Empire: World History - 37. The Armenian Genocide: Death Marches

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

The secret orders have been given. The Armenian community is to be destroyed. Ordered to march across the desert, to unsupplied camps in Deir ez-Zor. Listen as William and Anita are, for the final time, joined by Eugene Rogan to discuss the end of the Genocide and its aftermath.   LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello, and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. So, William, on Tuesday, we had what I thought. Anyway, for me, it was a difficult conversation about the... the build-up to the Armenian genocide. Yeah, we looked at previous outbreaks of violence against

the Armenians in the form of the massacres during the reign of Abdul Hamid and the massacres at Adana in 1909. And then we were taking a look at the way the First World War escalated absolutely everything, I mean, just like a catalyst into this chemical combustion that was already happening. The Ottoman government attempted to deport Armenians as they feared they were the enemy within. When we left you, we had secret kill orders issued by the Young Turk Central Government. Anita, you asked about the hundreds of thousands of Armenians who were being deported. Were they being sent anywhere with any intent or were they just being left to die? We are once again joined by the great Eugene Rogan, author of the fall of the Ottomans.

Eugene, what was the plan for these deportations? So women and children were seen as being no particular threat to the Ottoman state. when the men who are seen as being a possible fighters with the Russian side or a threat are taken aside and killed, then there is no real policy to exterminate the women and children. It's just they're seen as being a drain on resources at a time where resources are scarce. So this is an Ottoman Empire which is suffering from shortages of crops, they're having to feed, men who are in uniform rather than in the fields bringing in the harvests. And so the state, in the first instance, will concentrate Armenian women, and children,

and the old in towns and cities in the southeast of Turkey, places like Adina, for further measures. And then the next measures they decide on is to march them away from the Anatolian highlands down into the Syrian desert to places, well, in the first instance, Lepo, and then on to Derizor. Derazoor is the place that you keep hearing. This name keeps coming back when you talk to Armenian family. Dersor had the echoes of death to it in the ears of Armenians because to get to Dersor,

you had to cross some of the most inhospitable desert, and no one was trying to take such care as to preserve the lives of those who were marching there. The deportations are not contested, even by those who find the rest of the story contestable, or they dispute this term genocide very strongly. But when those deportations take place, are we talking about people who are chained together? Are we talking about people who are, you know, sort of carrying whatever they have?

Are we talking about the pictures that we see going over the newly created partition between India and Pakistan? What are we looking at here? Because I think to most people, they will have no visual reference of what was going on here. So here again, Gregoros Belakian is a, a wonderful source on the way in which this is carried out. And he actually did not take the march to Dersor.

He's able to get himself secunded to a work gang on the railway line, not too far from Adnan. And that will be his pathway to escape and then to survival. And he survives the Armenian genocide to tell the story. But he certainly, while he was being moved, he was one of the Armenian leaders. that was arrested by the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople on what is now taken as the opening day of the Armenian genocide, the 24th of April, 1915. And so his story of deportation takes him across Anatolia. And he's informed of what happens to those who go to Der Zor. And he knows that if you take that road, it is the road to death.

And so what we do know is that the people marching across the desert were not changed. they were in groups of hundreds and thousands who made caravans on foot being driven by a certain number of Ottoman troops. They were ordered to kill those who lag behind. So there are a lot of accounts of those who are old, sick, or weak falling behind being bayonet and left to die. Others just fell by the side of the road and died. Others, you know, you talk about the taking of children or of rape. there are lots of accounts of people intervening really out of humanitarian motive, seeing women and children being marched in this way, and then taking them away to their homes.

There's a very famous book by a Turkish lawyer named Defetia Chetim, which is called My Grandmother's Story. And her grandmother, she'd always taken to be an Anatolian Turk like herself, was actually a survivor of the Armenian death marches who had been taken away by a captain on horseback, treated as a member of his family. and then married into the family, and the children that she raised, she raises as Turkish Muslims. And no one ever really knows that her real name is Heronush and that she is an Armenian survivor

and that her mother and her brothers actually survived the genocide as well. I've met many families like that in the Turkish islands around Erzurum. Many people will point it, well, in the 1980s, used to point to their grandmothers and say she was one of those.

