09th October, 2002

This week on SBS Television's Dateline: A holocaust denied

On Dateline this Wednesday October 9, the first genocide of the twentieth century - who remembers it? and indeed, who accepts that it happened?

Dateline looks at the 1915 deaths of one million Armenians, an event in which the Turkish government continues to deny any part.

In 1915 the Ottoman Turks, fearing a nationalist uprising by the Christian Armenians, expelled the population from their homelands in Eastern Turkey. In a meticulously-planned exercise, all Armenian leaders, intellectuals and professionals were killed. Then the survivors were ordered into the Syrian desert in death marches. Once they arrived at extermination camps in Northern Syria, they were slaughtered in their tens of thousands.

Armenians have collected thousands of testimonies to these events and a few eyewitnesses still survive. But much of the world still does not recognise the Armenian genocide. In Turkey it has been a taboo subject for almost a century. Now, however, some Turks are speaking out. Others criticise Israel, who also denies the Armenians suffered a similar holocaust to the Jews.

The Armenian holocaust, this Wednesday October 9 2002 at 8.30 pm, on Dateline.