Month: February 2021

The Australasian Orphanage in Lebanon was an unexpected outpost of Antipodean generosity in the years after World War I.

Two Cantabrians, John and Lydia Knudsen, opened the orphanage in 1922 in the pretty seaside town of Antelias, long since absorbed into greater Beirut. John had served in World War I and stayed on to do relief work in the Middle East. He married Lydia in Cairo in 1920.

As London-based New Zealand journalist James Robins outlines in his fascinating new book, When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide, the Knudsens arrived to find a displaced crowd of Armenian boys, homeless and parentless after the war and the genocide, who helped them build the orphanage.

Supplies arrived by ship from Australia, where, as in New Zealand, the immense tragedy of the Armenian Genocide had become a popular cause.

READ MORE:
* Anzac Day: How New Zealanders remembered the fallen from their Covid-19 bubble
* The Chanak Affair: NZ committed to another war at Gallipoli in 1922
* The Christchurch couple who founded an orphanage in the wake of the Armenian Genocide
* Armenian genocide comment welcome
* Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner faces deluge of protest ahead of US opening
* 100 years later, world debates: Were Armenian deaths genocide?

It's almost a running joke that you can find New Zealanders everywhere, no matter how unlikely or remote the setting. But our connections to the killing of more than 1 million Armenian people by the Ottoman government between 1915 and 1923 are uncanny and often highly emotional, which makes it all the more surprising that both New Zealand and Australia still refuse to join other countries in formally recognising the genocide.

Historians agree that this was the first genocide of the 20th century, although the word “genocide” would not be coined for another three decades. New Zealanders could not have failed to know what was going on. Here, for example, is news wired from London on September 13, 1915, that was carried in local newspapers:

“Armenians in Geneva have issued an appeal to the civilised world to make an effort to save the remnant of a martyred people. The inhabitants of Armenia have been driven into the interior of Mesopotamia, and most of the able-bodied men massacred. The Armenians protest against this appalling crime, which is without a parallel in history – even in the age of barbarians.”

Four days later, another story: “The Salonica correspondent of ‘The Times’ says all witnesses agree as to the terrible character of Turkish atrocities in Armenia. It is believed that the official intention is a campaign of extermination, involving the murder of a million persons.”

Two words went together again and again: Armenian and atrocities. When Robins searched the archives he counted more than 13,000 stories about the genocide in New Zealand newspapers over the course of World War I and more than 27,000 in Australian newspapers. Other than the war itself, it was the big story of the age.

The book is the culmination of about five years of work for Robins, who also produced articles and a podcast titled The Great Crime.

He resists being called a spokesperson, which is too strong a word, he says.

“My ultimate goal is a more general awareness. New Zealand history as it’s often portrayed rests on very shaky ground.”

To him, the Anzac myth is especially shaky. He was struck by a peculiar synchronicity in which the Ottoman Empire began killing and displacing Armenians and other minorities in large numbers at exactly the same timeas the Anzacs launched themselves at Gallipoli.

He writes: “And while those soldiers scrapped for mere inches of Gallipoli’s soil, killing squads swept swiftly through hamlets, cities and towns, hunting Armenian men. Those left behind – women, children and the elderly – were corralled south, to the desert wastes of Syria. Endless convoys. Death marches.”

And now, more than a century later, the same Gallipoli connections seem to have made it impossible for New Zealand and Australia to fully confront and acknowledge this genocide. It is a paradox that needs explaining.

Thirty-two countries officially recognise the genocide, including the United States, Canada, France, Germany and Russia.

Hoory Yeldizian, chairperson of the Armenian National Committee of New Zealand, explains why recognition is so important.

“There is a three-pronged theory to bringing closure to crimes against humanity, which is recognition, retribution and restitution,” she says. “So when you have recognition you're closing a chapter acknowledging that a crime has been committed, just as a family going to a trial of an alleged murderer sets up a system that recognises a crime has been done.”

Born in New Zealand, Yeldizian is currently living and working in Sydney, which has a substantial Armenian population. While there are 264 Armenians in New Zealand, according to the last census, there are around 30,000 in Sydney alone, including New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian, whose grandparents were orphaned in the genocide.

And while Australia does not recognise the genocide, the state of New South Wales does, along with South Australia.

The shared experience of the atrocities remains central to Armenian identity, Yeldizian says.

Along with the maintenance of language and culture in the diaspora, “there is a whole other side to Armenian history which is not as spoken about, and that is intergenerational trauma.

“It’s still inherently in our behaviour. Making feasts of food because tomorrow we may not have food. Packing up pantries with food because there will be war tomorrow, and other symptoms of trauma that are passed through our bloodline, from the Armenian Genocide.

“So we are geographically displaced around the world and have to integrate into other cultures to survive, and we still harbour trauma from over 105 years ago from the Armenian Genocide.”

