8 April 2004

1. "Kurds Say Homes Raided by Syrians", Syria has arrested dozens of Kurds in nightime raids of homes in the country's northeast, Kurdish officials said Wednesday.

2. "Kurdistan unbound", for the first time in centuries, Kurds have a nation they can call their own -- on the Internet.

3. "France to oppose Turkish EU entry", Turkey's hopes of launching EU accession talks soon took an unexpected battering yesterday when France's new foreign minister insisted Paris would oppose its entry "under current circumstances". Addressing the French parliament, Michel Barnier said France would reject the Muslim state's application because it failed to meet the requisite political criteria.

4. "Leader calls for 'no' vote on Cyprus referendum", the Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash said on Wednesday that he would seek a 'no' vote in an April 24 referendum on an accord to reunite Cyprus, hours before the Greek Cypriot leader was expected to urge rejection of the plan as well.

5. "EU to hold donor conference for Cyprus", the European Union will next week hold a preparatory donors' conference for Cyprus amid hopes the divided island can be reunited in time for EU entry on May 1.

6. "The forgotten genocide", the mass murder of the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey was, as the Holocaust scholar Israel Charny put it, the "prototype" of 20th-century genocide. In 1894, and again with even greater ferocity in 1915, the Turkish government engaged in a deliberate strategy of straightforward massacre, transplantation, death marches, and forced conversion to Islam.

Dear reader,

Due to the upcoming public holidays our next Flash Bulletin will be published on Tuesday 13, 2004.
We regret any inconvenience this may cause.

The editors

1. - Associated Press - "Kurds Say Homes Raided by Syrians":

BEIRUT / 7 April 2004 / by Zeina Karam

Syria has arrested dozens of Kurds in nightime raids of homes in the country's northeast, Kurdish officials said Wednesday.

The arrests followed clashes between Syrian security forces and Kurdish rioters last month that killed 25 and wounded more than 100. Hundreds of Kurds were arrested following that unrest.

"Syrian authorities have not stopped their nighttime raids, arrests, and oppression of safe Kurds in their homes, continuing the policy of persecution against the Kurdish people," Abdel Baki Youssef, leader of the Kurdish Yekiti Party, said in a statement that was faxed to The Associated Press in Beirut.

Syrian officials could not be reached for comment.

Youssef said the arrests included four Kurdish schoolchildren, aged 12 and 13, taken from their school in Qamishli, 450 miles northeast of Damascus. He said they were sent to a prison in Hasakah, 50 miles southwest of Qamishli.

Youssef claimed another Kurd, 26-year-old Hussein Hamak Nasso, died overnight Wednesday after being tortured in prison in the northern town of Afreen. He said Syrian security forces prevented Nasso's family from holding a funeral and forced them to bury him secretly in their presence.

Up to 40 people may have been arrested in Hasakah province in the past two days, Abdel Hamid Darwish, the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party in Syria, said from Qamishli.

On Tuesday, human rights watchdog Amnesty International urged Syria to begin an independent judicial inquiry into last month's clashes, to end repressive measures against its Kurdish minority, and release "hundreds" of Kurds held without charges.

The Syrian constitution does not recognize Kurds, who make up about 1.5 million of Syria's 18.5 million people and live mostly in the underdeveloped northern provinces of Qamishli and Hasakah.

The clashes between Kurds and Syrian police began March 12 with a brawl between supporters of rival soccer teams before a match in Qamishli. The next day, Kurds went on the rampage during a funeral for the riot victims, and the violence spread to nearby areas.

The government blamed the five days of violence on "mobs and opportunists" influenced from abroad.

It is not known how many Kurds were detained in the unrest. More than 400 were released last month, but many are thought to be still in custody.

2. - Salon.com - "Kurdistan unbound":

For the first time in centuries, Kurds have a nation they can call their own -- on the Internet

7 April 2004 / by Christopher Farah

Three weeks ago in northern Syria, clashes erupted between Arab police and the ethnic Kurds who call that area their home despite being granted a bare minimum of rights by the Syrian government. Kurds account for about 2 million of the 17 million people in Syria, but they are not recognized officially as a minority community, and many of them haven't been granted citizenship.