It's a whole class of people they call the survivors of the sword. Yeah. But again, here, this will fit into genocide nonetheless because the adoption of children, the forced conversion of people is just another way to make a genus disappear, to make Armenians no longer exist.

One of the stories you hear in many of the accounts is the column of the naked, where there is a group of women from Marash, I think, who are marched by their Ottoman guards into desert. Then they're stripped naked, made to walk on and there's, of course, horrific rapes and so on. And they are then marched on to Daryl Zor, and there's one or two survivors who live to tell the tale. You know, all I would say is

the fact of being stripped naked is, of course, sensational. But the greater threat than rape is its own. And if you had to march to the Syrian desert, you'd want as much coverage as you could get because, you know, being marched naked is just another way to hasten your death by dehydration and sunburn and Sunstroke. So, you know, doubly cruel fate. Eugene, obviously this is a highly contested story. Tell us about some of the accounts, not by either Armenians or from Turkish sources. I'm thinking of Donogales, for example. He's a Venezuelan working with the Ottomans who records this, and also the German ambassador. Is it von Wagenheim?

Well, De Nogadis is a soldier of fortune, who has come to the First World War as a neutral looking for an army to join and get in on the action. And he could have gone either way, to be honest, but he was sympathetic to Germany, saw that the Ottomans needed more officers, volunteered to serve them, was sent out to, first, the devastated third army in the Caucasus frontier, and found that they were more engaged fighting Typhus than the Russians. And so he volunteers for the Ottoman gendarmery in the town of Vann. Vann with its large Armenian community is rapidly becoming a center of an Armenian uprising

that will attract a Russian intervention. And so he goes as an expert in artillery to assist the gendarmery to preserve Vahn in the Ottoman's control. And in a sense, he comes as an outsider so he can view critically what he sees the Ottoman's doing. He's the one who, as he's riding from the caucuses down towards Vann in southeastern Turkey, a town situated on a very beautiful lake, not too far from the Russian and Persian frontiers, he comes to a village where he finds Ottoman officers engaged in a massacre of young men, and he tells him to stop and they say to him, we are just following the orders we were given by the civilian authorities here,

to kill all men over the age of 12. And as an officer, he had no authority to countermand, an order given by a civilian official, and he turns his back on the massacre and walks away. Further evidence that there may have been verbal orders given to willing executioners to see out the killing of men of a certain age. I'm really interested in this, you know, the othering that has to happen before you can have a massacre. And if you are saying that, you know, these Christian strange, not like us, people, they are

more akin to the Orthodox Russians and therefore we can't trust them, there were other Christian groups in the Ottoman Empire. So, for example, the Assyrian Christians, that is a grouping. What is the attitude to them and what are they doing and how are they feeling at this time? I'm very glad you bring the Assyrians into the discussion, Anita, because all too often they are left out of the story of First World War atrocity. And though their numbers are smaller, they were a smaller community than the Armenians, they number in the hundreds of thousands. They nonetheless suffer violence on what would be in percentage terms be. a par with what the Armenians suffered, but have not had the same degree of organized protest

and search for justice. But really, the same measures that the Armenians are suffering are applied to the Assyrian community, who are uprooted from their villages, forced to march in death march conditions, and suffered a high level of death in atrocity at the same time. I've interviewed some survivors from that community to old ladies in the 80s and 90s in a village called Einwardo near the monastery of Mar Gabriel. Einuardo was on top of a hill. It was a fortified monastery. And again, like Musadar, this was a place to which the locals fled.

They had already got grain and some water kept aside. And they survived a siege by, they said Kurdish irregulars in this case, for however many long. And then I can't remember whether it was typhus or some disease broke out in the besieging ranks. And as told to me, 60, 70 years later, they were rescued by St. Michael appearing on the back of a horse and breaking the siege. And it sort of turned into this sort of fantastical story. But that there had been a siege was clear. And you could see still the marks not only on the Aynuardo monastery, but they then broken out to the local chandemarie. And when the Christians had broken the siege, they went and attacked the gendarmer, and you can still see the peppering of small arms fire on that building.

It's so interesting, William, because, you know, your experiences in traveling around Eastern Turkey in the 1980s, I first visited Van in 1985. And Van at that point was a modern city about two miles away from the lake. And you wondered why they didn't build the city right next to the beautiful waterfront. But you visit the antiquities of, let's say, the citadel and the ruins of the old town. You walk two miles towards the lake. The citadel is on a sort of escarpment overlooking the town. And from there you look down, you can see all the foundations of what used to be a city. From the air, you can see what used to be a very, you know, populist...

