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court case. Court cases are very expensive and it can simply be
easier for banks or firms or hospitals to agree to make a pay-
ment without any confession of liability, just because fighting
the case would be absurdly expensive, and the outcome – given
how the American jury system works – unpredictable. A
burglar, crawling over a householder‟s glass roof, fell through
it, was badly wounded, and took the householder to court:
result, a million dollars in damages. Class actions by Armenian
Diaspora descendants in California shook down the Deutsche
Bank over claims dating back to 1915 and collected 17,000,000
dollars; then they attempted the same with a French insurance
company. We can be entirely certain that if Turkey ever
„recognizes the genocide‟ then the financial claims will follow.
But if Turkey refuses to admit it, she is in fact on perfectly
good ground. The very first thing to be said is that the business
of „genocide‟ has never been proved. The evidence for it is at
best indirect and when the British were in occupation of
Istanbul they never found any direct evidence or proof at all.
They kept some hundred or so prominent Turks in captivity on
Malta, hoping to find some sort of evidence against them, and
failed. They asked the Americans if they knew anything and
were told, no. The result is that the alleged „genocide‟ has
never been subjected to a properly-constituted court of law.
The British released their Turks (meanly refusing to pay for
their journeys back home from Malta).
There is a counter-claim
to the effect that this happened because the Nationalist Turks
were holding British officers hostage but the fact is that the
Law Officers simply said that they did not have the evidence to
try their captives. Diaspora Armenians claim that „historians‟
accept the genocide case. There is some preposterous organi-
zation called „association of genocide scholars‟ which does
indeed endorse the Diaspora line, but who are they and what
qualifications do they have? Knowing about Rwanda or Bosnia
or even Auschwitz does not qualify them to discuss Anatolia in