The rioting was sparked by a fight at a soccer match, but quickly tapped into deep Kurdish resentment over their status in Syria. Political protest of this nature is almost unheard of in a country known for dealing quickly and brutally with insurgents, and the protesters paid a steep price. About 30 people died, most of them Kurds, and hundreds were imprisoned.

But thanks in part to the Internet, even as Kurds in Syria were experiencing the familiar helplessness of an oppressed minority, their kin throughout the rest of the world were able to fight back -- mere hours after the unrest began. Through an increasingly sophisticated network of Kurdish Web sites, news of the clashes spread throughout the Kurdish diaspora to Kurdish population centers in Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland and Canada.

"Kurds everywhere were on the Internet following the situation," says Nijyar Shemdin, the U.S. representative for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the political party currently governing much of northern Iraq. "Kurdish organizations everywhere began attacking embassies, organizing demonstrations. Before, this would have taken a long time."

The American military presence in nearby Iraq undoubtedly had a deterrent effect on the zealous Syrian military, but did the public attention generated by the Internet also play a role? It's impossible to say for sure. An active, unified diaspora and the watchful eye of foreign governments could strengthen the position of the millions of Kurds living in Turkey, Syria and Iran -- aside from Iraq, the nations with the largest Kurdish populations. But outsiders generally have little direct influence on the day-to-day actions of authoritarian regimes.

This much, however, is certain: In countries like Syria where the media is state controlled and strictly regulated, outsider Web sites like that of the KRG help Kurds there see that life can be better, that they can have more rights and more self-determination, just like the Kurds in Iraq. "They see a live example of democracy working that all of Iraq and the region can follow," says Shemdin.

And that, in turn, means that the governments of Turkey, Syria and Iran are worried more than ever about the "Kurdish question."

Cyber-gurus have long speculated that the Internet would lead to the creation of politically and culturally viable communities that defied traditional categories. Instead of being defined by a shared physical space, these communities would be defined by shared interests or common goals, with only Internet connections and computers linking the individuals. Historically disenfranchised groups like the Kurds -- a people who have not ruled themselves in hundreds of years, instead living as minorities under other regimes -- provide an intriguing test of the virtual-reality theory, a test that has real implications for a people whose tenuous political status demands a real solution.

The Internet has allowed Kurdish communities across the globe to connect in ways never before possible. So much so that new research suggests that these networks of ethnic nationalist Web sites have become "cyber-states" -- nations created in cyberspace because of the lack of a nation in real space.

"This form of mass communication allows for the creation of a community without the need for a space, for a territory," says Kari Neely, a doctoral student in Near Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, who is researching the impact of the Internet on ethnic minorities in the Middle East. "Cyberspace allows people to coalesce in a new kind of territory to maintain cultural traditions that might otherwise be threatened with extinction through assimilation, warfare and population displacement."

Neely is quick to point out that this "new kind of territory" will never be able to replace the obvious benefits of possessing a shared physical territory. And other scholars caution that, even when used as a tool to affect situations on the ground, "virtual" nations have very real limitations. "Reality is in real space, not cyberspace," says Amir Hassanpour, a professor at the University of Toronto who has written extensively about the effects of modern media on Kurdish nationalism. "In the case of Iraq, for example, the Internet may give Kurds some ability to promote ideas, but the reality is that the United States is an occupying force, the majority of people are Shiites, and Kurds are a minority."

The historic minority status of the Kurds is part of what makes the idea of a Kurdish cyber-state so provocative. Although a Kurd, Saladin, is credited with having liberated much of the Arab world from Crusader rule in the Middle Ages, Kurds have long been a persecuted minority in the Middle East. The traditional (but internationally unrecognized) Kurdish homeland, Kurdistan, is on land divided by four nations, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Although Turkey has been carrying out a prominent military campaign against Kurdish nationalists for decades, Americans are probably most familiar with Iraqi crimes against the Kurds. Remember all those times you heard the Bush administration talk about Saddam gassing his own people? Those people were the Kurds.