Particularly in the evening with the raking light. If you stand up there, look, all the house platforms that were destroyed in the Second World War are all there. But that was actually a Russian intervention, wasn't it? The Russians got as far as far as that. Van proved the worst of Ottoman fears that the Armenians were a fifth column in league with the Russians. because, you know, very much in response to the measures taken by the deportation and murdering of Armenian surrounding villagers, you have an uprising among Armenian partisans who were numerous and prepared. And they take on the Ottomans in the town of Vann that leads

to a kind of trench war between the two sides, which brings an intervention by the Russian army who come in, drive the Ottomans out and liberate Vann. But then the Ottomans are able to mount a counterattack, drive the Russians back, you have the great retreat of the Armenians of Vaughn. And in the course of 1915, the city will pass hands three times until it ultimately lies in Russian control, but proving for those who deem the Armenians to be an internal threat and a fifth column, that indeed the Armenians and the Russians were determined to try and take Eastern Anatolia away from the Ottoman Empire. I mean, it is so interesting because, I mean, you've again reminded us we are still only in 1915.

Because, you know, this sort of litany of horror and ghastliness, it's exhausting to talk about and hear. But how quickly is it over or does it continue to the end of the war? You know, in a sense, Anita, we concentrate our study of the genocide in 1915, 16, when really the worst of the measures were taken and most of the killing was done. but at no point until the end of the war was it safe to be an Armenian and the Ottoman Empire? You lived in constant fear that if you'd survived until 1917, you could be denounced, taken away,

and suffer the fate of your co-religionaries. And so, you know, again, Gregoros Malakim will remain undercover in hiding until the armistice is signed and you have the arrival of the Entente fleets in Constantinople at the end of 1918, that he will reemerge. And he describes his first experience of being back home in Constantinapels,

meeting up with his surviving family members who had given him up for dead and is able to recount what a kind of post-genocide future remain for the Armenians. And he writes his whole narrative, if you like, as a way of preserving this history for future generations because despite the efforts of the state, the Armenians had survived, and he would be part of the voice of that surviving renaissance. One of the complicating factors, of course, was the Germans, wasn't it? Because they were allies of the Turks and individual Germans in the Ottoman Empire were horrified by what they saw. And we have cables from the German ambassador called von Wangenheim, who reports to the German Chancellor. He says that the Ottomans were trying to, and this is a quote, exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish Empire. What effect does that have? Well, again, I think you have lots of diplomatic accounts at the time.

Another very outspoken critic of the young Turks for the mass murder of Armenians was the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau. The United States remained in neutral in the First World War until April of 1917. And so they were eyewitnesses to the events in Eastern Anatolia. American missionaries were posted in towns right through Eastern Anatolia, working with Armenian communities and reporting back to their ambassador on the horrors that they were witnessing. And so these American reports have always been part of the dossier. But the Germans are brought into it because they were the Ottoman's allies in the First World War. And of course, retroactively, people associate the Germans with genocide because of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. And it's important to stress that people

like von von von von von derange were denouncing the atrocity against Christians in Eastern Anatolia. But when these reports went back to Berlin, the government's response was, this is an internal affair that we should not interfere. We need to preserve the Ottoman spirit to fight the war, and we can't be caught up in their internal disputes and how they handle what they proceed to be fifth columns. And so there was to be, if you like, no human intervention, which is why your Assyrians would look to an archangel and the divine to come in on their behalf to deliver them, because God only knows people weren't going to do it for them. One of the defenses I've heard made by Turkish historians is that it wasn't just a one-way massacre. It wasn't just that Armenians were being massacred by Ottoman troops,

that in areas that were taken by the Russians, Armenian troops would massacre Turkish villages. What's your view of that? Again, there are lots of documents that point to violence being committed by Armenians against Turkish or Kurdish Muslims, particularly in the Caucasus region. Again, I come back to our medical corporal Ali Riza Eti, who went through villages that had been sacked by Armenians with the Russians and described the desecration of mosques and, you know, very poetic images of sheets of Qur'ans blowing in the wind

where they'd been despoiled by the attackers and whatnot. And this definitely fed not just hatred, but a wish for revenge. And we'll see this even after like what happens in Vaan and subsequently in conflict between the Russians and the Ottomans in the eastern Anatolia in 1917, 1918. And in some cases you get kind of double massacres, don't you? Because first of all, you get the, in a sense, the Russians rolling forward and there's massacres of Turkish and Muslim families. Then the Russians retreat back again to their border, leaving those Armenians exposed. And there's a second massacre, often in the same villages. You get double waves.

