In 1916 the British Parliament published a Blue Book that identified the events of 1915-16 as a systematic effort to exterminate the Armenian people. The Blue Book has been one of the most solid and influential sources on the Armenian Genocide. A critical, uncensored edition, edited and with an introduction by Ara Sarafian, has now been published by the Gomidas Institute.
"The British Government today refuses to recognise the Armenian Genocide of 1915. They say that there is insufficient evidence, and that it is not their responsibility to review the events of 80 years ago and pronounce on them. Yet the British Foreign Office itself published a great deal of evidence as early as 1916. Their refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide today is an affront to the brave witnesses whose testimony was carefully recorded, and the eminent scholars whose analysis is still valid today.
"Ara Sarafian should be commended for making a critical edition of 'The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire' available to the public. It may be seen as bad politics to exhume a million victims when the perpetrators' successors are on the threshold of the European Union, but it has been well said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --Eric Avebury, House of Lords
"The collection and collation of the evidence from which the Blue Book ['The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire'] was compiled had occupied most of my working time for a number of months; and, after the Blue Book had been published, I could not dismiss its contents from my mind. I was not only haunted by the victims' sufferings and by the criminals' deeds; I was exercised by the question how it could be possible for human beings to do what those perpetrators of genocide had done.
"My study [of the Armenian Genocide]... left an impression on my mind that was not effaced by the still more cold-blooded genocide, on a far larger scale, that was committed during the Second World War by the Nazi.
"Any great crime--private or public, personal or impersonal--raises a question that transcends national limits; the question goes to the heart of human nature itself. My study of the genocide that had been committed in Turkey in 1915 brought home to me the reality of Original Sin." --Arnold J. Toynbee, "Acquaintances" (1967)
