they eventually voted to send a junior representative, Shuja Shafi, to attend the event in London. Armenians The event also drew similar criticism in 2000 from the United Kingdom's Armenian community, who complained that the event remained exclusively for commemorating those who perished in the Holocaust, and not the Armenian genocide. Neil Frater, an official from Tony Blair's Race Equality Unit, a branch of the Home Office, replied that it had consulted the Holocaust Memorial Day Steering Group on the issue and had agreed that while it understood that the Armenian Genocide was an "appalling tragedy", it wanted to "avoid the risk of the message becoming too diluted if we try to include too much history." Frater went on to say that it had gone on with the Steering Group's advice to reject commemorating the Genocide. His comments were received with even more criticism. Zaven Messerlian, the principal of the Armenian Evangelical College in Beirut, Lebanon, stated that "any serious commemoration must include the aetiology of genocide, particularly those of the twentieth century, especially if one encouraged the next." The UK-based Refugee Council also supported this position, since the event was supposed to include "all victims of genocide." The British government faced a flurry of public criticism for its decision not to include the Armenian Genocide, most notably in the daily newspaper The Independent, from its chief Middle East correspondent, British author Robert Fisk. After months of pressure, the government allowed 20 Armenian survivors to attend the event in its first annual commemoration. Armenians contended that the British government held out for so long because it wished to preserve its relationship with the successor state of the Ottoman Empire and NATO ally, Turkey. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust To mark Holocaust Remembrance Day 2019, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust released a survey result, commissioned by the Trust and derived from a tick-box online poll of 2006 people undertaken by the market research company Opinion Matters, that claimed "five per cent of UK adults don't believe the Holocaust", a figure widely reported in "lurid terms" in UK media such as "More than 2.6m Brits are Holocaust deniers, poll finds". More or Less, a BBC Radio 4 programme on the use and misuse of statistics, noted that the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust had provided only basic information on its website Press Release, and said that Opinion Matters had refused to release "the full