That kind of persecution aided the creation of a large Kurdish diaspora throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. It also meant that the Bush administration and the American occupation authority have had to handle an emerging Kurdish republic in northern Iraq with kid gloves. Although the Kurds have largely -- and democratically -- been managing their own affairs in Iraq since soon after the first Gulf War, America had to deny the Kurds' request that they be allowed to establish their own independent nation following Saddam's ouster. Turkey, Iran and Syria were terrified that this new Kurdistan would inspire their own Kurdish minorities to revolt, and the last thing the United States needs is more instability in the Middle East. Meaning that Kurds dreaming of a nation of their own can keep dreaming.

According to Neely, this gap between dreams and reality is exactly what Kurdish Web sites are trying to fill. "There's an abundance of Web sites that have been established for and by these communities that include not only chat rooms and political forums, but minority literature -- poems, short stories, novels, calls for original writings by community members -- and even dating centers," she says. "While the quality of the literary work being produced on the sites is certainly open to question, the point is that people use these sites to feel a connection to a larger community, a cyber-nation."

What's striking about the wide range of Kurdish Web sites is that so many of them attempt to provide a kind of one-stop shopping for Kurdish culture and nationalism. A Web site that happens to be operated by an American will not necessarily have content devoted to American literature, history and music. But many Kurdish sites link to all of the above -- a history of the Kurds, samples of their literature and music, chat rooms, along with Kurdish news from all parts of the diaspora and "Kurdistan." KurdTeens.com focuses on a younger audience, for example, but still connects people to all things Kurdish, for all ages.

"Other people say it is very nice to have your own country, so we try to create that feeling online," says Bryar Fattah, a 20-year-old student who founded KurdTeens when he moved to Great Britain from Iraq in 2000. "We sometimes feel like each Web site is like a city from the Kurdish cities. Our virtual Kurdistan is not on the ground. It is in our minds."

Some sites, including Kurdland.com, Kurdistan Net and KurdistanWeb practically sound like countries in their own right, while others such as Kurdish Media and the Kurdish Information Network have slightly less conspicuous names but perform the same kind of role.

"The site helps bring about a common bond in terms of language and cultural events," says Dilan Roshani, an Iranian Kurdish engineer living in Great Britain who has operated KurdistanWeb since 1995. "The bond makes it easier for them to overcome a long history of Kurdish oppression and makes them feel a connection that no international border could give them."

Neely says the "cyber-state" model can also apply to a host of other dispossessed peoples, particularly those with large diasporas -- for example, the Druse, a religious minority; the Armenians, who have experienced an extensive diaspora and only recently received a territory of their own; and the Palestinians, who are part of the dominant Arab majority but who lack a state. A Web site such as the Electronic Intifada tries to represent, by definition, an electronic uprising, carrying the Palestinian struggle for a nation -- nonviolently, through information, education and communication -- to Palestinians beyond the West Bank and Gaza, helping to create a unified Palestinian community that extends from Europe, to America, to the Middle East.

The prototype for the Electronic Intifada was established on the Internet in September 1996, when Nigel Parry, who was in the West Bank, posted photos of a clash between Palestinians and Israelis. The photos reached Ali Abunimah, an ocean away. Parry, Abunimah and two others founded the Electronic Intifada soon afterward -- even though the four never met in person until April of last year. "The first Palestinians I came into contact with who actually lived in Palestine were through listservs in the late 1990s," says Abunimah, a writer who grew up in Great Britain and currently lives in Chicago. "It gave me an incredible, crucial sense of connection and community."

But for all the feelings of community engendered by Kurdish, Palestinian or Armenian Web sites, can a cyber-Palestine ever rival a real Palestine, or a cyber-Kurdistan a real Kurdistan? The short answer is no, absolutely not.

Even the most popular Kurdish Web sites, which record several thousand unique visitors a day, don't come close to connecting to the entire Kurdish population, numbering about 25 million, spread across the world. And while it is often a good tool for diaspora communities in Europe or America with easy access to computers, the Internet simply is not available for many of the Kurds living in small towns in ancestral Kurdistan.

