LONDON, England (Nov. 23) - The government will refuse to acknowledge the 1915 Armenian Holocaust - the mass slaughter of one-and-a-half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in the world's first genocide - when it commemorates United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Day in January.

In an extraordinary two-page letter, a senior Home Office official has written to the Armenian Assembly of America, stating that while the massacres of the minority Christian community during the First World War were "an appalling tragedy condemned by the British Government of the day," the British memorial day will focus on "the Nazi Holocaust (of Jews) and more recent atrocities that raise similar issues."

The letter, from Neil Frater of the Home Office's "Race Equality Unit," make no reference to Turkey - whose Ottoman troops and gendarmerie carried out the mass killings of Armenian men, women and children - and refrains from mentioning that the British Cabinet demanded war crimes trials for the perpetrators at the end of the 1914-1918 war. Ross Vartian, executive director of the Armenian Assembly in Washington, yesterday accused the British of bowing to pressure from the Turkish government, partly because of British Petroleum's business interests in the Turkish south Caucasus.

Neutral US diplomats in Turkey, German army officers attached to the Ottoman army and European humanitarian workers witnessed the deliberate dispossession and slaughter of tens of thousands of Armenians in 1915, sending back from Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, of harrowing reports of the mass shooting of young men, the starvation, rape and execution of Armenian women, even the burning of babies in the Syrian desert.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Winston Churchill and other senior British politicians called these war crimes a "holocaust," demanding that the culprits be taken to court. Even Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, accepted that the Armenians had been persecuted.

In 1939, Hitler - planning the genocide of Europe's Jews - asked his Wehrmacht generals: "Who now remembers the liquidation of the Armenians?" (*) But the Home Office letter makes no allusion to this.

"The British decision is obviously arbitrary and not rooted in fact," Mr. Vartian said in Washington yesterday. "The British Government joined the other Allied powers in announcing that the Turks would be held accountable. If Hitler could figure it out, the Home Office should be able to."

Historians acknowledge the pivotal role of the Armenian Holocaust in setting the stage for Hitler's murder of six million Jews. A recent account of the Armenian genocide, by Warwick University historian Mark Levene, who is himself Jewish, provides an appalling account - culled from western archives and survivors' testimony - of the killing fields in the Syrian desert, including the burning of children when Zeki Bey, the Turkish police chief of Deir el-Zour, Syria, spilt 200 cans of petroleum over stacks of wood "and then had 2,000 orphans, with hands and feet bound, thrown into the pyre."

At Sabka, on the Euphrates River, Mr. Levene states that as many as 60,000 Armenians died in one week "through the generous use of kerosene." He compares the Armenian genocide with the Jewish genocide at the hands of Romanian troops and militiamen in 1941 and describes both bloodbaths as "geography of death in which human ingenuity in killing was sanctioned by the state."

Britain is not alone in turning its back. The Home Office letter follows an appeal from President Bill Clinton that the US Congress should not vote its own acknowledgment of the Armenian Holocaust because Turkish anger was such that "American lives might be at risk." After the US State Department was told that Anglo-American flights over northern Iraq from the Turkish air base at Incirlik might be restricted - and arms deals with Washington curtailed - Congress bowed to Mr. Clinton's request.

Ironically, the Royal Navy played a heroic role in rescuing survivors of Turkish savagery and saved the lives of countless Armenians when Turkish troops burned the then-Greek-held city of Smyrna (now Izmir).

Mr. Vartian said: "The British are taking the extraordinary step of diminishing their own history. At least the Americans stated that the Turks were threatening the 'national security' of the United States."

Mr. Vartian's grandmother was driven from the Armenian-Turkish city of Harput in 1915. Of the 14 closest members of her family, only she and her father survived the massacres.

Turkey - paying a large number of US lobby groups and "academics" to expound a highly exclusive version of the history of 1915 - claims that fewer Armenians were killed in the massacres, that they were victims of a civil war. The Home Office letter claims Britain's Holocaust Day on 27 January "is not about definitions but about learning the lessons of the (Jewish) Holocaust."

The Independent