"...What happened to the Armenians probably does not qualify, in the strict definition of the word, as a genocide."

The debate will not be shut down, however, not even in Turkey. The new generation of Turks have a long distance to travel and the journey will be an emotionally wrenching one, but before the end the Armenians are going to have to cover some distance, too. Because what happened to the Armenians probably does not qualify, in the strict definition of the word, as a genocide.

As the respected American historian Guenter Lewy writes in this month’s “Commentary”: “The historical question at issue is premeditation — that is, whether the Turkish regime intentionally organized the annihilation of its Armenian minority. According to the Genocide Convention of 1948, such an intent to destroy a group is a necessary condition of genocide....Hence the crucial problem to be addressed is not the huge loss of life in and of itself but rather whether the Turkish government deliberately sought the deaths that we know to have occurred.”

At least 600,000 people, and perhaps as many as a million, died in the mass deportation of Armenians from their eastern Anatolian homeland south to the Ottoman province of Syria in 1915-16. Many were robbed and murdered by the Kurdish irregular soldiers who escorted the columns of deportees in their terrible journey; many more died of hunger or exposure. And they never went home again: Anatolia today has almost no Armenian population.

Armenians have never forgiven what happened, while the Turkish republic that emerged from the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s has never acknowledged it. Now the Turks are beginning to struggle with this terrible heritage, and not only to advance their EU candidacy. As Pamuk said in October: “We are confronted with an immense human tragedy and immense human suffering we did not learn about at school. So it is a sensitive subject...(but) it is obvious, even in Turkey, that there was an immense hidden pain which we now have to face.” However, Pamuk never uses the word “genocide” — nor, significantly, does the state of Israel, the informal custodian of the word, when called upon to comment on the Armenian issue.

What happened to the Armenians was dreadful, but as Lewy documents in his new book “The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide,” which will most likely become the standard work on the subject, both premeditation and an intention to annihilate, two preconditions for genocide, were either absent or at least open to considerable dispute.

The mass deportations were ordered during a big Russian Army attack into eastern Anatolia in 1915 that was supported by Armenian uprisings behind the Turkish lines. Huge numbers of Armenians died in these forced marches, which crossed high mountains in winter, and the government in Istanbul did little to curb the murder of many deportees by their guards and hostile villagers in the areas they passed through. But Armenians living in areas served by the railway could buy tickets and travel safely, there were no further attacks on Armenians who reached Syria — and Armenians living in Istanbul and other Turkish cities far from the war zone were left undisturbed.

Does one word matter all that much? Armenians think so, feeling that their tragedy is being played down unfairly if they are denied the word “genocide.” Turks think so too, believing that there is no legitimate comparison between the crimes committed by their ancestors during the First World War and the cold-blooded atrocity of Hitler’s Holocaust. But after three generations of what one observer called “fossilized venom” on both sides, the argument is at last coming out into the open.