of killings. Which is why American Civil War General Sherman declared war hell. I mean, there's just no way that one can put rules around war to spare civilians from the worst of atrocity. And there is no doubt that atrocity will be hyped in a way to engender hatred, mobilize people to fight the war with more vigor or to bring allies into the conflict on the sides of the righteous and the just to liberate the victims. You know, we look on the account. We look on the account. accounts that come from third parties and we take them with a grain of salt. I think as historians, we are constantly looking for the reliable historical narratives or details that allow us to piece together why a genocide happens. Not to justify it by a long shot is to explain this and also

to learn from it because as we keep saying, it is not a crime that we can comfortably distance ourselves from or pin to one society. It is something that is omnipresent in human society and very much with us today. Yeah, depressing. Depressingly so. Very depressingly so. Well, anyway, we're going to take a short break there, and we'll be back in the second half to discuss the end of the genocide and its legacy.

Welcome back. So the war ends, and we know that the Ottomans end up being on the losing side, do we know what happens to those people who are responsible for the terrible Armenian bloodlet that we've just been talking about? As the Ottomans signed the armistice in October of 1918, they knew that they would face tremendous retribution from the victorious powers. The Ottomans were in the business of losing war. They'd done this before and survived very well. But they knew full well that facing particularly the British and French in the Atmanathist War,

they would be held accountable. And probably the most serious crime that they'd be accused of would be the massacres that took place of the Armenians. because there had been so much reporting, not just for the American ambassador Morgenthau, but Arnold Toynbee was drawn in. He did a blue book, didn't he, of drawing up? He did a blue book that really captured this for the British government. And so the Ottomans were very keen to be demonstrating

to Western public opinion that they acknowledged the magnitude of the horror, and they were going to take measures off their own bat to hold those responsible accountable. The first thing that happens after war's end is the thing, three leading young Turks. Talat, who is the architect of the Armenian Genocide, his colleague Ender, who brought Germany into the First World War and the first place minister of war, and Jamal, the minister of Marine, who as Governor General of Syria actually is seen to have been responsible for many surviving Armenian communities, including the ones that William

will have encountered in Jerusalem. These were people received into Syria for reasons that basically Armenians were very thin on the ground in Syria and could be absorbed into the territory without creating a demographic center of gravity that might, in future, give rise to new Armenian claims for territory. So Gemmol actually comes out of the Armenian story as having been responsible for saving lives. Aleppo and Jerusalem being two places which had very small Armenian communities before and a very large ones by the end of the war. And very much coming from the area's closest to, so the area around Alexandria

and Antioch, though which is like Dort Yol, Zetun, a lot of the surviving communities those places will become the Armenian communities of Aleppo and others from East Adelaide making the way through to Damascus and down through Transdordan, Palestine to Beirut. A very large community in Beirut. I remember the

Armenian community around Bush Hamud when I was a kid in Beirut and the way they memorialized the events of the genocide. An extraordinary museum there of the Armenian Genocide. Very, very moving museum. But you were saying, so there are these three names that you've identified. And so what happens to them? Yeah. Yes. Follow the Fox. Follow the Fox. So the three leading triumphs, Enver Jamal and Talat, all take flight immediately after the signing of the armistice and take refuge in Germany in the first instance, where they

will, another story, but be picked off by Armenian vigilantes. as a matter of retribution. It's Operation Nemesis, isn't it? It's codenamed Operation Nemesis, and they send out assassins to take them one by one, and all three are dead by the end of 1922. Talat, 1921, Jamal, 1922, and Inver in Central Asia, long, far away,

