Internationally, politicians and historians appear to be in agreement on the real not mythical status of the Armenian Genocide. The question is whether it is worth extracting a formal recognition from Turkey. It is almost as if Turkey is merely waiting out the years until the very question of the genocide becomes defunct and irrelevant; although the uninterrupted efforts of Armenians since 1915 to achieve international recognition and redress of the genocide belies the possibility of the issue being laid to rest. The fact that the major international powers, acting on their own interests, have turned a deaf ear to the issue, does not render it "historical" and depreciable. The UK is one country which uses the historical argument to refute recognition of the genocide. On April 20, 1999, in a response to a question posed to the British foreign minister about the plans of the government to make a statement in regard to the Armenian Genocide, Joyce Quin (member of the Labour party and the British foreign committee) stated that the British government had condemned the events of 1915-1916 at the time that they took place. "But the British government does not intend to recognise these events as Genocide, since the conception did not exist at that time." 18 The argument is based on the fact that the concept of "genocide" was defined by the UN only after the Second World War. This trite semantic excuse is equivalent to not allowing for all discoveries of dinosaur fossils dated prior to 1850s to be dinosaurs since the term "Dinosauria" was first defined in 1842 by the English scientist Richard Owen.
Nevertheless, more and more politicians are defying the economic interests of their countries and raising the question of the forgotten genocide.
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