, what you have had to endure.’
The historian, Arnold Toynbee, meanwhile, wrote of the premeditated and systematic nature of the genocide: ‘The attempt to exterminate the Armenians during World War One was carried out under the cloak of legality by cold-blooded government action. These are not mass murders committed spontaneously by mobs and private people.’
Winston Churchill wrote that ‘There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.’ Despite the overwhelming evidence and contemporary accounts – and Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s own assertion that ‘The best way to finish the Armenian question is to finish the Armenians.’[2] To this day Turkey has persisted in denying that the genocide ever took place. They have also refused to open their borders and to normalise relations with Armenia until all talk of genocide is stopped.
In 1933, Franz Werfel published his powerful novel, ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’, set during the Armenian genocide and which Turkey has always tried to suppress. Hitler had Werfel’s books burnt, hoping to give force to his remark ‘who now remembers the Armenians?’ Amnesia about the deadly phenomenon of deportations, concentration camps, rape and killings and ethnic cleansing did not end in 1915 with the Ottomans. Hitler simply believed that people’s indifference would enable him to murder with impunity as he began his campaign of Jewish annihilation.
There is an old Armenian saying, echoed in Musa Dagh, that ‘to be an Armenian is an impossibility’– a saying which had equal applicability to the Jews of Hitler’s Germany.
That impossibility of being able to be who you are is a wretched experience shared today by minorities the world over.
Even today’s Armenians, living in their homeland and in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, have faced the ever-present danger of constant unspeakable acts, motivated by the same hatred which ignited the genocide of 1915.
I have seen its consequences first-hand in the tiny remnants of Christian communities in Southeast Turkey, in Kurdish refugee camps of Northern Iraq, on the Yezidi Holy Mountain of Sinjar. Recep Erdogan’s Turkish nationalism and Islamist extremism is illustrated by his gratuitous decision to turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and indicative of his unwillingness to live with difference or to respect one another’s traditions or history.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilus III, was right to recall that in previous epochs of history, the seizure or destruction of one another’s sacred places and holy sites has led to centuries of bitterness and hostility. He said:
Our experience in Jerusalem is that to attempt to treat contested holy sites in an exclusive manner is simply a recipe for bitterness and suffering. When our holy sites are open to all, there is peace and mutual respect. (…) Turkey is a country with great potential to show the world the benefits of our common humanity and our common human destiny. The Orthodox world appeals to the Turkish government: We urge Turkey to live up to that potential and show the world the value of coexistence between its various communities.
Erdogan’s agenda is a very different one.
He sees himself as heir to the Ottoman Empire and staged the reopening of Hagia Sophia, as a mosque, to take place on the anniversary of the capture of Constantinople by Mehmet II – celebrating it as an act of conquest. This sequestration and usurping of buildings and artefacts is done with clinical precision and a purpose – it is to create the fiction, the lie, that these people no longer exist, that they are non-persons, and that no one much cares.
And as he emboldens his allies in Azerbaijan, and takes advantage of the decline of Russian influence, it is self-evident that not only has he encouraged the hostilities and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh but his pan-Turkic dream of completing the work of the Ottomans and eliminating Armenia is as potent and dangerous now as it was in 1915.
In September 2023 Azerbaijan’s unprovoked massive military attack on Nagorno Karabakh – Artsakh -which has its origins as part of the 10th province of the Kingdom of Armenia, existing from around 189 BC to 387 AD – ended three decades of contemporary de facto independence. There had been two wars over the enclave – in 1994 and 2020 (the 44 Day War). After the first war five de facto states came into existence following civil wars which began at the end of the Soviet era – and had their origins in Stalin’s mass displacements: Abkhazia, Chechnya, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Nagorno-Karabakh. There was internal sovereignty but no external recognition or international legitimacy – and unresolved issues simply stored up trouble for the future. Azeri refugees were decanted to camps in Azerbaijan. I have visited those camps and wrote at the time that as no real attempt was being made to permanently resettle them or to find long-term solutions this would simply come back to bite again.
It did in 2023. That attack – following the deliberate attempt by Azerbaijan to stave the people into submission via the blockade of the Lachin Corridor – about which I regularly raised questions in the UK Parliament – has led to the mass exodus of 100,000 Armenians driven from their ancient homeland. As the European Parliament and the US Administration have made clear this gross displacement not only has huge humanitarian consequences, but also has implications for identity, self-determination, sovereignty, and territorial integrity – with a read across to Ukraine, Taiwan, Guyana, the Falklands and elsewhere.
The resolution of some of these questions is not helped by hazy definitions and little international agreement about which principle takes precedence. Ethnic cleansing has no formal definition and is not recognised as a separate crime in international law. The UN Commission of Experts which examined what happened in the former Yugoslavia simply said ethnic cleansing could be regarded as a contributor to war crimes and could fall within the terms of the Geneva Convention. But note the ambiguity and lack of force.
But beyond legal remedies, the resolution is also hindered by the lack of emphasis placed by political and religious leaders in shaping discourse about how different ethnic and religious groups can take practical steps re-enforced by legal settlement recognising the rights of ethnic and religious communities and the objective of creating shared space and mutual respect, and co-existence. From time-to-time Azerbaijan has spoken such words but its deeds do not. Indeed, the drumbeat was never silenced and along with the bunkers, landmines, and Israeli-made drones and Turkish state-of-the-art weapons, along with the caricatures and offensive stigmatisation of its Armenian neighbours, the aggressive intentions of Baku were never far below the surface.
The signs of international crimes have been speaking their name for decades.
Recall that ethnic Armenians are banned from entering Azerbaijan; children in Azeri schools are taught that all Armenians are enemies; Azeri President Ilham Aliyev and his officials make fierce, offensive deeply racist statements about Armenians, describing some as “dogs” and calling for the “decontamination” of Nagorno Karabakh; those who kill Armenians abroad, like Ramil Safarov, are rewarded by the state; at the Baku Trophy Park children have been taken to see grotesque offensive mannequins of Armenian soldiers with exaggerated features and exhibited in humiliating poses.
But which countries have protested about this?
Who contradicted President Aliyev when he described “Armenia as a country is of no value. It is actually a colony, an outpost run from abroad, a territory artificially created on ancient Azerbaijani lands” tweeting that “Turkey and Azerbaijan work in a coordinated manner to dispel the myth of the ‘Armenian genocide’ in the world”. “Armenia is not even a colony; it is not even worthy of being a servant.” “We are driving them away like dogs”
The stigmatising propaganda doesn’t end there.
All of Armenia is referred to as “Western Azerbaijan”, with propaganda created to accompany that fiction and to airbrush out of existence Armenian heritage and culture with academics in Azerbaijan renaming Armenians as “Caucasian Albanian”.
Its intentions for Nagorno Karabakh can be seen in the eradication of all Armenian cultural and religious heritage in the exclave of Nakhichevan; and in the use of sledgehammers to destroy the cemetery of Julfa which contained thousands of stunning beautifully carved 1000-year-old Armenian khachkars. In an act of desecration, a shooting ground has been erected over the cemetery with access denied to UNESCO and outside observers.
There was a deafening silence from the international community after the 2020 war; during the endless persecution which followed and in the aftermath of the 2023 ethnic cleansing. And Azerbaijan is by no means finished.
Thirty one Armenian villages, excluding enclaves, are currently occupied by Azerbaijan, which is making illegal territorial claims to them. Mr. Aliyev says: “This is our land. We are on our land. Lake Garagol (Lake Sevan) _and other places are ours. We are here now.” Azerbaijan is seeking to cut road links from Armenia to Georgia and Iran – all part of a process of asphyxiation.