And for those who do have Internet connections, a cyber-state may help people connect with each other, but it won't keep them warm at night. After all, this is reality, not a scene from "The Matrix." "You cannot take a plane and go to the Internet and live there," says Shemdin, the Iraqi KRG's American representative. "You can't go home and visit relatives there or build a house there."

But while a cyber-Kurdistan will not alleviate the need for a real Kurdistan, it may help realize one in the future. The disadvantages of a cyber-state -- being ungrounded first and foremost -- can be distinctly advantageous for ethnic minority communities and their nationalist movements.

"Cyberspace can provide a type of protected space for dangerous political views, minority viewpoints that aren't legal in other settings," Neely says. "I think this might be a reason for the numerous sites published in the Kurdish language. When a state bans something -- like Turkey has done with the publication of Kurdish -- then it can find a place outside the establishment."

While simply maintaining the Kurdish language itself serves a nationalist goal -- it's difficult to establish a state politically if there's no distinct culture to define it -- many of the Web sites have explicit political content promoting a nationalist agenda. In countries such as Turkey, where Kurdish newspapers are banned, Kurds can learn about the progress of the nascent Kurdish republic in Iraq through the KRG Web site, which features not just news in depth but also descriptions of how the regional government works and biographies of all the elected officials -- in other words, the basic building blocks of the democratic process.

"In the past, you couldn't send a Kurdish paper to Iran or Turkey because of security checks," says Hassanpour, the University of Toronto professor. "Subscribing to a Kurdish paper published in Holland meant I would go to jail as a secessionist. There can still be state surveillance of the Internet, of course, but in spite of this, Kurdish political parties have their own sites and people are free to propagate their politics."

Shemdin says the KRG's Web site has also helped curb the tide of Iraqi Kurds emigrating to Europe and America because they feared the domestic situation was too unstable. The site demonstrated to people that there was a consistent government presence, in addition to spreading news about increasing employment rates and improving health statistics, he says. "It helped create national unity by holding together society and preventing any more people from leaving."

While access to these sites may be limited by Internet availability, Neely makes the point that even in real space, cultural and political institutions are almost never utilized by the entire population. Political elections in many countries, for example, fail to attract even a majority of the citizens, much less all of them. User statistics, particularly in places with limited access to computers, are vague at best.

"When I was in Syria I would see one person paying for an Internet connection while five of his friends would be standing behind him looking over his shoulder," Neely says. "How can we get an accurate count of how many people are affected?"

Almost 15 years ago, satellite television first began the modern revolution in the Kurdish national consciousness. The Kurdish Satellite Channel, a station licensed by Britain, started broadcasting in Europe and the Middle East, causing fervent protests from the Turkish and Iranian governments. In Turkey, the army smashed satellite dishes to prevent people from seeing images of the Kurdish flag and map and from hearing the Kurdish national anthem. "I knew a family in Turkey," Hassanpour says. "They never believed they'd be able to see Kurdish on television, but when they saw the shows, they changed their mind. They believed the Kurdish nation could exist."

The growing cyber-state is creating a similar effect -- with one crucial difference. Now Kurds all over the world aren't just passively watching content, they're creating their own, and they're connecting directly with thousands of others like themselves. The impact of this burgeoning nation in cyberspace on the formation of an actual Kurdistan may one day be very real.

"News on a daily basis, blogs, and especially chat rooms are very popular, and most of the content is nationalistic, of course," Hassanpour said. "Kurds from Iraq and Iran are communicating with each other in chat rooms -- even people from small towns in Iran. I myself am very surprised."

3. - The Guardian - "France to oppose Turkish EU entry":

ATHENS / 8 April 2004 / by Helena Smith

Turkey's hopes of launching EU accession talks soon took an unexpected battering yesterday when France's new foreign minister insisted Paris would oppose its entry "under current circumstances".

Addressing the French parliament, Michel Barnier said France would reject the Muslim state's application because it failed to meet the requisite political criteria.

"Turkey does not respect the conditions, even if it is preparing to do so," said the politician echoing similar sentiments in the European parliament.

