Genocidal follies

摘要

A recent evening in Istanbul, Turkey's (and Europe's) biggest city. Armenia's leading musician, Djivan Gasparyan, is playing his duduk, an Anatolian-style clarinet, as Yavuz Bingol, an ethnic Kurd, belts out Turkish folksongs. The event symbolises a budding rapprochement between ordinary TUrks and Armenians. But America's Congress may now torpedo this fragile process by voting for a bill calling the mass slaughter of up to 1m Ottoman Armenians in 1915 a genocide.