“padding-left: 40px”>The language of some of the organisers of that genocide also anticipated the depraved biological bilge of the Nazis. Dr Mehmed Resid, the governor of Diyarbakir province, declared: “We will liquidate them before they liquidate us … the Armenian bandits were a load of harmful microbes that had afflicted the body of the fatherland. Was it not the duty of the doctor to kill the microbes?”
In fact the British PM’s family is intimately linked to this episode, and heroically so. Boris Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather, Ali Kemal Bey, was a Turkish journalist and newspaper editor who entered politics and became the Ottoman interior minister. He was, perhaps more than any other Ottoman public figure, determined to bring to justice the thousands of perpetrators of the massacres of the Armenians — and explicit about it. In 1919, he wrote: “Don’t let us try to throw the blame on the Armenians; we must not flatter ourselves that the world is filled with idiots. We have plundered the possessions of the men we have deported and massacred … a historically singular crime has been perpetrated, a crime before which the world shudders.”
It was precisely these expressions (which have something of the prose style of his great-grandson) that led to Kemal’s kidnap from an Istanbul barbershop and, in due course, his stoning and lynching. One account described how “his blood-covered body was subsequently hanged with a scrawl across his chest which read ‘Artin Kemal’.” The point being that “Artin” is an Armenian name: this was, in the view of the killers, the ultimate insult to perpetrate on his corpse.
As far as I know, while Boris Johnson is said to be proud of his Turkish ancestry — and when he became PM, he was acclaimed as “an Ottoman grandson” by the Turkish press — he has never spoken in public about his antecedent’s murder, or the reasons for it. I doubt very much he brought it up during his telephone call with Erdoğan on September 28, which, apparently, did touch on the events in Nagorno-Karabakh. Erdoğan’s office released a statement to the effect that “the two leaders discussed economic steps to reach a $20bn trade volume between the two nations, as well as moves to further co-operation in the defence industry”.
This raises three questions. Is Erdoğan really the person to whom the British government should be increasing arms sales? How will the prime minister feel if they are used to massacre more Armenians? And what would his great-grandfather say?
I wasn't aware of Johnson's great-grandfather's role. Perhaps Boris would be better off taking his ancestor as a role model, rather than indulging in the sub-Churchillian bluster he tends to favour.
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