Genocide is the most serious charge that can be levelled at any nation or people. For a country as adamant about its past as Turkey, the concept is unimaginable. Turkish children are taught that their country is among history's good guys - indeed, among history's victims. A focus on the republican period after 1923 means history books gloss over the messier decade of the 1910s.

This is why accusations that Ottoman-era Turks and their Kurdish allies committed genocide against the empire's Armenian citizens from 1915 to 1917 cause such bewilderment and resentment. Last week's decision by the foreign affairs committee of the US House of Representatives to acknowledge the genocide had the added stain, from the Turkish point of view, of foreign politicians pronouncing on other people's history.