Robert Fisk: The truth should be proclaimed loudly

Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It’s from a letter from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation. The reason, of course, is a chapter entitled "The First Holocaust", which records the genocide of one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, a crime against humanity that even Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara tried to hide by initially refusing to invite Armenian survivors to his Holocaust Day in London. It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read the following, from their message to my London publishers HarperCollins, remember it is written by the citizen of a country that seriously wishes to enter the European Community. Since I do not speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses in Mr Osman’s otherwise excellent English. "We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems, Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of April 2007... Therefore we would like to undertake the publication quietly, which means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk’s book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to us if any trial [is] ... held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk and HarperCollins can understand our reservations." Well indeedydoody, I can. Here is a publisher in a country negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds, Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) - even Turkey’s bid to join the EU, for heaven’s sake - is reason enough to try to sneak my book out in silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book ? Well, I can give you an example. When Taner Akcam’s magnificent A Shameful Act : The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was first published in Turkish - it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a terrifying historical fact - the Turkish historian experienced an almost identical reaction. His work was published "quietly" in Turkey - and without a single book review.