---

Genocide (Armenia and Assyria)

My hon. Friend’s words are so prescient and important that I almost felt like pausing when I heard them. I remember standing on the steps of Downing street with the noble Lord Avebury, who repeated those words in the original German. As we know, when people said to Hitler, ““You will never be forgiven for the genocide of the Jews””, he said, ““Who remembers the Armenians now?”” Genocide was the new horror of the 20th century. Technology had progressed in such a way that whole populations could be slaughtered. The 1915 Armenian and Assyrian genocide in the Ottoman empire was the first; sadly it was not to be the last, either in the last century or this one. Now no one seeks to deny that genocide took place. I hope that we can be realistic, because only when we accept that ethnic cleansing and genocide take place can we confront their horrors. We owe that not only to our Armenian, Assyrian and Greek friends, or only to our Christian friends from the former Ottoman empire, but to ourselves. How can we seek to combat the evil of genocide when the very existence of such a major example is denied? My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) quoted Adolf Hitler. I would like to close by quoting a contemporary of Hitler’s, but a man who walked in the light rather than the darkness. In 1929, Winston Churchill stated:"““In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor…There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.””" Churchill was right then, and he is right now. I look to my right hon. Friend the Minister and to this Government and this country to play their part in assuaging the agony of those whose relatives died so horribly by recognising in this country the fact that genocide took place. I hope that by such recognition in this House of Commons, in this Parliament, ultimately we may influence the Turkish Government, because as long as we refuse to recognise that genocide took place, they have the perfect excuse for denial.