By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 2, 2016
An article in the twenty-second edition of al-Naba, the Islamic State’s (IS) newsletter, released on 15 March 2016, explained why the group has not made fighting Israel a priority.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 25, 2016
Published at Left Foot Forward.
The British inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko concluded on Thursday, making official what everyone already knew: the Russian intelligence services, “probably” at the direct order of Russian President Vladimir Putin, murdered Litvinenko in London in November 2006.
Welcome as it is to have this on the record and to have Litvinenko’s killers named for all the world to see, it now leaves questions, primarily:
Will similar forensic scrutiny be brought to bear on several other odd instances of political and other crime in Russia?
And what does the British government intend to do now that the Kremlin is carrying out assassinations on its territory again? Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 3, 2015
A version of this article was published at The Independent.
Yesterday, the British House of Commons voted 397 to 223 to extend airstrikes against the Islamic State (ISIS) into Syria from Iraq. After the vote in August 2013 against military action to punish Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for the massive poison gas attack outside Damascus that killed 1,500 people in a few hours, this is undoubtedly a sign of a recovery in confidence of Britain’s international role, but it is only the beginning. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 3, 2015
Published at Left Foot Forward.
An RAF Tornado fighter jet in Cyprus
This morning the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee published a report recommending that the British government should not extend its airstrikes campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS) from Iraq to Syria.
The report makes little legal or military sense, but its political objection—that the government’s attempt to defeat ISIS independently of a resolution to the Syrian war is untenable—is exactly right. Unfortunately the report, while very vague, hints that a resolution involves cooperation with the Bashar al-Assad regime and Iran, which cannot work, and actually helps ISIS. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 11, 2015
Published at Left Foot Forward
On 9 September the British government announced a new plan for dealing with Syria and the Islamic State (ISIS):
All three parts of this plan push in a pro-Iran direction, and strengthen Assad. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 26, 2015
On Sunday the British Embassy in Iran was reopened after four years of closure. The British government’s decision is consistent with two emerging trends: the United States using the nuclear accord to facilitate détente with Iran, and European States falling into line with this policy and beginning to compete to enter the emerging Iranian market.
The British Embassy in Tehran was closed in November 2011 after ‘protesters’—a regime-orchestrated mob—stormed the building, ostensibly in protest against sanctions. The regime claimed helplessness in the face of angry demonstrators.
But it is worth remembering that when Iranian citizens take to the streets in a manner the regime actually disapproves of, it mobilises its security forces to murder them, and imprison them en masse in facilities where they are, male and female, raped as a form of punishment and torture. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 9, 2015
This is the complete review. It has previously been posted in three parts: Part 1 on the question of whether the 1915-16 Armenian massacres constitute genocide; Part 2 on the post-war trials and the Nationalist Movement; and Part 3 gives some conclusions on what went wrong in the Allied efforts to prosecute the war criminals and the implications for the present time, with Turkey’s ongoing denial that genocide took place and the exodus of Christians from the Middle East.
A Question of Genocide
The controversy over the 1915-16 massacres of Armenian Christians in the Ottoman Empire is whether those acts constitute genocide. Those who say they don’t are not the equivalent of Holocaust-deniers in that they do not deny that the massacres happened; what they deny is that the massacres reach the legal definition of genocide. Their case is based on three interlinked arguments:
Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility presents evidence to undermine every one of these arguments. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 7, 2015
In 2012, Bernard Lewis published his memoirs, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, which included a chapter on the court case brought against him in France in the 1990s for refusing to agree that the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 constitute genocide in the original sense of the term, as applied to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. The chapter is reproduced below.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 7, 2015
Part 1 of this review dealt with the question of whether the 1915-16 Armenian massacres constitute genocide. Part 2 was about the post-war trials and the Nationalist Movement. This part gives some conclusions on what went wrong in the Allied efforts to prosecute the war criminals and the implications for the present time. Alternatively, the complete review is available here.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 4, 2015
Part 1 of this review dealt with the question of whether the 1915-16 Armenian massacres constitute genocide. This part is about the post-war trials and the Nationalist Movement. Part 3 gives some conclusions on what went wrong in the Allied efforts to prosecute the war criminals and the implications for the present time. Alternatively, the complete review is available here.
The First Phase of the Trials
On October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed its final treaty of defeat. The Ottomans’ long decline began in 1683, and by 1844—not the 1830s, as Akcam slightly strangely says—the Empire was referred to as the “sick man of Europe”. The armistice was a near-total surrender, allowing the occupation of any area the Allies deemed necessary for their security. Unfortunately, it was neither the end of the war nor the end of the massacres against the Armenians.
The Allies—Britain, France, and Russia—issued a declaration on May 24, 1915, saying:
In light of the crimes against humanity and civilisation committed by Turkey, the allied powers warn the Sublime Porte that members of the Ottoman government involved in the mass murder will be held personally responsible for these crimes.
Not coincidentally, Akcam remarks, within days of this the official deportation law was passed through the Ottoman Parliament and would thereafter be issued by the Interior Ministry as legal cover for the CUP’s actions. The Allied statement was a first introduction of the concept of crimes against humanity, and of individual responsibility that extended to senior Generals and Heads of State. The Russians fell to the Communists and for reasons of realpolitik the French and Italians soon dropped their demands for punishing the Turkish war criminals, but the British were relentless. Continue reading
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