The remarks, less than a week after his appointment, come at a critical juncture as the world tries to persuade Greek and Turkish Cypriots to accept a UN power-sharing plan which envisages Greek and Turkish Cypriots reuniting in a loose federal state. The plan will be put to a popular vote on both sides.

Turkey's reformist government is widely seen to have gone out of its way to agree to the deal, partly in the hope of receiving a start date for EU talks this December.

Analysts fear France's stance may strengthen Turkish nationalists, including the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, who opposes a deal.

"The timing is very unfortunate," said James Ker-Lindsay who heads a thinktank in Nicosia, the island's divided capital, adding that the French attitude will doubtless raise fears among Turks that they might have been duped.

In turn, that could undermine Ankara's modernising prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who last week endorsed the UN's Cyprus plan in order to promote Turkey's "European orientation." Until yesterday, Cyprus was viewed as the last impediment to Turkey launching EU entry talks.

Cyprus's head of state, President Tassos Papadopoulos, was also due to deliver his verdict last night, a move likely to influence how Greek Cypriots vote in the referendum on April 24.

4. - The International Herald Tribune - "Leader calls for 'no' vote on Cyprus referendum":

NICOSIA / 8 April 2004

The Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash said on Wednesday that he would seek a 'no' vote in an April 24 referendum on an accord to reunite Cyprus, hours before the Greek Cypriot leader was expected to urge rejection of the plan as well.

The Greek Cypriot president, Tassos Papadopoulos, who has barely hidden his distaste for the UN peace blueprint, was scheduled to outline his position on national television late Wednesday. But his main coalition partner said earlier that the president was certain to recommend a "no" vote.

Cyprus is scheduled to join the European Union on May 1, but if either side votes against the plan, only the internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government will enter, deepening the isolation of the minority Turkish Cypriots and harming Turkey's own EU hopes.

Denktash, 80, made clear he believed the power-sharing plan would spell the end of his Turkish Cypriot mini-state in the north of the island, which only Turkey recognizes.

Asked at a news conference in Ankara if he would urge Turkish Cypriots to vote against the plan, Denktash said, "I have already announced that I have launched" a "no" campaign.

"We cannot be expected to give our approval to a future full of risks," Denktash said before flying back to Cyprus.

Denktash fears Turkish Cypriots will be swamped by the majority Greek Cypriots in a reunited Cyprus, despite guarantees contained within the UN blueprint that would allow both communities broad autonomy over their own affairs.

Denktash had been under pressure from Ankara, which faces its own struggle to join the European Union, to at least stay silent during the referendum campaign.

In the Greek-speaking south, Demetris Christofias, head of the Communist AKEL party, said Papadopoulos was certain to urge a vote against the plan in his televised speech later on Wednesday.

AKEL is the Greek Cypriots' largest party and was crucial in getting Papadopoulos elected as president last year.

Local news media have said AKEL itself is inching toward acceptance of the UN plan, though it will not announce its final decision until April 14. Christofias said that despite their differences over the plan, AKEL would not withdraw from the coalition government.

Despite Denktash's hard-line stance, Turkish Cypriots are generally more receptive to the UN proposals; the Turkish Cypriot prime minister, Mehmet Ali Talat, said Wednesday that he would cross to the Greek Cypriot south over the weekend to promote a "yes" vote in an upcoming referendum to end the division of the island.

The EU enlargement commissioner, Günter Verheugen, meanwhile, reaffirmed the bloc's readiness to help the reunification process.

"If the referendum fails, we will have to consider how we can avoid political, economic and social tensions and problems on the island," he said at a news conference in Brussels.

Cyprus has been split along ethnic lines since 1974, when Turkey invaded the north after a brief Greek Cypriot coup backed by the military then ruling Greece.

The 1960s saw fierce communal bloodshed that left deep scars.

The Cyprus divide

Their leaders have failed to find a way out of their bitter 30-year division, but the Greek and Turkish communities of Cyprus will get their say on April 24. That's when they get to vote on a UN-brokered plan that offers a fair resolution to the conflict.