up in Bukta Kestan with 1922. Leading a charge, he's the only one who died with his boots on instead of being killed by Armenian assassins. But in a sense, with the young Turk triumvirate out of Istanbul, the successor government had its work cut out to demonstrate it was going to hold those responsible for the Armenian massacres or capture those who were responsible for the Armenian massacres. And what they wound up doing was creating special tribunals to arrest and take evidence and try anyone accused of involvement in giving. orders in, you know, the deportation movements or in the actual massacres themselves. And these tribunals were open, they were public. The evidence taken was published and was archived. It's become a source of some of the best details we have. The courts were, you know,

slow to come down with convictions and only a handful of Ottoman, the things. were actually sentenced to death in person. Many more were sentenced to death in absentia. Others were put in jail for various terms for their roles. But the message coming out of Istanbul, while it's under occupation by the British and French authorities, is we are actively pursuing justice for the victims of the young church crimes against the Armenians in the hopes that this would color the kind of peace treaty that the victorious powers would impose on the Ottoman Empire. And this, once they saw that they weren't going to get any particular break from the victorious powers, then I think the enthusiasm of pursuing justice and the function of these tribunals begins to wane

and they become, you know, derelict and close down. Let's talk about today and the impact of all of this. because I mean I've read accounts from people going back to their ancestral homes in Van in particular where they will say, did you know my great grandparents? And there will be an enormous amount of denialism that they will meet saying, I don't know what you're talking about. There wasn't a community here, no idea. Now, is that, I mean, from what you see, is that just a very human response to,

I cannot bear that this happened here? is there some kind of official effort to minimise what happened, or at least we know sort of internationally, that there is a huge resistance to using the word genocide, and that has gone right to the top. I've come across House of Lords debates in this country, coinciding with that Biden announcement, where there is an argument,

a really spirited argument about can we use the word genocide to describe what happened to. the Armenians. And actually what comes out of Britain, Britain says, no, we're not going to do that. We acknowledge that there were hundreds of thousands of deaths and killings and torture and awful things that happened, but we won't use genocide. But this idea of this sort of cultural amnesia, is it real or is it imagined? I think it's neither real nor imagined it's imposed. And I think the Turkish government has long resisted pressures to acknowledge what happened in the First World War as a state-sanctioned genocide. This goes to the level of law because it was

actually against the law to use the term genocide or to talk about what the Ottomans, you know, did to the Armenians as a crime against humanity. You may recall that Turkey's won Nobel laureate or Han Pamuk in an interview with the German magazine made reference to the Armenian genocide and was charged by the state. And then the government had to take a step back and say, do we really want to take one of our most internationally celebrated cultural figures and put them on trial for this crime. And so they dropped charges. Orhan is coming on our podcast in the end of the season. Well, I think Orhan will be a very eloquent person to address these issues. But all I would say, Anita, is that if for decades, and this is really an issue, I mean, I think that Armenian claims

for justice really began to take off in the 1960s. I think you can say, aside from the popularity of the 40 Days of Musa Dog as a novel and then as a film, you know, there was very low awareness of what had happened to the Armenians, and that was the amnesia. And Armenians looking at the way in which the Jewish community was demanding justice for the atrocity of the Shoah, made them feel that they had neglected their own war victims by not demanding the same for the Armenian victims of their genocide. And the 1960s emerged of increasing demands for justice by the Armenians, which provokes a real rejection from the Turkish government, who I think would have been better off to said, yeah, that happened under the big, bad Ottoman Empire, were the new Turkish

Republic in much the same way that, let's say, East Germany, always denied responsibility for the Nazi atrocities of the Shoah. In the 70s and 80s, there were this sort of succession of bannings. The Psychopoietta Britannica got banned because it talked about the Armenian Genocide. The Times Atlas of World History got banned. The National Geographic Atlas of the World got banned. And this was partly because also there was the Armenian Asala, wasn't it? The Armenian Liberation Army assassinating Turkish diplomats at the same time, which continued to make it a live issue in Turkey.