In September 2023, following the starvation and bombardment of Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan reopened the Lachin Corridor and grabbing whatever they could carry people were forced to flee – some being struck by gunfire and shrapnel.
As they fled to Armenia, they had to abandon their homes, their churches and ancient burial grounds, their museums, their schools, indeed, everything which gave them definition as the rightful and indigenous inhabitants of Artsakh.
Note too that there are more than 4000 Armenian historical and cultural monuments under the threat of total destruction and the territory is subjected to historical revisionism.
Note also that Russian troops – theoretically there to protect Armenians – told the people to leave their villages, that they should not resist and that they would be free to return. As the people fled some of the Russian troops stole personal belongings. The reality is that Russia backs Azerbaijan, describing ethnic cleansing as an Azeri anti-terrorist campaign. In true Putinesque style it continues to deny that the deportation of Armenians has occurred. Confiscated military hardware was sent west to be used against the Ukrainians.
On 10 October 2023, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution strongly condemning Azerbaijan’s “clear disregard” for international norms, warning Azerbaijan that “the practice of ethnic cleansing, may give rise to individual criminal responsibility under international law.”
Although most European countries have acknowledged the plunder of Nagorno Karabakh as ethnic cleansing, along with Russia, the UK government still refuses to call it ethnic cleansing. Why not? Why hasn’t it imposed Magnitsky sanctions on those responsible? It is high time that it did instead of implying a moral equivalence between Armenians and Azeris.
On 17 November 2023, the International Court of Justice set out the rights of the people who had been forced to flee but as of this month no Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians have been allowed by Azerbaijan to return to their homes and no measures have been proposed by Azerbaijan to enable this to happen. And without the presence of international peacekeepers who would feel safe?
On 7 August 2023, Luis Ocampo, the first Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, produced a report on Nagorno-Karabakh. He said that what has occurred revealed a disturbing pattern of human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, and disregard for international law on the part of Azerbaijan towards the ethnic Armenian population.
In a further report, he says he believes that Azerbaijan’s treatment of the Armenian population constitutes a genocide, citing Article II(b) of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and he has given evidence to that effect to the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee and to the European Parliament.
Professor Melanie O’Brien, President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, says the Lachin blockade was the start of a genocide, as it was implemented with the aim of “deliberately inflicting conditions of life designed to bring about the physical destruction of the targeted group.”
The International lawyer, Priya Pillai, says Azerbaijan’s actions constitute the conditions for the war crime of “deportation or forcible transfer”, or potentially a crime against humanity. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Genocide Watch both described the wholesale attack on the population as constituting genocide.
Genocide Watch says “Azerbaijani forces are still attempting to capture new territory…Azerbaijan is using Syrian mercenaries. Azerbaijan’s political ally, Turkey, provides air support for Azerbaijani forces, sparking fears that Turkey will resume the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – 1922.”
Genocide Watch reminds us that “Forced displacement is a crime against humanity;” that Azerbaijan’s leaders deny the 1915 genocide while “The Azerbaijani government promotes hate speech and encourages violence against Armenians”. They also published the ten warning signs that are indicative of an impending genocide.
The clear objective is to eliminate Armenians from the Caucasus, just as the Ottoman Turks did in 1915 in Asia Minor. This is simply the continuation of a slow-burn genocide.
But without official recognition of this reality and without recognition of a justiciable crime how do you ensure enforceability?
In trying to find the answer to that question I have been reading East West Street by Philippe Sands KC.
In a deeply moving personal account – which is born in the mass killings of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Tribunal – he unravels the factors that led Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht to bring Nazi War Criminals to trial and to forge legal mechanisms to hold to account those responsible for genocide or crimes against humanity. The phrase ethnic cleansing was not used – perhaps it is time to rectify that?
But Armenia is itself at least one step closer to being able to use existing mechanisms.
On February 1st Armenia formally came under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by signing the Rome Statute. It opens the door to the prosecution of Azeri leaders, including the sort of arrest warrants issued against Vladimir Putin.
Without the upholding of international law, we resort to the laws of the jungle. That is why Nagorno-Karabakh matters so much.
If you are a Hazara facing genocide in Afghanistan, a Yazidi facing genocide in Northern Iraq, a Christian facing genocide in parts of Nigeria, a Rohingya facing genocide at the hands of the Burmese military, a Darfuri African experiencing, at this very moment, the second genocide of the 21st century – and atrocities in other places too, from Xinjiang to the Middle East – the rule of law is not merely about the theory.
Victims don’t have that luxury or time to ask why the signatories to the Genocide Convention repeatedly fail in their legally binding duty to prevent, protect and punish and, since Bosnia, to predict by looking for emerging signs of genocide. If they have no intention of honouring what they signed up to they should withdraw their signatures rather than devaluing a solemn duty.
Be clear – when we fail to do what we pledged to do there are grave lethal consequences. Consider what happens when a solemn and binding duty is disregarded, when a death warrant can be issued against a whole race – as happened with the Armenians – when outrageous brutality, mutilation, and violence are left to haunt a country’s landscape, when despots can plan the ethnic cleansing or the annihilation of an entire people: that is when the law must assert itself.
And if you don’t want history to repeat itself, you must at least be told truthfully about historical events and the role of your country in those events. The belief that noone really cares is what always encourages the tyrant.
Hitler believed he could invade Poland and do so with impunity. His ‘final solution’ of the Jews was preceded by his notorious question: ‘who after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’[4] The same rationale – a culture of impunity – led to the industrialised murders of the concentration camps. The folly of forgetting – collective amnesia about what has gone before – led to Hitler’s ideology of a purified master race – directly inspired by the biological vision of a purified pan-Turkism, based on racial origins and racial superiority; even Hitler’s corruption of medicine and science drew inspiration from the deliberate infecting of Armenians with typhus in a sequence of medical experiments.
In 1942, Stefan Zweig (whose books were also burnt by the Nazis) published ‘The World of Yesterday – Memoirs of a European.’ In it,he describes how quickly a relatively civilised and humane society, and a seemingly permanent golden age, can be ruthlessly and swiftly destroyed. His masterful autobiography charts the rise of visceral hatred; how scapegoating and xenophobia, cultivated by populist leaders, can rapidly morph into genocide, and culminate in the hecatombs of the concentration camps.
A fatal chain of events stretches from the Turkish genocide of the Armenians to Hitler’s concentration camps and to the depredations of Stalin’s gulags and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, from the pestilential nature of persecution, demonization, scapegoating, and hateful prejudice.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, just 32 countries currently recognise the crimes to which the Armenian people were subjected as genocide. This failure to recognise past genocides and to name them for what they are is not insignificant. Such denialism, and associated impunity for the crimes committed, inevitably results in further atrocities. But Turkey should note that despite its threats to countries which recognise the Armenian Genocide, the issue never goes away and will not do so until Turkey itself honestly recognises this chapter in its history for the infamy that it was.
Unhealed history can never and should never be suppressed.
It is why it is so important that we honour the memory of Archbishop Krikoris Balakian tonight and in doing so insist anew, with men like Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, that international law must stand between us and the alliance of dictators and authoritarians who seek to replace the rule of law based on a world order determined by their hegemony. Yes, international law does still matter.
Bishop Hovakim Manukyan has set me quite a task in inviting me to deliver the first lecture named for Archbishop Krikoris Balakian and in turn I doubt that I will do justice to either the subject matter “Ethnic Cleansing: Does International Law Still Matter?”or to the illustrious and holy man after whom the lecture is named.
