Mr. Speaker, for the benefit of those at home who have not been following this debate, once in a while there is a debate that speaks to the very heart of what Parliament is all about and what the world parliament should all be about and how we relate one to another.
The Bloc put forward a motion today that would call on the Government of Canada to use the word genocide in condemnation of what transpired primarily in the years around 1915 by the Turks, addressed primarily to the Armenians.
The motion was amended by the Liberals to take the word genocide out. Liberals opposite would concur with the notion that genocide did take place but for political reasons cannot use the word genocide. Our position was to insert the word genocide in a subamendment so as to be true to the meaning the Bloc originally put forward.
This is a particularly important debate. While the events took place many years ago and half way around the world, they affect each and every one of us every day.
A couple of years ago I was at a dinner party. A person there, now in his sixties, a great raconteur, was regaling us with stories of his youth. He name is Jack Cohen. He was telling us of the time when he was in an orphanage in Montreal. When he was four years old he and his twin brother saw this great man come into the orphanage to pick out a child. They knew, just like a bunch of puppies I guess, they had to get up and catch the attention of the person coming into the orphanage if they were to get a home.
He and his brother were a little older than some of the other children in the orphanage. When this man came in each of them grabbed Jack Cohen's father by the leg and would not let go.
We were laughing about the word picture of these two little boys holding on to this man who had been sent to Montreal from Edmonton get a little girl, as it turns out. They would not let go. When he came home he was telling how his mother found she had twin boys rather than a little girl.
It was one of those stories that we laugh at but inside in our hearts we are kind of crying at the tragedy that caused this to take place. It is funny because of the ability of Jack as a storyteller to make what is really a tragic story palatable and something that we could understand.
Jack and his brother were not alone. There were thousands and thousands of children just like him who were survivors of the death camps. Every relative Jack and his twin brother had was exterminated. Because they were twins they were put into a special compound and for one reason or another they managed to survive. What does this have to do with the debate at hand? How do we get to that?
We get to it because of the notion of denial. This is the elemental concern behind the government's position and why the government is in great difficulty voting for this motion when it incorporates the word genocide. Even though the Governments of Quebec and Ontario in 1980 passed unanimous motions stating the Turkish government should be made to recognize what had gone on, when we as a government aid and abet a denial we are participating in the cover-up.
I know Canadians do not want to be part of it. I am sure the vast majority of Turks today would not want to be part of a cover-up. The only way we can possibly learn from history is to recognize it and go on from there.
For people watching not all that familiar about the events that took place, let me go back through a bit of history. This really did not start in 1915. It started even before the late 1800s. The Chinese built a great wall to protect themselves from the Ottoman hordes, as they are described. The Armenians had been occupying that part of the world for 3000 years. The Turks came into that part of the world and began moving them out. It really started to take definition in the late 1800s.
In 1915 all men between 16 and 60 were drafted into the army. There being two sides to every story, and there always is a shade of grey, it is important to understand that the Turks' position is that the Armenians joined the Russians and were fighting with the Russians against the Turks. That is why the genocide took place. That is why they were moved out and moved offshore.
There is a good deal of dispute about the exact numbers. However, does it matter if it was 1.5 million, 1 million or 800,000? If it was one it was one too many. Genocide, as defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary is the mass extermination of human beings, especially of a particular race or nation. Any mass slaughter is by definition genocide. One cannot whitewash genocide. We cannot use words to make it sound better. Genocide is genocide.
The ground zero of the genocide that took place against the Armenians in Turkey is when, on April 24, 1915, the interior minister of Turkey said in 50 years the only Armenians will be in museums.
Today all that remains in Turkey of the Armenians, who were the people who were there first, are between 30,000 and 50,000, most in Istanbul. Today the situation in Turkey for the Armenians left is such that when their churches, schools and cultural institutions need repair the Armenians must apply to the interior ministry of Turkey to have them repaired.
What is the link between my story of Jack Cohen and the situation that exists today? It is this. Hitler, when asked before the holocaust what would mankind say in light of what he was doing, responded: "Who remembers the Armenians?" The genocide against the Armenians was the foundation of other genocides to come. It was the foundation for the mass extermination of the Jews of Europe.
What is so chilling, so frightening, so repulsive about what is going on in our world today and how does it link to the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians? In my view the link is denial.
Who will speak for all of the dead? Who will speak for those who will die in future genocides if we do not recognize and honour those who died before us? In my view it is the denial of what took place that is the most reprehensible aspect of what is before us today. We know we cannot change history. We know we cannot reverse the hands of time. We know that what happened, happened. We know that Canada has a relationship with Turkey today. We know and understand that the vast majority of people in Turkey had nothing to do with what happened in 1915 and would be just as repulsed today as we are.
Basically people are good, but genocide goes on day after day all around the world. We do not seem to learn from our mistakes. Perhaps that is because in one way or another we try to pretend that it does not exist because it is just too hard to bear.
That is what is going on in Canada and around the world with the holocaust denial. That is why it is so important that light is brought to this situation so that those who went before us are not forgotten.
In Canada, even as we speak, people deny the holocaust. They say it was impossible. How could mankind be so cruel? How could a cultured and enlightened people perpetrate such a horror against mankind, such a horror against the Jews and others, but specifically against the Jews? How could the people of a whole nation turn their eyes or not see it?
Perhaps there is a germ of a reason for that in what is happening today. Perhaps we do not believe what we do not want to believe. Let me give an example of what is going on today in holocaust denial and link it to the events which took place in 1915 in Turkey.
The people at the Ecole polytechnique in Montreal and the University of Montreal will shortly hear a speaker. There will be at Ecole polytechnique a conference sponsored by 15 Muslim organizations. The person speaking is a revisionist historian and anti-Semite, Roger Garaudy. This person is coming to these two institutions. He has a right in a free society to express his views.
The problem is that when someone in a free society is able to expound his revisionist theories which are generally known to be untrue and does so as an academic, that person puts a cloak of respectability on history which was not there before.
We live in a free society and people have the right to say what they will, provided they are not spreading hate propaganda. The fact is these revisionists, these people who are rewriting history, must be challenged and challenged at every opportunity. If we do not, we run a risk. What will certainly happen is that we will repeat the mistakes we made in the past.
I would like to conclude my comments with this thought: Anything that diminishes any one of us as a human being hurts and diminishes all of us. We are all human beings. Regardless of our gender, skin colour, sexual orientation we are all human beings. We are all children of the same God. When any one of us is diminished we are all diminished.
It is desperately important that every time violations of human rights occur, for example, the revisionists who deny history, who try to change history and cloak what actually happened with some sort of respectability, or the apologists for something that is beyond apology, then others must stand up and tell the truth of what happened. We cannot pretend it did not happen. It is important for our grandchildren that we are aware of the foundation and where we came from.