THE Rev Dr John Cameron (Letters, April 16) doubts "whether Raphael Lemkin was justified in comparing it (the Armenian Genocide) to the industrialised extermination of Eastern Europe's Jews".

I am unaware that he ever did and I certainly did not assert in my letter of April 15 that he did so. However, unlike Dr Cameron apparently, the only thing I would have noted would have been that the methods were different albeit the outcome was the same. The land was cleansed of an unwanted people.

Indeed, the American-Pole, Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Shoah - of Auscwitz, Buna and Buchenwald - and the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate for his work as Chairman of the "President's Committee on the Holocaust", called the Armenian Genocide the "Holocaust before the Holocaust".

Historically, the Armenian Genocide can, indeed, be linked in time and place with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. But its roots lie elsewhere, in the right-wing nationalism of France and Germany in the early 1900s with which the "Young Turks", later of the Union and Progress Party - Talaat Bey, Enver and Cemel Pasha - were imbued. And, of course, their other great Western influence was freemasonry, Union and Progress being established along the same lines as the Italian paramasonic revolutionary society the "Carbonaries". Unable to utilize any national identity, for the Turks were of such disparate origins, they focused on a Suuni identity and the infidels became their chosen bogeymen.

Allied to Germany during the First World War, and Germany having given refuge to Talaat Bey when he had to flee, it was noticeable that the Germany Ambassador to the Holy See, His Excellency Herr Reinhard Schweppe, was absent from Sunday's commemorative Mass.

Hugh McLoughlin,

24 Russell Street,

Mossend, Bellshill.