Archbishop Balakian’s own story is, of course, rooted in the Armenian Genocide – of which he was a survivor. In 1915, in Constantinople, he was arrested with 250 other leading Armenians who were forced onto the death march into the Syrian desert. On learning from one of his captors of the Ottoman government’s plan to exterminate the whole Armenian population, Balakian took part in a hair-raising escape and was just one of sixteen who survived. His memoir – Armenian Golgotha – is a crucial first-hand account of the horrific genocide which occurred – and a rebuke to those who so easily forget – or fail to keep records and witness statements. When we fail to remember we are doomed to repeat the same atrocities all over again. Every bad thing which happens in the world – and there is no shortage of them at this present time – those bad things start with forgetting the bad things that happened before.
So let me divide my remarks into first recalling the Armenian Genocide and why I believe that what has happened in Nagorno-Karabakh is an extension of those events which began in 1915, and which were prefigured by atrocities to which the world turned a blind eye. I will then say something about the use of the phrase ethnic cleansing, about definitions and international law and I will touch on some of the other situations involving ethnic cleansing.
- The Armenian Genocide.
On 24 September 1896, at the age of 86, and having been elected Prime Minster four times, William Ewart Gladstone returned to the city of Liverpool to give his last public speech. To the thousands who had gathered to hear him at Hengler’s Circus – which was in a Liverpool neighbourhood where 80 years later I would be Member of Parliament – Gladstone said they might wonder what had brought an old man out of his quiet retirement at Hawarden Castle in North Wales. He then provided the answer: ‘two Armenian gentlemen.’
In 1876, Gladstone had published his ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.’ In a tirade against the tyranny of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans Gladstone used all his powers of rhetoric:
Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves… from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This… is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah to the moral sense of mankind at large. (…) That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!
Of course, repetition of those atrocities is precisely what did happen.
Gladstone turned his moral indignation into a nationwide clarion call, the Midlothian Campaigns calling on civilised nations to stand together; for Britain to assert a doctrine of ‘equal rights of all nations’; and, in particular, for Britain to condemn the brutality of the Ottoman Empire against its Christian subjects and to defend their right to believe and worship freely.
The Hengler’s Circus speech came after a series of pogroms throughout Turkey’s Armenian provinces – and even in the capital, Istanbul. The Armenians – and other Christian minorities – were forced to pay ‘double taxes’ and were denied many civil rights.Their protests against this discrimination led to their wholesale slaughter.
At Hawarden, Gladstone had carefully taken first-hand accounts from his two visitors, and he began his remarks by saying ‘The powers of language hardly suffice to describe what has been and is being done, and exaggeration, if we were ever so much disposed to it, is in such a case really beyond our power.’
He declared ‘We are not dealing with a common and ordinary question of abuses of government. We are dealing with something that goes far deeper (…) four awful words – plunder, murder, rape, and torture.
In describing the ‘horribly accumulated outrages’ he demanded a non-sectarian and non-partisan approach, and he also emphasised that ‘this is no crusade against Mohammedanism’; that, whatever faith had been held by the Armenians, ‘it would have been incumbent upon us with the same force and the same sacredness’ to speak out on their behalf. With precision, Gladstone identified and named the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II – ‘The assassin’ – as responsible for the order to massacre the Armenians; and he roundly condemned the European powers for giving the Sultan ‘The assurance of impunity.’ While believing that ideally, Europe should act together, he bitterly criticised their failure to do so: ‘Collectively, the powers have undergone miserable disgrace.’ But, when Europe failed to act, Gladstone said Britain had the right to act alone and not ‘make herself a slave to be dragged at the chariot wheel of other powers of Europe.’
A German newspaper, The Hamburger Nachrichten, took Mr. Gladstone to task and responded: ‘For us [Germans] the sound bones of a single Pomeranian [German] grenadier are worth more than the lives of 10,000 Armenians.’
Many of these same arguments have relevance and application in our own times but so does the challenge which comes at the culmination of his Hengler’s Circus address: he demands no ambiguity, no neutrality but condemnation of crimes against humanity ‘which have already come to such a magnitude and to such a depth of atrocity that they constitute the most terrible, most monstrous series of proceedings that have ever been recorded in the dismal and deplorable history of human crime.’
Gladstone was right to prophesy that indifference would lead to catastrophic consequences. We will see the same response and the same consequences in other examples which I will cite later.
He told his audience in 1896 that if they were indifferent when people in faraway provinces were slaughtered it would only be a matter of time before the same horrors were visited upon them.
Seventeen years after Gladstone’s death, the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 would become the second genocide of the twentieth century (after the Herero and Nama genocide).
Over one million men, women and children were killed as the Ottoman Turks sought to entirely erase the Armenian identity from eastern Turkey.
1.5 million ethnic Armenians were arrested, deported, or murdered by the Ottoman Empire. Geoffrey Robertson KC, in “Was There An Armenian Genocide?” concluded that:
the evidence is compelling… their deliberate fanning of racial superiority theories in the Turkification programme; the deportation orders and their foresight of the consequences; their failure to protect the deportees or to punish their attackers, some of whom were state agents. They instigated, or at very least acquiesced in, the killing of a significant part of the Armenian race – probably about half of those who were alive in Eastern Turkey at the beginning of 1915… if these same events occurred today, in a country with a history similar to Turkey’s in 1915, there can be no doubt that prosecutions for genocide would be warranted and indeed required by the Genocide Convention.
In the 1950s, as a child, my dying grandfather gave me pictures of Armenians, which he had collected during the capture of Jerusalem where he served as a soldier with General Edmund Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force. The pictures were of Armenians executed by the Ottomans during their retreat, after the capture of Jerusalem.
I would see some of the same pictures again in 2007 when, with my daughter, Marianne, and my parliamentary colleague, and friend, Baroness Caroline Cox, I travelled to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. In Yerevan, we took the opportunity to visit the Memorial to the Genocide victims and to spend time in the genocide museum.
The museum has collated the memories, photographs, and records into a damning indictment of both the objectives of the Ottoman Turks and the abject failure of the international community to act on the information which its own diplomats had assembled – and which in an overwhelming number of countries has not been recognised as a genocide.
To this day, in pandering to Recep Erdogan, rather than upholding the truth and seeking the healing of history, the UK’s Foreign Office defends Turkey as a potential ally in the ‘fight against terror’ as a ‘NATO ally’ and as a post-Brexit target trading partner.
Although the US has often taken much the same position as the UK, in 2019 the US House of Representatives decided that truth mattered more. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat Congresswoman from California, the only Armenian-Assyrian member of Congress said:
I’ve been waiting for this moment since I first came to Congress 27 years ago… Members of my own family were among those murdered, and my parents fled with my grandparents to America. What all the persecuted had in common was that they were Christians.
The evidence is there for all to see.
Hayk Demoyan, the Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, showed me letters written by three women who had been deported to Brazil, and which had recently been given to the museum. One pregnant woman whose experiences led to a miscarriage wrote: ‘These eyes saw things the world should never see.’
I was struck by the first-hand accounts of Christian relief workers and missionaries working with the Armenians at the time of the genocide.
Maria Jacobsen, a Danish missionary, wrote in her diary that the atrocities had their beginning in June 1915:
It was proclaimed from all mosques today that all Armenians are to be sent into exile. They are to be given four days in which to dispose of their possessions, to be ready for their journey to an unknown destination for an indefinite period. It is said that they will be sent to the desert south of Ourfa. If this is true, then it is obvious that the whole meaning behind this movement of the Armenian people is their extermination.
On 24 July, she noted ‘Any Turk who hides an Armenian will be hanged and his house burnt. All houses from the poorest to the richest are to be searched.’[1] By 14 August, she was writing ‘Poor, poor Armenians, what you have had to endure.’