So then the question of recognizing the genocide becomes a concession to terrorism. And Armenian terrorists in the 1970s, people were using political violence, islands to try and gain historic justice, were branded as terrorists by the Turkish state, and that hardens the line against recognizing historic realities. And school texts, public debate, and discourse, what you see in the newspapers, all reinforce the denialist narrative, which means that it becomes very hard to simply sweep it away. As I'm saying, it's neither, you know, real or fantasy, it's imposed. And I think it's only the resistance of historians and cultural figures, again, Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish historical establishment

that rejects the idea that they will be dictated to of what they can and can't write about who begin to really reveal the terms of the violence against Armenians from Turkish sources written by Turkish authors. That to me is a transformative moment and it's really been taking place in the past 20, 25 years. There's this moment in the 1980s during these assassinations when you get this thing I talked about at the beginning of the destruction of Armenian physical remains. So, for example, there's a wonderful Armenian monastery to place called Kitskong that has evidence of dynamite being placed by the gendarmerie and blown up very deliberately

of many catch cars being removed and destroyed, of many Armenian churches, even cathedrals, either being destroyed or converted into mosques at this period. But this sort of dies down. But it's very interesting, William, because I think there are many in Turkey today who would be very happy to come to terms with history and move on. And it's very telling that I was invited by a think tank in Ankara to come and give a private talk on the question of the genocide. And never in my career as a historian did I expect to be given an invitation specifically to address the genocide. I asked my host, I'm really curious.

Why did you ask me to do this? And they were involved with the Chamber of Commerce in Turkey. And they saw the possibility for the development of the northeast of the country, a very poor part of Turkey, if they could just get past the history and open up beautiful historic sites to tourism like Ani, open the frontier with Armenia, enhanced trade between Turkey and Armenia, just a realization that if you could come to terms of the history and move on, there were very pragmatic benefits that would accrue, and it would break Turkey out of isolation over historic denial. Do you remember what year this was that you did your talks?

This would have been in 2016. Okay, because I'm just wondering how quickly these things move on because, I mean, it was only 2007, which wasn't that long ago, that a newspaper editor was shot dead by a nationalist teenager, it turns out, for publishing articles talking about genocide and the Ottoman genocide. Now, that just shows you that these things, you know, just are still this sensitive and tipping points are fragile and they are everywhere. Eugene, if you had to give a figure at the end of this, I mean, obviously these are things which are hugely contentious. What was the Armenian population before the First World War and what was it by the end of the 1920s? William, there is simply no consensus. And so in writing this, I had to answer that question. And I tried my best guesstimate on the basis of contemporary accounts, the debates by demographers. you know, I would say that the population of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire would have been

around 2 million and that around a million were killed in the events. The numbers are just impossible to pin down. I'm sure you'll get listeners who'll come back to you quoting good demographic evidence to say there's no way that a million could have been killed because the following demographic censuses taken shows that the population couldn't have exceeded, et cetera. But, you know, one of the three young Turks, Jemal Pasha, left a memoir before he was assassinated. He himself acknowledges massacres killing 900,000. So, you know, it's a number that was circulated in the Ottoman courts in 1918, 1919, on the massacres.

Come up with figures between 900,000 and even 1.5 million. You will see Armenians who acclaim a figure as high as 2 or 2.5 million. I think that might go beyond the size of what the Armenian community actually was in the Ottoman Empire. But I stress this with all the humility of someone who recognizes that a lot of the debate between those seeking justice for Armenians and those who would deny the, you know, lies in precisely this area of numbers. And it makes it very hard to achieve clarity in the kind of cloud of violence that surrounds the atrocities. One last question, Eugene, before we let you go. 30 countries now have used the term genocide about what happened in Anatolia to the Armenians in the course of the First World War. Is that a term you would use? Was it a genocide?

I definitely used the word genocide. I think that what happened in the First World War conforms in all the ways that the UN definition of the term would describe a genocide. side. And I think it is only a matter of time. And I believe that the recognition, first and foremost, must come from Turkey itself. And I believe that great progress is being made towards that end, but that what really pauses other countries from following the 30 is Turkey's role as a geostrategic neighbor as a NATO ally, that no one really wants to provoke a rupture with Turkey over a historic issue that is a second order priority, however much the justice of the situation might demand it.

Eugene Regan, thank you once again. That is the end of what we always knew is going to be a tricky conversation to have, and we anticipate that a lot of you will want to be in touch with us, and William, just remind people how they can email us. We have an email address, which is EmpirePod UK at gmail.com. Plus, we're on Twitter. We are always on Twitter. We're always on Twitter.

Always. Actually, yes, ask my family. We are literally always, always, mommy, always on Twitter. Anyway, listen, that is all from us. It's goodbye for me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durember.