?Thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,? said Turkey?s most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, during an interview with a Swiss newspaper last February. He was charged with ?public denigration of Turkish identity? by an Istanbul public prosecutor, and his trial opened on December 16 . He could face up to three years in jail.

The prosecutor?s game is fairly obvious. The Turkish judiciary is not short of conservative nationalists who detest the wave of liberal reforms carried out by prime minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan?s government in order to qualify for membership in the European Union. It was they who smuggled in the new law under which Pamuk has been charged at the very time when the Turkish legal code was being purged of many other elements that were incompatible with EU legal norms.

Their purpose in going after Orhan Pamuk was not simply to stifle the debate over the Armenian massacres of 1915-16 that is finally opening up in Turkey. They chose such a high-profile target because they wanted to stimulate an anti-Turkish backlash in the EU, reasoning that if enough foreigners criticize Turkey, a nationalist backlash will shut down the whole debate about the Armenians in Turkey, and maybe even derail the entire project for EU membership.

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.

The real culprits

As the respected American historian, Guenther Lewy, writes in Commentary, ?The historical question at issue is premeditation ? that is, whether the Turkish regime intentionally organized the annihilation of its Armenian minority...?

At least 600,000 people died in the mass deportation of Armenians from their eastern Anatolian homeland 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.

What happened to the Armenians was dreadful, but as Guenther Lewy documents in his new book, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, 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 World War I and the cold-blooded atrocity of Hitler?s holocaust. But after three generations of what one observer called ?fossilised venom? on both sides, the argument is at last coming out into the open.