The historian, Arnold Toynbee, meanwhile, wrote of the premeditated and systematic nature of the genocide: ‘The attempt to exterminate the Armenians during World War One was carried out under the cloak of legality by cold-blooded government action. These are not mass murders committed spontaneously by mobs and private people.’
Winston Churchill wrote that ‘There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.’ Despite the overwhelming evidence and contemporary accounts – and Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s own assertion that ‘The best way to finish the Armenian question is to finish the Armenians.’[2] To this day Turkey has persisted in denying that the genocide ever took place. They have also refused to open their borders and to normalise relations with Armenia until all talk of genocide is stopped.
In 1933, Franz Werfel published his powerful novel, ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’, set during the Armenian genocide and which Turkey has always tried to suppress. Hitler had Werfel’s books burnt, hoping to give force to his remark ‘who now remembers the Armenians?’ Amnesia about the deadly phenomenon of deportations, concentration camps, rape and killings and ethnic cleansing did not end in 1915 with the Ottomans. Hitler simply believed that people’s indifference would enable him to murder with impunity as he began his campaign of Jewish annihilation.
There is an old Armenian saying, echoed in Musa Dagh, that ‘to be an Armenian is an impossibility’– a saying which had equal applicability to the Jews of Hitler’s Germany.
That impossibility of being able to be who you are is a wretched experience shared today by minorities the world over.
Even today’s Armenians, living in their homeland and in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, have faced the ever-present danger of constant unspeakable acts, motivated by the same hatred which ignited the genocide of 1915.
I have seen its consequences first-hand in the tiny remnants of Christian communities in Southeast Turkey, in Kurdish refugee camps of Northern Iraq, on the Yezidi Holy Mountain of Sinjar. Recep Erdogan’s Turkish nationalism and Islamist extremism is illustrated by his gratuitous decision to turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and indicative of his unwillingness to live with difference or to respect one another’s traditions or history.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilus III, was right to recall that in previous epochs of history, the seizure or destruction of one another’s sacred places and holy sites has led to centuries of bitterness and hostility. He said:
Our experience in Jerusalem is that to attempt to treat contested holy sites in an exclusive manner is simply a recipe for bitterness and suffering. When our holy sites are open to all, there is peace and mutual respect. (…) Turkey is a country with great potential to show the world the benefits of our common humanity and our common human destiny. The Orthodox world appeals to the Turkish government: We urge Turkey to live up to that potential and show the world the value of coexistence between its various communities.
Erdogan’s agenda is a very different one.
He sees himself as heir to the Ottoman Empire and staged the reopening of Hagia Sophia, as a mosque, to take place on the anniversary of the capture of Constantinople by Mehmet II – celebrating it as an act of conquest. This sequestration and usurping of buildings and artefacts is done with clinical precision and a purpose – it is to create the fiction, the lie, that these people no longer exist, that they are non-persons, and that no one much cares.
And as he emboldens his allies in Azerbaijan, and takes advantage of the decline of Russian influence, it is self-evident that not only has he encouraged the hostilities and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh but his pan-Turkic dream of completing the work of the Ottomans and eliminating Armenia is as potent and dangerous now as it was in 1915.
In September 2023 Azerbaijan’s unprovoked massive military attack on Nagorno Karabakh – Artsakh -which has its origins as part of the 10th province of the Kingdom of Armenia, existing from around 189 BC to 387 AD – ended three decades of contemporary de facto independence. There had been two wars over the enclave – in 1994 and 2020 (the 44 Day War). After the first war five de facto states came into existence following civil wars which began at the end of the Soviet era – and had their origins in Stalin’s mass displacements: Abkhazia, Chechnya, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Nagorno-Karabakh. There was internal sovereignty but no external recognition or international legitimacy – and unresolved issues simply stored up trouble for the future. Azeri refugees were decanted to camps in Azerbaijan. I have visited those camps and wrote at the time that as no real attempt was being made to permanently resettle them or to find long-term solutions this would simply come back to bite again.
It did in 2023. That attack – following the deliberate attempt by Azerbaijan to stave the people into submission via the blockade of the Lachin Corridor – about which I regularly raised questions in the UK Parliament – has led to the mass exodus of 100,000 Armenians driven from their ancient homeland. As the European Parliament and the US Administration have made clear this gross displacement not only has huge humanitarian consequences, but also has implications for identity, self-determination, sovereignty, and territorial integrity – with a read across to Ukraine, Taiwan, Guyana, the Falklands and elsewhere.
The resolution of some of these questions is not helped by hazy definitions and little international agreement about which principle takes precedence. Ethnic cleansing has no formal definition and is not recognised as a separate crime in international law. The UN Commission of Experts which examined what happened in the former Yugoslavia simply said ethnic cleansing could be regarded as a contributor to war crimes and could fall within the terms of the Geneva Convention. But note the ambiguity and lack of force.
But beyond legal remedies, the resolution is also hindered by the lack of emphasis placed by political and religious leaders in shaping discourse about how different ethnic and religious groups can take practical steps re-enforced by legal settlement recognising the rights of ethnic and religious communities and the objective of creating shared space and mutual respect, and co-existence. From time-to-time Azerbaijan has spoken such words but its deeds do not. Indeed, the drumbeat was never silenced and along with the bunkers, landmines, and Israeli-made drones and Turkish state-of-the-art weapons, along with the caricatures and offensive stigmatisation of its Armenian neighbours, the aggressive intentions of Baku were never far below the surface.
The signs of international crimes have been speaking their name for decades.
Recall that ethnic Armenians are banned from entering Azerbaijan; children in Azeri schools are taught that all Armenians are enemies; Azeri President Ilham Aliyev and his officials make fierce, offensive deeply racist statements about Armenians, describing some as “dogs” and calling for the “decontamination” of Nagorno Karabakh; those who kill Armenians abroad, like Ramil Safarov, are rewarded by the state; at the Baku Trophy Park children have been taken to see grotesque offensive mannequins of Armenian soldiers with exaggerated features and exhibited in humiliating poses.
But which countries have protested about this?
Who contradicted President Aliyev when he described “Armenia as a country is of no value. It is actually a colony, an outpost run from abroad, a territory artificially created on ancient Azerbaijani lands” tweeting that “Turkey and Azerbaijan work in a coordinated manner to dispel the myth of the ‘Armenian genocide’ in the world”. “Armenia is not even a colony; it is not even worthy of being a servant.” “We are driving them away like dogs”
The stigmatising propaganda doesn’t end there.
All of Armenia is referred to as “Western Azerbaijan”, with propaganda created to accompany that fiction and to airbrush out of existence Armenian heritage and culture with academics in Azerbaijan renaming Armenians as “Caucasian Albanian”.
Its intentions for Nagorno Karabakh can be seen in the eradication of all Armenian cultural and religious heritage in the exclave of Nakhichevan; and in the use of sledgehammers to destroy the cemetery of Julfa which contained thousands of stunning beautifully carved 1000-year-old Armenian khachkars. In an act of desecration, a shooting ground has been erected over the cemetery with access denied to UNESCO and outside observers.
There was a deafening silence from the international community after the 2020 war; during the endless persecution which followed and in the aftermath of the 2023 ethnic cleansing. And Azerbaijan is by no means finished.
Thirty one Armenian villages, excluding enclaves, are currently occupied by Azerbaijan, which is making illegal territorial claims to them. Mr. Aliyev says: “This is our land. We are on our land. Lake Garagol (Lake Sevan) _and other places are ours. We are here now.” Azerbaijan is seeking to cut road links from Armenia to Georgia and Iran – all part of a process of asphyxiation.