Many Greek Cypriots, sadly, cannot see that lasting peace is reason enough to support the plan. Their president, Tassos Papadopoulos, is to formally come out in favor of a n' vote on Wednesday. With their entry into the European Union assured on May 1, regardless of the outcome of the referendum, the Greek community feels less urgency to make concessions that would help bring Turkish Cypriots into the EU as well.

European officials need to counter the complacency on the Greek side, as do both the Greek and Turkish governments. Their mutual antagonism has softened recently, and both countries should strive to remove the barbed wire and minefields in Cyprus that have long symbolized their traditional enmity.

It doesn't help that many Greek Cypriots feel that the reunification plan, which calls for a loose federation of Greek and Turkish regions with the presidency rotating between their leaders, makes too many concessions to the island's Turks. The plan makes sense because it acknowledges the Turks' right to remain on the island and gives their community a say in its government.

For Greeks who lost their homes when Turkey invaded after a pro-Greek coup in 1974, however, it is hard to accept that the Turks, who make up 18 percent of the population, would keep 29 percent of the land, and that some troops from Turkey would be allowed to remain. But the plan, meticulously drafted under the auspices of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, is the island's best chance for a stable and prosperous future. Greek Cypriots need to realize that a failure to resolve the stalemate will prevent Cyprus from fulfilling its full potential in the EU.

European leaders should forcefully deliver that message. A donors' conference in mid-April will spell out the kind of assistance Cyprus can expect in the event of reunification.

Turkey's forward-thinking prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who also hopes to bring his country into the EU, has already done much to sell the plan. Greece's newly elected prime minister, Costas Caramanlis, must do the same.

The mutual antagonism between Greece and Turkey has been slowly diminishing since 1999, when each country offered the other aid after both suffered earthquakes. Resolving the Cyprus riddle could turn minds in Athens and Ankara firmly toward future cooperation.

5. - The Financial Times - "EU to hold donor conference for Cyprus":

BRUSSELS / 8 April 2004 / by Judy Dempsey

The European Union will next week hold a preparatory donors' conference for Cyprus amid hopes the divided island can be reunited in time for EU entry on May 1.

The EU remains optimistic that referendums in both parts of the island on April 24 will support a United Nations reunification plan despite objections from the Greek Cypriots.

Last week Tassos Papadopoulos, the Greek Cypriot president, rejected the UN proposals during intense negotiations in the Swiss resort of Bürgenstock.

Günter Verheugen, the EU's enlargement commissioner, made the announcement on the donors' conference yesterday after Britain, Greece and Turkey sent letters to Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general.

They said they fully supported the UN peace plan as well as backing one of the most crucial elements of its timetable: the referendum to be held by Greek Cypriots in the south and Turkish Cypriots in the north.

The show of unity by London, Athens and Ankara is more than symbolic. They are the island's Guarantor Powers after Cyprus gained its independence from Britain in 1960.

The island's brief spell of unity under independence ended in 1974 after the Turkish army invaded the north in response to an attempted coup by the junta in Athens.

Any change to the status of the island is required by the Guarantor Powers. "The fact that Greece and Turkey have signed on to the UN plan deal shows how much the 'mother' countries want a deal," said a European Commission official.

Despite the collapse of the Bürgenstock talks, Mr Verheugen remained optimistic. An agreement, he said, was "within inches" but he advised against the EU or other delegations on the island entering the referendum campaign. It could lead to "overkill", he said.

Whatever the outcome of the vote, Mr Verheugen said Mr Annan had "no other plan. It is the last opportunity. If it is missed, this opportunity will not come back for a very long time."

If either side rejects the plan, and opinions polls in both communities are still unpredictable, Mr Verheugen said the "whole [peace] process will have failed". Any EU laws extended to the Turkish-controlled north would be suspended, the Republic of Cyprus would become the legal representative of the whole island and the north might have to wait to join the EU if and when Turkey is admitted.

Commission officials are hoping a donors' conference might influence public opinion, particularly among Greek Cypriots who in polls have complained that they would have to pay most of the costs for reunification.

