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Crime of SilenceA
Crime of SilencePermanent Peoples’ Tribunal. A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide. London: Zed Pub., 1985, 249p. Paper covers. Out of print.
To mark the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (successor to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Vietnam) held a special hearing in Paris on April 13-16, 1984. This volume reproduces the evidence and papers delivered at the Tribunal’s hearings, and its Verdict.
The Tribunal’s jury included three Nobel Prize winners and ten other eminent jurists, theologians, academics and political figures from various Western and Third World countries.
The Turkish Government still denies its predecessor’s responsibility for the wholesale killings and destruction. Of great interest in this book, therefore, is the official Turkish defence of their position, particularly when contrasted with Dr. Tessa Hofmann’s exhaustive survey of German eye-witness accounts of the killings, as well as former UN Human Rights Division Director, Théo van Boven’s detailed account of how in 1979 the Turkish Government successfully pressured the UN into deleting all reference to the Armenian massacre in Paragraph 30 of the UN Study on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.