In September 2023, following the starvation and bombardment of Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan reopened the Lachin Corridor and grabbing whatever they could carry people were forced to flee – some being struck by gunfire and shrapnel.
As they fled to Armenia, they had to abandon their homes, their churches and ancient burial grounds, their museums, their schools, indeed, everything which gave them definition as the rightful and indigenous inhabitants of Artsakh.
Note too that there are more than 4000 Armenian historical and cultural monuments under the threat of total destruction and the territory is subjected to historical revisionism.
Note also that Russian troops – theoretically there to protect Armenians – told the people to leave their villages, that they should not resist and that they would be free to return. As the people fled some of the Russian troops stole personal belongings. The reality is that Russia backs Azerbaijan, describing ethnic cleansing as an Azeri anti-terrorist campaign. In true Putinesque style it continues to deny that the deportation of Armenians has occurred. Confiscated military hardware was sent west to be used against the Ukrainians.
On 10 October 2023, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution strongly condemning Azerbaijan’s “clear disregard” for international norms, warning Azerbaijan that “the practice of ethnic cleansing, may give rise to individual criminal responsibility under international law.”
Although most European countries have acknowledged the plunder of Nagorno Karabakh as ethnic cleansing, along with Russia, the UK government still refuses to call it ethnic cleansing. Why not? Why hasn’t it imposed Magnitsky sanctions on those responsible? It is high time that it did instead of implying a moral equivalence between Armenians and Azeris.
On 17 November 2023, the International Court of Justice set out the rights of the people who had been forced to flee but as of this month no Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians have been allowed by Azerbaijan to return to their homes and no measures have been proposed by Azerbaijan to enable this to happen. And without the presence of international peacekeepers who would feel safe?
On 7 August 2023, Luis Ocampo, the first Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, produced a report on Nagorno-Karabakh. He said that what has occurred revealed a disturbing pattern of human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, and disregard for international law on the part of Azerbaijan towards the ethnic Armenian population.
In a further report, he says he believes that Azerbaijan’s treatment of the Armenian population constitutes a genocide, citing Article II(b) of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and he has given evidence to that effect to the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee and to the European Parliament.
Professor Melanie O’Brien, President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, says the Lachin blockade was the start of a genocide, as it was implemented with the aim of “deliberately inflicting conditions of life designed to bring about the physical destruction of the targeted group.”
The International lawyer, Priya Pillai, says Azerbaijan’s actions constitute the conditions for the war crime of “deportation or forcible transfer”, or potentially a crime against humanity. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Genocide Watch both described the wholesale attack on the population as constituting genocide.
Genocide Watch says “Azerbaijani forces are still attempting to capture new territory…Azerbaijan is using Syrian mercenaries. Azerbaijan’s political ally, Turkey, provides air support for Azerbaijani forces, sparking fears that Turkey will resume the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – 1922.”
Genocide Watch reminds us that “Forced displacement is a crime against humanity;” that Azerbaijan’s leaders deny the 1915 genocide while “The Azerbaijani government promotes hate speech and encourages violence against Armenians”. They also published the ten warning signs that are indicative of an impending genocide.
The clear objective is to eliminate Armenians from the Caucasus, just as the Ottoman Turks did in 1915 in Asia Minor. This is simply the continuation of a slow-burn genocide.
But without official recognition of this reality and without recognition of a justiciable crime how do you ensure enforceability?
In trying to find the answer to that question I have been reading East West Street by Philippe Sands KC.
In a deeply moving personal account – which is born in the mass killings of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Tribunal – he unravels the factors that led Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht to bring Nazi War Criminals to trial and to forge legal mechanisms to hold to account those responsible for genocide or crimes against humanity. The phrase ethnic cleansing was not used – perhaps it is time to rectify that?
But Armenia is itself at least one step closer to being able to use existing mechanisms.
On February 1st Armenia formally came under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by signing the Rome Statute. It opens the door to the prosecution of Azeri leaders, including the sort of arrest warrants issued against Vladimir Putin.
Without the upholding of international law, we resort to the laws of the jungle. That is why Nagorno-Karabakh matters so much.
If you are a Hazara facing genocide in Afghanistan, a Yazidi facing genocide in Northern Iraq, a Christian facing genocide in parts of Nigeria, a Rohingya facing genocide at the hands of the Burmese military, a Darfuri African experiencing, at this very moment, the second genocide of the 21st century – and atrocities in other places too, from Xinjiang to the Middle East – the rule of law is not merely about the theory.
Victims don’t have that luxury or time to ask why the signatories to the Genocide Convention repeatedly fail in their legally binding duty to prevent, protect and punish and, since Bosnia, to predict by looking for emerging signs of genocide. If they have no intention of honouring what they signed up to they should withdraw their signatures rather than devaluing a solemn duty.
Be clear – when we fail to do what we pledged to do there are grave lethal consequences. Consider what happens when a solemn and binding duty is disregarded, when a death warrant can be issued against a whole race – as happened with the Armenians – when outrageous brutality, mutilation, and violence are left to haunt a country’s landscape, when despots can plan the ethnic cleansing or the annihilation of an entire people: that is when the law must assert itself.
And if you don’t want history to repeat itself, you must at least be told truthfully about historical events and the role of your country in those events. The belief that noone really cares is what always encourages the tyrant.
Hitler believed he could invade Poland and do so with impunity. His ‘final solution’ of the Jews was preceded by his notorious question: ‘who after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’[4] The same rationale – a culture of impunity – led to the industrialised murders of the concentration camps. The folly of forgetting – collective amnesia about what has gone before – led to Hitler’s ideology of a purified master race – directly inspired by the biological vision of a purified pan-Turkism, based on racial origins and racial superiority; even Hitler’s corruption of medicine and science drew inspiration from the deliberate infecting of Armenians with typhus in a sequence of medical experiments.
In 1942, Stefan Zweig (whose books were also burnt by the Nazis) published ‘The World of Yesterday – Memoirs of a European.’ In it,he describes how quickly a relatively civilised and humane society, and a seemingly permanent golden age, can be ruthlessly and swiftly destroyed. His masterful autobiography charts the rise of visceral hatred; how scapegoating and xenophobia, cultivated by populist leaders, can rapidly morph into genocide, and culminate in the hecatombs of the concentration camps.
A fatal chain of events stretches from the Turkish genocide of the Armenians to Hitler’s concentration camps and to the depredations of Stalin’s gulags and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, from the pestilential nature of persecution, demonization, scapegoating, and hateful prejudice.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, just 32 countries currently recognise the crimes to which the Armenian people were subjected as genocide. This failure to recognise past genocides and to name them for what they are is not insignificant. Such denialism, and associated impunity for the crimes committed, inevitably results in further atrocities. But Turkey should note that despite its threats to countries which recognise the Armenian Genocide, the issue never goes away and will not do so until Turkey itself honestly recognises this chapter in its history for the infamy that it was.
Unhealed history can never and should never be suppressed.
It is why it is so important that we honour the memory of Archbishop Krikoris Balakian tonight and in doing so insist anew, with men like Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, that international law must stand between us and the alliance of dictators and authoritarians who seek to replace the rule of law based on a world order determined by their hegemony. Yes, international law does still matter.
Archbishop Krikoris Balakian Lecture at the Armenian Church St. Yeghiche Church, Cranely Gardens: March 2024. “Ethnic Cleansing: Does International Law Still Matter?”
