Madam Ambassador:

Recently you were quoted in the Armenian press as saying that "the massacre of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in the early 1900s cannot be qualified as genocide in line with the 1948 UN convention on genocide". I don't consider it appropriate to discuss or question the British position on Armenian-Turkish relations, as it lies exclusively within the purview of your government and you may reiterate it and make any comment whenever you wish to. I believe, however, that a similar caution should be exercised regarding the question of the applicability of an international convention to certain events, as it is a purely legal issue and cannot and should not be addressed incidentally, while talking about other things. The original drafters of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, representing a number of countries (the United Kingdom being represented by Sir Hartley Shawcross, who had been the chief British prosecutor before the Nuremberg Tribunal), spent years negotiating the final text of the convention and at the very least deserve that the issue be addressed professionally, from a legal standpoint.

As a founding member of the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC) - an independent group of prominent Armenians and Turks, established in July 2001 to promote mutual understanding and good will between the people of Armenia and Turkey, and to encourage improved relations between the countries - I have been involved in many discussions on the subject and know how sensitive and delicate the issue is and how punctilious one must be in considering it.

That is why TARC, through the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice, commissioned a legal analysis by an independent legal counsel entitled The Applicability of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to the Events that Occurred during the Early Twentieth Century. This groundbreaking study, which was published a year ago and is available on the internet (www.tarc.info ), concludes unequivocally that the events in question "include all of the elements of the crime of genocide as defined in the Convention, and legal scholars as well as historians, politicians, journalists and other people would be justified in continuing to so describe them."

Madam Ambassador, the news reports on your statement coincided with the publication of the article "Turks Breach Wall of Silence on Armenians" by Belinda Cooper in the March 6, 2004 issue of the New York Times. Let me quote two sentences from the article:

"Most scholars outside Turkey agree that the killings are among the first 20th-century instances of 'genocide,' defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention as acts 'committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,' and "A legal analysis commissioned last year by the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York concluded that sufficient evidence existed to term the killings a 'genocide' under international law."

I hope that the clarifications I have made will be of use to you in future references to the subject.

Please, Madam Ambassador, accept the assurances of my highest consideration.

Alexander Arzoumanian 
Former Minister of Foreign A ff airs of the Republic of Armenia 
Yerevan, March 10, 2004