No need for inverted commas

The BBC's response to the Armenian commemoration was interesting. In spite of growing acceptance of the word genocide to describe the mass killings, the headlines throughout April 24 placed the word in inverted commas, as if the broadcaster was trying to distance its editorial stance from that taken by the leaders of France and Germany, to name but two of the many who insist the evidence of ordered destruction - particularly evidence from then Ottoman Constantinople and Alleppo - that there was a degree of official sanction for the removal and killing that followed. Modern-day Turkish leaders would doubtless approve. President Erdogan even went so far as to move his country's Gallipoli commemoration forward by 24-hours in an attempt to detract from the events taking place in Yerevan; thereby politicising what should have been a solemn occasion, and one that was foreshadowed as such by the treatment it received from Mustafa Kemal - the leader of the Ottoman defence of the peninsular, and later, the founder and president of the secular Turkish republic. Ataturk wanted the memorial at Cape Heles to be for all who died, regardless of nationality. Erdogan's actions cast a shadow over that noble aspiration. There are those in Turkey who take a herioc stand against this officially-sanctioned state of denial. Turkey's leading author, Orhan Pamuk, said on the publication of his novel Snow that

'a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in this country and I'm the only one who dares to talk about it'.

A remark that forced him into hiding and for which he was prosecuted. This state of denial sits oddly with the view of Mehmed VI, the last Ottoman sultan, who expressed his heartfelt sorrow at the mass killings and instituted an inquiry with the intention of prosecuting those responsible; his initiative foundered when he was forced to abdicate in the wake of Ottoman defeat. Erdogan's intrigues saw Princes Charles and Harry in their military finery commemorating Gallipoli a mere 99years and 364 days after the original, ill-fated landings