Bishop Hovakim Manukyan has set me quite a task in inviting me to deliver the first lecture named for Archbishop Krikoris Balakian and in turn I doubt that I will do justice to either the subject matter “Ethnic Cleansing: Does International Law Still Matter?”or to the illustrious and holy man after whom the lecture is named.
Archbishop Balakian’s own story is, of course, rooted in the Armenian Genocide – of which he was a survivor. In 1915, in Constantinople, he was arrested with 250 other leading Armenians who were forced onto the death march into the Syrian desert. On learning from one of his captors of the Ottoman government’s plan to exterminate the whole Armenian population, Balakian took part in a hair-raising escape and was just one of sixteen who survived. His memoir – Armenian Golgotha – is a crucial first-hand account of the horrific genocide which occurred – and a rebuke to those who so easily forget – or fail to keep records and witness statements. When we fail to remember we are doomed to repeat the same atrocities all over again. Every bad thing which happens in the world – and there is no shortage of them at this present time – those bad things start with forgetting the bad things that happened before.
So let me divide my remarks into first recalling the Armenian Genocide and why I believe that what has happened in Nagorno-Karabakh is an extension of those events which began in 1915, and which were prefigured by atrocities to which the world turned a blind eye. I will then say something about the use of the phrase ethnic cleansing, about definitions and international law and I will touch on some of the other situations involving ethnic cleansing.
- The Armenian Genocide.
On 24 September 1896, at the age of 86, and having been elected Prime Minster four times, William Ewart Gladstone returned to the city of Liverpool to give his last public speech. To the thousands who had gathered to hear him at Hengler’s Circus – which was in a Liverpool neighbourhood where 80 years later I would be Member of Parliament – Gladstone said they might wonder what had brought an old man out of his quiet retirement at Hawarden Castle in North Wales. He then provided the answer: ‘two Armenian gentlemen.’
In 1876, Gladstone had published his ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.’ In a tirade against the tyranny of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans Gladstone used all his powers of rhetoric:
Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves… from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This… is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah to the moral sense of mankind at large. (…) That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!
Of course, repetition of those atrocities is precisely what did happen.
Gladstone turned his moral indignation into a nationwide clarion call, the Midlothian Campaigns calling on civilised nations to stand together; for Britain to assert a doctrine of ‘equal rights of all nations’; and, in particular, for Britain to condemn the brutality of the Ottoman Empire against its Christian subjects and to defend their right to believe and worship freely.
The Hengler’s Circus speech came after a series of pogroms throughout Turkey’s Armenian provinces – and even in the capital, Istanbul. The Armenians – and other Christian minorities – were forced to pay ‘double taxes’ and were denied many civil rights.Their protests against this discrimination led to their wholesale slaughter.
At Hawarden, Gladstone had carefully taken first-hand accounts from his two visitors, and he began his remarks by saying ‘The powers of language hardly suffice to describe what has been and is being done, and exaggeration, if we were ever so much disposed to it, is in such a case really beyond our power.’
He declared ‘We are not dealing with a common and ordinary question of abuses of government. We are dealing with something that goes far deeper (…) four awful words – plunder, murder, rape, and torture.
In describing the ‘horribly accumulated outrages’ he demanded a non-sectarian and non-partisan approach, and he also emphasised that ‘this is no crusade against Mohammedanism’; that, whatever faith had been held by the Armenians, ‘it would have been incumbent upon us with the same force and the same sacredness’ to speak out on their behalf. With precision, Gladstone identified and named the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II – ‘The assassin’ – as responsible for the order to massacre the Armenians; and he roundly condemned the European powers for giving the Sultan ‘The assurance of impunity.’ While believing that ideally, Europe should act together, he bitterly criticised their failure to do so: ‘Collectively, the powers have undergone miserable disgrace.’ But, when Europe failed to act, Gladstone said Britain had the right to act alone and not ‘make herself a slave to be dragged at the chariot wheel of other powers of Europe.’
A German newspaper, The Hamburger Nachrichten, took Mr. Gladstone to task and responded: ‘For us [Germans] the sound bones of a single Pomeranian [German] grenadier are worth more than the lives of 10,000 Armenians.’
Many of these same arguments have relevance and application in our own times but so does the challenge which comes at the culmination of his Hengler’s Circus address: he demands no ambiguity, no neutrality but condemnation of crimes against humanity ‘which have already come to such a magnitude and to such a depth of atrocity that they constitute the most terrible, most monstrous series of proceedings that have ever been recorded in the dismal and deplorable history of human crime.’
Gladstone was right to prophesy that indifference would lead to catastrophic consequences. We will see the same response and the same consequences in other examples which I will cite later.
He told his audience in 1896 that if they were indifferent when people in faraway provinces were slaughtered it would only be a matter of time before the same horrors were visited upon them.
Seventeen years after Gladstone’s death, the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 would become the second genocide of the twentieth century (after the Herero and Nama genocide).
Over one million men, women and children were killed as the Ottoman Turks sought to entirely erase the Armenian identity from eastern Turkey.
1.5 million ethnic Armenians were arrested, deported, or murdered by the Ottoman Empire. Geoffrey Robertson KC, in “Was There An Armenian Genocide?” concluded that:
the evidence is compelling… their deliberate fanning of racial superiority theories in the Turkification programme; the deportation orders and their foresight of the consequences; their failure to protect the deportees or to punish their attackers, some of whom were state agents. They instigated, or at very least acquiesced in, the killing of a significant part of the Armenian race – probably about half of those who were alive in Eastern Turkey at the beginning of 1915… if these same events occurred today, in a country with a history similar to Turkey’s in 1915, there can be no doubt that prosecutions for genocide would be warranted and indeed required by the Genocide Convention.
In the 1950s, as a child, my dying grandfather gave me pictures of Armenians, which he had collected during the capture of Jerusalem where he served as a soldier with General Edmund Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force. The pictures were of Armenians executed by the Ottomans during their retreat, after the capture of Jerusalem.
I would see some of the same pictures again in 2007 when, with my daughter, Marianne, and my parliamentary colleague, and friend, Baroness Caroline Cox, I travelled to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. In Yerevan, we took the opportunity to visit the Memorial to the Genocide victims and to spend time in the genocide museum.
The museum has collated the memories, photographs, and records into a damning indictment of both the objectives of the Ottoman Turks and the abject failure of the international community to act on the information which its own diplomats had assembled – and which in an overwhelming number of countries has not been recognised as a genocide.
To this day, in pandering to Recep Erdogan, rather than upholding the truth and seeking the healing of history, the UK’s Foreign Office defends Turkey as a potential ally in the ‘fight against terror’ as a ‘NATO ally’ and as a post-Brexit target trading partner.
Although the US has often taken much the same position as the UK, in 2019 the US House of Representatives decided that truth mattered more. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat Congresswoman from California, the only Armenian-Assyrian member of Congress said:
I’ve been waiting for this moment since I first came to Congress 27 years ago… Members of my own family were among those murdered, and my parents fled with my grandparents to America. What all the persecuted had in common was that they were Christians.
The evidence is there for all to see.
Hayk Demoyan, the Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, showed me letters written by three women who had been deported to Brazil, and which had recently been given to the museum. One pregnant woman whose experiences led to a miscarriage wrote: ‘These eyes saw things the world should never see.’
I was struck by the first-hand accounts of Christian relief workers and missionaries working with the Armenians at the time of the genocide.
Maria Jacobsen, a Danish missionary, wrote in her diary that the atrocities had their beginning in June 1915:
It was proclaimed from all mosques today that all Armenians are to be sent into exile. They are to be given four days in which to dispose of their possessions, to be ready for their journey to an unknown destination for an indefinite period. It is said that they will be sent to the desert south of Ourfa. If this is true, then it is obvious that the whole meaning behind this movement of the Armenian people is their extermination.
