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Genocide (Armenia and Assyria)

It is a pleasure to appear before you this afternoon, Mr. Cook, and a particular honour that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe will be responding for the Government. Few Ministers, if any, know more about the subject and I could not have chosen a better Minister to respond. I start with a minor point. The subject of this Adjournment debate appears on the Order Paper as ““Genocide in Armenia and Assyria””. I am not seeking to apportion blame, but that is not the title that was submitted. The original title was ““Recognition of the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians””. It would be obvious to you, Mr. Cook, and to many people, that to talk about genocide in Armenia, a country that has existed in its present form for a comparatively short time, and Assyria, a country that might have a millennia-old history but is not recognised in international boundaries, would be superfluous. I wish to speak about the incidents in the then Ottoman empire, particularly in the spring of and throughout 1915, that led, I hope indisputably, to the planned, calculated genocide of the Christian community, which consisted principally of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks. I shall seek to persuade my right hon. Friend that the time has finally come for Her Majesty’s Government to join so many other countries, Parliaments and legislatures in recognising the genocide that occurred in that year. I hope that it will be comparatively uncontentious to state a few basic facts. One and a half million Armenian residents of the former Ottoman empire died between 1915 and 1923 as a result of calculated genocide. I hope that it is not contentious to say that 3.5 million of the historic Christian population of Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks then living in the Ottoman empire had been murdered—starved to death or slaughtered—or exiled by 1923. I hope that those are not contentious points. I hope that no one would seek to deny that the process started on 24 April 1915 in Constantinople, where 1,000 Armenians were identified, taken from their homes and murdered. I hope that it is not contentious to reaffirm that 300,000 Armenian males were then conscripted into the Turkish army, unarmed and then murdered, and that death marches into the Syrian desert took place.