The power of collective grievance

When last Sunday Pope Francis took the brave step of acknowledging the Armenian tragedy as the ‘first genocide of the 20th century’, he knew he was entering a minefield. On 24 April Armenians will commemorate the 100th anniversary of their genocide. There can be no single date for a genocide but that was the day the entire leadership of the Armenian people was arrested by the Ottoman government in Constantinople, now Istanbul, whose successors are the modern Turkish state. The Ottomans had never trusted Armenians, who were Christians, and had long suspected them of being a fifth column within the empire. There had already been pogroms.

But now began a sustained campaign of massacre, eviction and cultural suppression at the end of which somewhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians had been murdered, and the survivors scattered to the four winds to become the enormous diaspora that expatriate Armenians constitute today, even though there is now an Armenian state and government.

The whole ghastly episode remains the subject of deep and neuralgic controversy on both sides, the only agreement being that it was indeed a ghastly episode. Turks furiously deny that the mass murders were planned or systematic and that this could therefore amount to a genocide; everyone disputes the numbers though all agree they were huge; and countries like ours rather feebly decline to go beyond words like ‘tragedy’, for fear of upsetting a strategically important ally: Turkey. If you want to start a fight in a bar in Ankara, Nicosia, Beirut or a score more places where Armenians have settled (and on the whole prospered), then just mention the Armenian genocide.