(2008) What Mr. Geoffrey Robertson thinks about Turkish issues?

[ Geoffrey Robertson, QC, is a human rights lawyer, academic, author and broadcaster. Australian-born, London-based Geoffrey Robertson, QC, is the author of Crimes Against Humanity - The Struggle for Global Justice (second edition published last month by Penguin) and presents the Hypotheticals television specials.]

Mother England as much to blame Geoffrey Robertson February 16, 2008

“….The British exterminated the Tasmanian Aborigines, leaving only 40 survivors who were placed on an offshore island gulag. The governor's wife led the hunt for their skulls to decorate London mantelpieces. At least there was a parliamentary inquiry, which reported in 1836 that "not a single native now remains upon Van Dieman's land … the adoption of any conduct, having for its avowed or secret object the extermination of the native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the British government". That "indelible stain" was, a century later, termed "genocide". We castigate the Turks for pretending the Armenian genocide never took place, but we are apt to forget the Tasmanian genocide. Last year the National History Museum had to be taken to court to stop it experimenting on the skulls of victims.…” GUARDIAN
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/mother-england-as-much-to-blame/2008/02/15/1202760596979.html?page=2

Others:
….. Then of course we spool forward another century to the First World War and the failure of peace in Versailles; the inability of the world at that stage to develop any kind of enforceable universal law to prevent genocide. The Armenians were massacred in 1915 and 1916 and retribution never came. The Kaiser was not punished for unrestricted submarine warfare or for invading Belgium. BillyHughes may have gone to Versailles with the slogan “Hang the Kaiser”, the Kaiser got away because he had what was thought to be sovereign immunity and the Turks got away with the Armenian genocide. Hitler in his famous speech to his generals on the Polish border urging them to show no mercy said “After all, who now remembers the Armenians?’” http://www.cornerstones.org.au/media/pdfs/G_Robertson_speech.pdf

“…Britain had provided forces to protect an ethnic minority of Christians from killing by the Turks in Bulgaria. America justified its declaration of war on Spain in 1898 on the grounds of the oppressive rule in Cuba that "shocked the moral sense of the people of the United States". And all of this was without CNN. Roosevelt's 1904 State of the Union message made it clear that the US believed intervention for humanitarian reasons was justifiable when oppression was on a vast scale….” http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=158055§ioncode=7


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