HAVE WE FORGOTTEN? GALLIPOLI AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
12:39 * 19.11.14
By Robert Kaplan
Re-published from Abcnet.au
A century ago, in a misconceived encounter on the history-soaked
precipices of Asia Minor, the sons of Anzac received their battle
initiation against the German-trained forces of the Ottoman Empire.
Now, in an annual event that grows in mythology and status in
proportion to the passing of the years, is celebrated the shared
combat ordeal of gallant “Johnny Turk” and the Bronzed Anzac.
And why not? The Turkish forces, well prepared behind excellent
defences, used their tactics to good effect, ably led by a professional
officer who was to go on to bigger things, such as the fire destruction
of Smyrna – namely, Kemal Ataturk.
But, pause for one moment to consider a slightly different scenario.
Let us suspend historical reality for the purposes of this exercise.
What if, say, instead of Gallipoli, the Anzac forces were going into
combat with an SS Battalion somewhere in Poland during the Second
World War? Would we then, decades later, be joining up with our
comrades in battle to celebrate what both sides had gone through,
our enmities forgotten? Can one commemorate the shared experiences
with enemy forces who acted as the military arm of a state carrying
out a terrible genocide at the same time?
For it was the night before the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915
in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, then called Constantinople,
when occurred the arrest, detention and subsequent liquidation of
625 intellectuals, priests and leading figures of the Armenian Empire.
This event is widely held to signal the onset of the first major
genocide of the twentieth century, the most blood-drenched period in
human history.
What followed was a mass murder of an entirely innocent group of
citizens in the Ottoman Empire by means that are still horrifying to
contemplate. By the time Turkey sued for peace in 1918, up to 1.5
million Armenians had been slaughtered, decimating the population
of a group of people who had lived in the Fertile Crescent since the
dawn of human settlement.
And it did not stop there. The Assyrian people suffered at least 75,000
victims, three-quarters of their population; the numbers have not been
made up to this day. Later the Greeks in Asia Minor, in some of the
bloodiest scenes of city sacking since the fall of Nineveh and Tyre,
were driven out of ancient homelands, never to return. And, largely
lost in the high tide of bloodletting at the time, there were pogroms
of Jewish settlements in Anatolia.
We have made our peace with the genocidal German and Japanese foes
of the Second World War (there is no way the unrestrained butchery of
the inhabitants of Manchuria, to say nothing of the Rape of Nanking,
would not constitute a genocide). They have (at least partially,
in the case of the Japanese) acknowledged their roles as aggressors
and in the genocide (at least in the German case; the Austrians are
still hoping their role will be forgotten). But we still would not
ask the SS battalions to join us on Anzac Day parades.
This is right and the way it should be.
Yet these qualms do not trouble us in fostering our war links with
the Turkish people – still led by the political descendants of
the Ittihadist Party that planned, organised and carried out the
Anatolian genocides.
Part of the reason for this is wilful ignorance. The Turkish government
vigorously enforces an official policy of denial, maintaining it as
the duty of their diplomatic staff abroad to engage in a well-funded
campaign of disinformation and protest should anyone publically state
anything to the contrary.
Genocide denied is an extension of the genocide perpetuated and an
ongoing crime against human rights.
Turkish nationalism, which runs coeval with its policy of genocide
denial, remains the last outpost of unreconstructed pre-Second World
War racial nationalism.
Johnny Turk, by all accounts, was a brave fighter when well led and
supported (which was often not the case), but can we separate the
soldiers from their officers, leaders, politicians and bureaucrats
who at the same time were engaged in exterminating an entire group of
people – especially when that same state, a century later, continues
to defile the memory of these victims by refusing to admit that the
slaughter even occurred?
So when we celebrate the Anzac spirit, let us remember that they were
fighting for freedom, pure and simple, and a nation that insists on
covering up, if not extinguishing history, to escape its culpability
for genocide is not a nation with whom we can associate as equals. And
nor should we until they desist from their deceitful denial of the
awful truth of what their forces did to several million innocent and
unprotected peoples under their sway after that day in April 1915.
Let the Anzac ceremonies proceed with Johnny Turk – but be sure to
let them know what we know, will not forget and will not deny until
they face up to their culpability and can then re-join the ranks of
enemies of honour, if not the nations of the world.