Genocide denial has become a particularly hot topic in Britain lately because the media have drawn attention to the government's efforts to exclude the Armenian Genocide from the official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony on 27 January 2001. Sarafian, an archival historian by training, was academic adviser to the British Committee for the Recognition of the Armenian Genocide (CRAG), which campaigned for the inclusion of the Armenian Genocide in the ceremony.

As part of its strategy, the committee supported the republication, by the Gomidas Institute, of the British government's Parliamentary Blue Book, which in 1916 had presented a vast number of eyewitness accounts of the Armenian massacres and deportations of 1915-16. The book had clearly showed that the mass killings were centrally planned and genocidal in nature.

Sarafian prepared and wrote an introduction to an "uncensored edition" of the book, James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. The publication, which was released in the House of Lords in December 2000, was used by a number of journalists to make the case that the government was being hypocritical in excluding the Armenian Genocide.

Sarafian began his talk with reference to the definition of genocide, as specified in Article 2 of the 1948 United Nations genocide convention. He drew attention to the key qualitative element in the definition, that genocide can be committed not simply by mass murder, but by other means as well. He argued that whereas the Armenian Genocide was carried out primarily through mass murder, other genocides have been through a cocktail of measures; the ongoing destruction of Kurds in Turkey, for example, has included systematic impoverishment, forced assimilation, and murder--superintended by the Turkish state.

Sarafian demonstrated that as early as 1916 Britain and the United States were fully aware of the atrocities taking place in the Ottoman Empire. Since the United States had representatives in the Ottoman Empire, Americans channelled information out of the Ottoman Empire and, as a result, half of the reports in the Parliamentary Blue Book came from the United States.

Sarafian also made three fundamental points regarding significance of the Blue Book: First, the entire manuscript is available for scrutiny at the Public Records Office in London, and one can follow the trail of sources back to the United States and Ottoman Turkey. Second, Toynbee and Bryce presented a clear analysis of the Armenian Genocide and the responsibility of the Ottoman state. Third, there is no disagreement about the facts of the case. Denialists, including the British government, simply ignore the existence of facts, the way Holocaust deniers ignore facts surrounding the events of World War II.

The Armenian Genocide, according to Sarafian, exemplifies how states can commit genocide and rewrite history. "It seems that as long as you play your diplomatic cards right, as long as you grease the right palms, you can implement genocidal policies without punishment," said Sarafian, making further references to atrocities in Rwanda, East Timor, Tibet, South America, and Kurdistan. The term "never again," used after the Holocaust, means very little in the modern world.

The talk ended with interesting questions and answers, and there was undoubted appreciation by the audience, which included historians of many different fields. For many members the talk was simply new and enlightening. Several people took notes for further investigation and analysis.

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Last modified on 13 November 2007.