On 24 July, she noted ‘Any Turk who hides an Armenian will be hanged and his house burnt. All houses from the poorest to the richest are to be searched.’[1] By 14 August, she was writing ‘Poor, poor Armenians, what you have had to endure.’
The historian, Arnold Toynbee, meanwhile, wrote of the premeditated and systematic nature of the genocide: ‘The attempt to exterminate the Armenians during World War One was carried out under the cloak of legality by cold-blooded government action. These are not mass murders committed spontaneously by mobs and private people.’
Winston Churchill wrote that ‘There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.’ Despite the overwhelming evidence and contemporary accounts – and Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s own assertion that ‘The best way to finish the Armenian question is to finish the Armenians.’[2] To this day Turkey has persisted in denying that the genocide ever took place. They have also refused to open their borders and to normalise relations with Armenia until all talk of genocide is stopped.
In 1933, Franz Werfel published his powerful novel, ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’, set during the Armenian genocide and which Turkey has always tried to suppress. Hitler had Werfel’s books burnt, hoping to give force to his remark ‘who now remembers the Armenians?’ Amnesia about the deadly phenomenon of deportations, concentration camps, rape and killings and ethnic cleansing did not end in 1915 with the Ottomans. Hitler simply believed that people’s indifference would enable him to murder with impunity as he began his campaign of Jewish annihilation.
There is an old Armenian saying, echoed in Musa Dagh, that ‘to be an Armenian is an impossibility’– a saying which had equal applicability to the Jews of Hitler’s Germany.
That impossibility of being able to be who you are is a wretched experience shared today by minorities the world over.
Even today’s Armenians, living in their homeland and in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, have faced the ever-present danger of constant unspeakable acts, motivated by the same hatred which ignited the genocide of 1915.
I have seen its consequences first-hand in the tiny remnants of Christian communities in Southeast Turkey, in Kurdish refugee camps of Northern Iraq, on the Yezidi Holy Mountain of Sinjar. Recep Erdogan’s Turkish nationalism and Islamist extremism is illustrated by his gratuitous decision to turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and indicative of his unwillingness to live with difference or to respect one another’s traditions or history.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilus III, was right to recall that in previous epochs of history, the seizure or destruction of one another’s sacred places and holy sites has led to centuries of bitterness and hostility. He said:
Our experience in Jerusalem is that to attempt to treat contested holy sites in an exclusive manner is simply a recipe for bitterness and suffering. When our holy sites are open to all, there is peace and mutual respect. (…) Turkey is a country with great potential to show the world the benefits of our common humanity and our common human destiny. The Orthodox world appeals to the Turkish government: We urge Turkey to live up to that potential and show the world the value of coexistence between its various communities.
Erdogan’s agenda is a very different one.
He sees himself as heir to the Ottoman Empire and staged the reopening of Hagia Sophia, as a mosque, to take place on the anniversary of the capture of Constantinople by Mehmet II – celebrating it as an act of conquest. This sequestration and usurping of buildings and artefacts is done with clinical precision and a purpose – it is to create the fiction, the lie, that these people no longer exist, that they are non-persons, and that no one much cares.
And as he emboldens his allies in Azerbaijan, and takes advantage of the decline of Russian influence, it is self-evident that not only has he encouraged the hostilities and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh but his pan-Turkic dream of completing the work of the Ottomans and eliminating Armenia is as potent and dangerous now as it was in 1915.
In September 2023 Azerbaijan’s unprovoked massive military attack on Nagorno Karabakh – Artsakh -which has its origins as part of the 10th province of the Kingdom of Armenia, existing from around 189 BC to 387 AD – ended three decades of contemporary de facto independence. There had been two wars over the enclave – in 1994 and 2020 (the 44 Day War). After the first war five de facto states came into existence following civil wars which began at the end of the Soviet era – and had their origins in Stalin’s mass displacements: Abkhazia, Chechnya, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Nagorno-Karabakh. There was internal sovereignty but no external recognition or international legitimacy – and unresolved issues simply stored up trouble for the future. Azeri refugees were decanted to camps in Azerbaijan. I have visited those camps and wrote at the time that as no real attempt was being made to permanently resettle them or to find long-term solutions this would simply come back to bite again.
It did in 2023. That attack – following the deliberate attempt by Azerbaijan to stave the people into submission via the blockade of the Lachin Corridor – about which I regularly raised questions in the UK Parliament – has led to the mass exodus of 100,000 Armenians driven from their ancient homeland. As the European Parliament and the US Administration have made clear this gross displacement not only has huge humanitarian consequences, but also has implications for identity, self-determination, sovereignty, and territorial integrity – with a read across to Ukraine, Taiwan, Guyana, the Falklands and elsewhere.
The resolution of some of these questions is not helped by hazy definitions and little international agreement about which principle takes precedence. Ethnic cleansing has no formal definition and is not recognised as a separate crime in international law. The UN Commission of Experts which examined what happened in the former Yugoslavia simply said ethnic cleansing could be regarded as a contributor to war crimes and could fall within the terms of the Geneva Convention. But note the ambiguity and lack of force.
But beyond legal remedies, the resolution is also hindered by the lack of emphasis placed by political and religious leaders in shaping discourse about how different ethnic and religious groups can take practical steps re-enforced by legal settlement recognising the rights of ethnic and religious communities and the objective of creating shared space and mutual respect, and co-existence. From time-to-time Azerbaijan has spoken such words but its deeds do not. Indeed, the drumbeat was never silenced and along with the bunkers, landmines, and Israeli-made drones and Turkish state-of-the-art weapons, along with the caricatures and offensive stigmatisation of its Armenian neighbours, the aggressive intentions of Baku were never far below the surface.
The signs of international crimes have been speaking their name for decades.
Recall that ethnic Armenians are banned from entering Azerbaijan; children in Azeri schools are taught that all Armenians are enemies; Azeri President Ilham Aliyev and his officials make fierce, offensive deeply racist statements about Armenians, describing some as “dogs” and calling for the “decontamination” of Nagorno Karabakh; those who kill Armenians abroad, like Ramil Safarov, are rewarded by the state; at the Baku Trophy Park children have been taken to see grotesque offensive mannequins of Armenian soldiers with exaggerated features and exhibited in humiliating poses.
But which countries have protested about this?
Who contradicted President Aliyev when he described “Armenia as a country is of no value. It is actually a colony, an outpost run from abroad, a territory artificially created on ancient Azerbaijani lands” tweeting that “Turkey and Azerbaijan work in a coordinated manner to dispel the myth of the ‘Armenian genocide’ in the world”. “Armenia is not even a colony; it is not even worthy of being a servant.” “We are driving them away like dogs”
The stigmatising propaganda doesn’t end there.
All of Armenia is referred to as “Western Azerbaijan”, with propaganda created to accompany that fiction and to airbrush out of existence Armenian heritage and culture with academics in Azerbaijan renaming Armenians as “Caucasian Albanian”.
Its intentions for Nagorno Karabakh can be seen in the eradication of all Armenian cultural and religious heritage in the exclave of Nakhichevan; and in the use of sledgehammers to destroy the cemetery of Julfa which contained thousands of stunning beautifully carved 1000-year-old Armenian khachkars. In an act of desecration, a shooting ground has been erected over the cemetery with access denied to UNESCO and outside observers.
There was a deafening silence from the international community after the 2020 war; during the endless persecution which followed and in the aftermath of the 2023 ethnic cleansing. And Azerbaijan is by no means finished.
