My wife has no idea where her grandmother was born. Nothing remarkable about that. In the long century of emigres and immigrants, when the ships were arriving or escaping, many people grew vague about half-remembered farmsteads, deserted villages or tenement rooms in forgotten ports. It happened.

My wife is entitled to be a little more precise, though. "No idea", means none, nothing. Not a scrap of evidence. Once upon a time, someone eradicated a large part of her ancestry. This also happened.

Just to ensure that a daughter's daughter would be forever mystified, they spent the best part of the long century insisting, sometimes with extraordinary violence, that no such eradication was ever contemplated. Just to say so is, to them, an outrage. In their country there is a law forbidding traitors, fools, journalists and novelists from mentioning the thing that never happened.

If that isn't enough, until last week my wife could only guess at Nana's given name. Imagine that.

Some heroic research by my sister-in-law says that once there may have been a girl called Vehanoush Astrick Tchakrian. She had a beautiful smile.

For years, nevertheless, the glorious myth persisted that this Vehanoush was actually "Venus" in some perfect, impossible, imagined past. My wife calculates that Nana spoke nine languages, not because she was a prodigy of a polyglot - though I bet she was - but because picking up a tongue around the Med basin was like picking up insurance. Armenians can never be too careful.

If you believe Turkey's journalist-slaughtering ultra-nationalists, 1.5 million of that troublesome ethnic group may possibly have perished in 1915 thanks to an administrative mishap no-one bothers to explain. You know the script: troubled times, faults on both sides, regrettable things happen.

Armenians remember swaddled children with their throats cut for a whim on the long marches through the desert. Memorialised are the girls raped in ditches and bartered to some local peasant for "marriage". The lucky ones were tossed into ravines.

American church people and diplomats bore witness to some of it. Britain, France and Germany got their reports in the embassy bags. They came for the educated first: for the teachers, doctors, lawyers and, yes, the journalists. Sometimes, the men were merely butchered in the street. The point, not overlooked by a junior Austrian demagogue, was to eliminate the witnesses.

Why does my wife have no knowledge of her grandmother's birthplace? Because hundreds of villages, many towns, and one great city were simply wiped from every map. The next time you take a package holiday to the country that is gracious heir to Byzantium, ask a single question. Ask when the tours through the rubble of Van begin.

Still, here's my most complicated, and least complicated, point. Do I believe that modern Turkey, and modern Turks, should be held responsible for any of this? No, not once, not ever. The Ottoman imperium in its last debauched days slaughtered the Armenians. Ataturk - who neither denied nor diminished the crime - left a finer legacy.

How is it, then, that holocaust denial has become an article of faith for Ataturk's children? Leave the ancient dead and the forgotten past behind, for now. The Congress of the United States of America, the last superpower, has just been bullied with threats and ill-disguised Turkish menaces merely for suggesting that genocide must always be admitted, named, and accepted.

Both George Bush and his Democrat rivals have come round to the view that any slaughter can be overlooked if a strategic airbase is at stake. How can you resupply the unholy Iraq adventure, or bomb Iran if Turkey's national pride is wounded? (And wounded by a fact of history, a fact for which modern Turkey is in no sense held responsible. Strategic infrastructure versus whitened Armenian bones: no contest.) History is not quite done with playful ironies. Turkey has enacted the role of injured innocent with some panache in recent weeks. All of a sudden, America is in no mood to argue if a certain prized ally desires to remove a stone from her shoe. Ankara says it must solve the Kurdish problem once and for all. A head nods in the White House. Killing follows.

At this point, Armenians probably lose the capacity for laughter, or for tears. Long before the Jewish people were caused to suffer and die, Armenians were forced to learn these lessons. Hilarity has its limits, however.

First, there is the issue of the Kurdish enclave. Wasn't that the single success story of the Iraq experiment, the one viable, peaceful example of a semi-democracy in the aftermath of Saddam? And the current plan is to allow Turkey (biggest army within marching distance of Paris or London) to go on the rampage Genius. So the home of the US State Department isn't called Foggy Bottom for nothing, then?

I mentioned history, and irony. When the women and children of Armenia were being dragged through the deserts, they had a pair of tormentors. One was the Turkish state, the other comprised an ethnic group making themselves useful, in those days, to Ottoman Turkey.

They stole homes, farms, livestock and (much the same thing, it appears) fertile girls. Screams of grief and agony, it is remembered, could be heard all over the hills and valleys. The Kurds did that. Now those same Kurds fight the Turks. They have my support, too. Are we still pursuing irony? Simultaneously I support the accession of the great Turkish state to the European Union, and as soon as possible.

"Possible" hinges, however, on the ability of real democracies to acknowledge, accept and - who knows? - apologise for the past. If Ankara continues to insist that the Armenian genocide is a strange conspiracy, let me into the Ottoman archives.

Then fix the constitution. The European ideal and laughable legalese invoking a nation's shallow pride will never cohere. In my country, journalists are not killed in the street for an opinion; generals are fired when they grow over-mighty; we understand genocide and (since we invented most of it) geopolitics. We do not tolerate a barbarism such as article 301, underpinning the Turkish state, threatening free expression.

That sounds patronising, no doubt. Clever of you to notice. Proud Turks, like slow Americans, have very thin skins. Armenians could meanwhile turn victimhood into a folk dance. But Armenians are the actual raped victims of someone else's proud foreign policies.

Someone killed 1.5 million versions of someone's beloved Vehanoush. Those multitudes of Armenians died, in essence, because no-one cared. This week, with another century gone, the Kurds have become the ducks in the shooting gallery. So why has this liberal (you think) non-interventionist got nothing to say about Iraq, and echoes?

Before you dare to hurt you must calculate the quantities of hurt. In the case of Armenia, no-one bothered to count.

When Turkey undergoes purgation, as it must, something vital will take place. That truth will transform us all. At Europe's heart, remember, is a reunited Germany with a history, dark and bloody, we do not yet understand. The Bush White House is grubby, but tawdry and dull: it will pass. So here's an idea. Armenia's past is Turkey's future. Does Turkey want, need, or remember how to grasp a future? Let's have two countries come home simultaneously.

My wife has no idea where her grandmother was born. Can someone please, once, explain that odd, unspeakable fact?