6. - The Telegraph - "The forgotten genocide":

Brendan Simms reviews The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian

7 April 2004

The mass murder of the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey was, as the Holocaust scholar Israel Charny put it, the "prototype" of 20th-century genocide. In 1894, and again with even greater ferocity in 1915, the Turkish government engaged in a deliberate strategy of straightforward massacre, transplantation, death marches, and forced conversion to Islam.

All this was well known at the time: the Armenian massacres regularly made the headlines in the British and American press. Indeed, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning study by Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell, reminded us recently, it was the Armenian massacres which prompted the Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin in the 1920s to start thinking about what kind of international legal safeguards could be put in place to prevent recurrence. Another, and even more terrible genocide later, Lemkin's quest resulted in the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948.

Peter Balakian's new book, The Burning Tigris, which made the New York Times best-seller lists last year, retells the story of the Armenian massacres in an accessible way. It is not for the faint-hearted. In places, the narrative becomes an almost unbearable catalogue of cruelties and killings. If the author seems to dwell on these, the reason lies in a revisionist campaign to minimise the scope of and intention behind the massacres, sponsored by some otherwise rather eminent historians.

Whether or not the murder of the Armenians was comparable to the Holocaust against the Jews is a matter of genuine academic debate; but the broad outline of the killings themselves cannot be disputed. Even if we discount the testimony of the survivors themselves as biased, there are still the grim accounts of American observers, and of the horrified German officers seconded to the Ottomans. In any case, some senior Turkish figures, such as the Ottoman minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, openly bragged about having "disposed of three-quarters of the Armenians".

The Armenian genocide was driven by three mutually interlocking concerns on the part of the Turkish government. First, there was a profound suspicion of the Christian "otherness" of the Armenians in an overwhelmingly Muslim polity. The Armenians were not alone in this respect, of course; the Greeks occupied a similar position.

Second, attempts to modernise the empire led to an emphasis on "Turkishness", rather than simply Islam, as a legitimating force. This only reinforced the exclusion of the Armenians. As Mr Balakian shows, Armenian converts to Islam were by no means safe: here the ethnic argument predominated.

Third, and most important, there was the fear of Russian subversion. The Tsarist empire had been encroaching on the Ottomans in the Caucasus for some time and had been using the Armenians as a pawn in this great game; the second wave of attacks took place shortly after the Ottomans entered the First World War on the German side. In the minds of the Turkish leadership, therefore, the massacres were also something of a pre-emptive strike.

The author pays particular attention to the American response to the genocide. It was, he notes, the first time that the public was exposed to this kind of man-made catastrophe. At the level of civil society, the response was overwhelming. Huge sums of money were donated for relief, and various committees were set up to raise awareness and put the Ottoman government under pressure. All this marked the beginning of a global human rights dimension in American politics.

At governmental level, the reaction was rather different. Some State Department figures, such as the ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, played an important role in bringing the massacres to the attention of the outside world. But in general, the received wisdom within the administration was that Turkey was a sovereign state, and that no direct American interests were involved.

Mr Balakian is perhaps a little too quick to judge here. It was all very well for ex-Presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt to call for American intervention, but there were severe practical difficulties involved. The kind of military instruments which rendered humanitarian interventions possible in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, such as precision air strikes, were still in their infancy; and "Johnny Turk" had shown at Gallipoli that he was a much more formidable foe than the Bosnian Serbs.

The Burning Tigris concludes with an epilogue on the memory of the Armenian genocide in recent years. It notes that the American government continues to defer to Turkish sensitivities on the issue. A Congressional Bill, the Armenian Genocide Resolution, designed to raise awareness of the massacres, was sabotaged by Clinton's White House as recently as the autumn of 2000 after furious Turkish lobbying.

During the Cold War, when Turkey was a key pillar of NATO in the eastern Mediterranean, this made some sort of sense. Nor was it completely unreasonable to maintain this stance throughout the 1990s, when Turkey was a cornerstone of the containment of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. No longer: the refusal of the Turkish government to join the "coalition of the willing" in 2003 means that the moment may have arrived when the American government can finally confront Ankara with the truth.

Brendan Simms's 'Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia', is published in paperback by Penguin.