Thirty one Armenian villages, excluding enclaves, are currently occupied by Azerbaijan, which is making illegal territorial claims to them. Mr. Aliyev says: “This is our land. We are on our land. Lake Garagol (Lake Sevan) _and other places are ours. We are here now.” Azerbaijan is seeking to cut road links from Armenia to Georgia and Iran – all part of a process of asphyxiation.
In September 2023, following the starvation and bombardment of Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan reopened the Lachin Corridor and grabbing whatever they could carry people were forced to flee – some being struck by gunfire and shrapnel.
As they fled to Armenia, they had to abandon their homes, their churches and ancient burial grounds, their museums, their schools, indeed, everything which gave them definition as the rightful and indigenous inhabitants of Artsakh.
Note too that there are more than 4000 Armenian historical and cultural monuments under the threat of total destruction and the territory is subjected to historical revisionism.
Note also that Russian troops – theoretically there to protect Armenians – told the people to leave their villages, that they should not resist and that they would be free to return. As the people fled some of the Russian troops stole personal belongings. The reality is that Russia backs Azerbaijan, describing ethnic cleansing as an Azeri anti-terrorist campaign. In true Putinesque style it continues to deny that the deportation of Armenians has occurred. Confiscated military hardware was sent west to be used against the Ukrainians.
On 10 October 2023, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution strongly condemning Azerbaijan’s “clear disregard” for international norms, warning Azerbaijan that “the practice of ethnic cleansing, may give rise to individual criminal responsibility under international law.”
Although most European countries have acknowledged the plunder of Nagorno Karabakh as ethnic cleansing, along with Russia, the UK government still refuses to call it ethnic cleansing. Why not? Why hasn’t it imposed Magnitsky sanctions on those responsible? It is high time that it did instead of implying a moral equivalence between Armenians and Azeris.
On 17 November 2023, the International Court of Justice set out the rights of the people who had been forced to flee but as of this month no Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians have been allowed by Azerbaijan to return to their homes and no measures have been proposed by Azerbaijan to enable this to happen. And without the presence of international peacekeepers who would feel safe?
On 7 August 2023, Luis Ocampo, the first Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, produced a report on Nagorno-Karabakh. He said that what has occurred revealed a disturbing pattern of human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, and disregard for international law on the part of Azerbaijan towards the ethnic Armenian population.
In a further report, he says he believes that Azerbaijan’s treatment of the Armenian population constitutes a genocide, citing Article II(b) of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and he has given evidence to that effect to the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee and to the European Parliament.
Professor Melanie O’Brien, President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, says the Lachin blockade was the start of a genocide, as it was implemented with the aim of “deliberately inflicting conditions of life designed to bring about the physical destruction of the targeted group.”
The International lawyer, Priya Pillai, says Azerbaijan’s actions constitute the conditions for the war crime of “deportation or forcible transfer”, or potentially a crime against humanity. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Genocide Watch both described the wholesale attack on the population as constituting genocide.
Genocide Watch says “Azerbaijani forces are still attempting to capture new territory…Azerbaijan is using Syrian mercenaries. Azerbaijan’s political ally, Turkey, provides air support for Azerbaijani forces, sparking fears that Turkey will resume the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – 1922.”
Genocide Watch reminds us that “Forced displacement is a crime against humanity;” that Azerbaijan’s leaders deny the 1915 genocide while “The Azerbaijani government promotes hate speech and encourages violence against Armenians”. They also published the ten warning signs that are indicative of an impending genocide.
The clear objective is to eliminate Armenians from the Caucasus, just as the Ottoman Turks did in 1915 in Asia Minor. This is simply the continuation of a slow-burn genocide.
But without official recognition of this reality and without recognition of a justiciable crime how do you ensure enforceability?
In trying to find the answer to that question I have been reading East West Street by Philippe Sands KC.
In a deeply moving personal account – which is born in the mass killings of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Tribunal – he unravels the factors that led Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht to bring Nazi War Criminals to trial and to forge legal mechanisms to hold to account those responsible for genocide or crimes against humanity. The phrase ethnic cleansing was not used – perhaps it is time to rectify that?
But Armenia is itself at least one step closer to being able to use existing mechanisms.
On February 1st Armenia formally came under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by signing the Rome Statute. It opens the door to the prosecution of Azeri leaders, including the sort of arrest warrants issued against Vladimir Putin.
Without the upholding of international law, we resort to the laws of the jungle. That is why Nagorno-Karabakh matters so much.
If you are a Hazara facing genocide in Afghanistan, a Yazidi facing genocide in Northern Iraq, a Christian facing genocide in parts of Nigeria, a Rohingya facing genocide at the hands of the Burmese military, a Darfuri African experiencing, at this very moment, the second genocide of the 21st century – and atrocities in other places too, from Xinjiang to the Middle East – the rule of law is not merely about the theory.
Victims don’t have that luxury or time to ask why the signatories to the Genocide Convention repeatedly fail in their legally binding duty to prevent, protect and punish and, since Bosnia, to predict by looking for emerging signs of genocide. If they have no intention of honouring what they signed up to they should withdraw their signatures rather than devaluing a solemn duty.
Be clear – when we fail to do what we pledged to do there are grave lethal consequences. Consider what happens when a solemn and binding duty is disregarded, when a death warrant can be issued against a whole race – as happened with the Armenians – when outrageous brutality, mutilation, and violence are left to haunt a country’s landscape, when despots can plan the ethnic cleansing or the annihilation of an entire people: that is when the law must assert itself.
And if you don’t want history to repeat itself, you must at least be told truthfully about historical events and the role of your country in those events. The belief that noone really cares is what always encourages the tyrant.
Hitler believed he could invade Poland and do so with impunity. His ‘final solution’ of the Jews was preceded by his notorious question: ‘who after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’[4] The same rationale – a culture of impunity – led to the industrialised murders of the concentration camps. The folly of forgetting – collective amnesia about what has gone before – led to Hitler’s ideology of a purified master race – directly inspired by the biological vision of a purified pan-Turkism, based on racial origins and racial superiority; even Hitler’s corruption of medicine and science drew inspiration from the deliberate infecting of Armenians with typhus in a sequence of medical experiments.
In 1942, Stefan Zweig (whose books were also burnt by the Nazis) published ‘The World of Yesterday – Memoirs of a European.’ In it,he describes how quickly a relatively civilised and humane society, and a seemingly permanent golden age, can be ruthlessly and swiftly destroyed. His masterful autobiography charts the rise of visceral hatred; how scapegoating and xenophobia, cultivated by populist leaders, can rapidly morph into genocide, and culminate in the hecatombs of the concentration camps.
A fatal chain of events stretches from the Turkish genocide of the Armenians to Hitler’s concentration camps and to the depredations of Stalin’s gulags and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, from the pestilential nature of persecution, demonization, scapegoating, and hateful prejudice.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, just 32 countries currently recognise the crimes to which the Armenian people were subjected as genocide. This failure to recognise past genocides and to name them for what they are is not insignificant. Such denialism, and associated impunity for the crimes committed, inevitably results in further atrocities. But Turkey should note that despite its threats to countries which recognise the Armenian Genocide, the issue never goes away and will not do so until Turkey itself honestly recognises this chapter in its history for the infamy that it was.
Unhealed history can never and should never be suppressed.
It is why it is so important that we honour the memory of Archbishop Krikoris Balakian tonight and in doing so insist anew, with men like Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, that international law must stand between us and the alliance of dictators and authoritarians who seek to replace the rule of law based on a world order determined by their hegemony. Yes, international law does still matter.
