Setting to one side for a moment (as if!) all the politicking around a vote by US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee to recognise as genocide the 1915-17 mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, it's worth recalling that what had happened to the Armenians was cited specifically when the word genocide (γένος+occidere) was coined.
Speaking in different circumstances and about different events, the 81 year old Andrzej Wajda told The World Tonight that the aim of Katyń, his film about the massacre of some 20,000 officers and intellectuals including his own father in 1940, is "to be a farewell and end to the subject... I don't want it to cause political problems...Despite the fact it was a crime I don't believe it should be followed by criminal charges against the people involved".
[P.S. 14 Oct: See David Ignatius, an Armenian-American, on The Dignity Agenda.]
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