Most of the people who devote themselves to chronicling the history of Anatolia during the first world war fall into one category or another: those determined to prove that the Armenians suffered genocide, and those determined to prove the opposite. This Manichean split amounts to a “travesty of history and memory”. What is needed is a “vaguer designation, avoiding the g-word but clearly connoting criminal acts of slaughter.”

That is Christopher de Bellaigue’s argument and many people will be shocked by it. How could anyone want to blur the outlines of an unspeakable phenomenon whose precise definition has, in recent years, been of keen concern to liberal internationalists and humanitarian law buffs? What hope is there of stopping genocide if people do not even try to decide what the word means?

But honest readers of this moving and intricately woven look at Turkey’s 20th-century history will surely see his point. By focusing on a single, remote area in the east Anatolian highlands, and describing not only its blood-drenched history but the multiple layers of denial that obscure every episode, Mr de Bellaigue, a former correspondent for this newspaper, conveys some important messages about the elusiveness of historical truth.

As he shows, in places where “the past is not even past”, the passage of time does not always make it easier to discern or speak the truth. It is difficult, though not impossible, to establish even the basic facts about the fate of the Armenians in this part of Anatolia; it is also hard to establish what horrors occurred during the Kurdish uprising which began in the 1990s and is still sputtering away.

... contd.