In New Zealand, the Green Party is alone among major parties in having a policy about the genocide. It called for a day of remembrance in 2015 and official recognition in 2018.

On the second occasion, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that while “we've always acknowledged that significant loss of life”, whether or not to call it genocide is up to “those parties who were involved”.

Green MP Golriz Ghahraman, who is the party’s foreign affairs spokesperson, recalls meeting the Armenian National Committee with former Green MP Gareth Hughes and others during the last parliamentary term. Like Yeldizian, who saw former Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters as “a roadblock”, Ghahraman hopes there will be progress now that Nanaia Mahuta has replaced Peters.

“It’s certainly on my list when I meet with the new minister,” she says.

The issue is personal for Ghahraman, who is the Iranian Kurdish daughter of refugees. The Kurdish people have also been persecuted by Turkey, she says.

Aside from the personal link, there is a moral imperative for Ghahraman: “If we don’t recognise the atrocities of the past, then these things continue.”

The New Zealand government’s bland line about the genocide was designed to avoid offending Turkey on the eve of the Gallipoli centenary, as Robins shows in his book. New Zealand officials saw that Turkey was incensed by New South Wales’ position and wanted to avoid any upsets in 2015.

As Yeldizian explains, a threat hangs over both Australia and New Zealand: call it a genocide and you may find it harder to get visas to visit Anzac Cove every April.

She sees the relationship between Turkey, New Zealand and Australia as “an abusive one and a manipulative one”. While there are “proven crimes against humanity”, visa status is used as a dangling carrot to maintain denial of the genocide.

The official denial of the genocide in Turkey is seen by historians as central to the emergence of the modern Turkish state from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, with founding president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a heroic figure.

Ataturk also fought at Gallipoli and as Robins and others have shown, a myth has grown around him that further complicates matters.

New Zealanders and Australians have been comforted by sentimental words attributed to Ataturk, about our Anzac soldiers lying in the soil of a foreign country, where “there is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets” and where, “after having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well”.

The words appear on Anzac memorials in Wellington and Canberra. They suggest a spirit of shared respect and reconciliation. Yet, as Australian historian Peter Stanley found, the quote seems to have been made up after Ataturk’s death.

After Robins brought that to the attention of Te Papa in 2018, the national museum set about altering text in its Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War exhibition to “better reflect the quote’s contested origins”. Robins reported that historical consultant Chris Pugsley had checked the quote’s translation but not its provenance.

There is also the paradox that, as Robins writes, “the most iconic refrain of Anzac Day, a plea for healing and unified grief … comes from a mass murderer”.

History is complicated but myths are convenient and politically useful. They can also make it harder to face the truth.

Ghahraman wonders if we can see it another way, though. Perhaps the emotional link New Zealand has forged with Turkey can produce some straight talk.

“Having those emotional connections should mean we can have the hard conversations,” she says. “Maybe it will make it easier.”

This is about who we are, or who we should be, Yeldizian says.

When she thinks back to the outpouring of support a century ago from the likes of the Knudsens and others, she says: “It doesn't surprise me that New Zealanders and Australians would do something like that, because that's our value system, we take care of each other.”

Now, she says, we need to find a way to display the same moral fibre and sense of honour we displayed then.

TAGHAVARD, Azerbaijan (Reuters) – Ethnic Armenian farmer Lenser Gabrielyan looks with sorrow at his land in the village of Taghavard, now cut off from him and his family under the terms of a peace deal which ended last year's war in the South Caucasus enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Within weeks of the conflict's outbreak in September, military forces from Azerbaijan had entered Gabrielyan's picturesque mountain settlement and made big territorial gains.

A Russia-brokered ceasefire last November cemented Azeri advances in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally recognised as a part of Azerbaijan but had been controlled by ethnic Armenians since the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The accord split Taghavard, which stretches for three kilometres along an unpaved road towards a mountain range and which had a pre-war population of over a thousand ethnic Armenians.

It also left Gabrielyan, who has lived there since his birth, with his house on one side of a new border and his farmland on the other.

"Now we have nothing to do," lamented the 65-year-old, as he walked near a barn that used to house livestock, but whose roof had since collapsed under shelling.

"I used to farm. But almost all the land was left under Azerbaijani control… No tractor is left here, all the equipment is in the hands of the Azeri side."

Azeri forces took control of the upper western end of the settlement. Those ethnic Armenians who did not flee now live in the east, protected by ethnic Armenian military units.

Gabrielyan's family, including his ten grandchildren, stayed. But like other families, they are now struggling to get by as fields where livestock used to graze and a nearby forest, where they used to chop firewood, are under Azeri control.

Before the war, his family kept sheep and pigs. Most of them were lost when the village became a battle field and Gabrielyan says his family will run out of firewood in a month.

"I don't know what to do," he said. "Everything is in ruins."

Before the war, residents also enjoyed running water to their homes from wells located in the upper part of the village. That access has now been lost.

An alternative water source – a pipe located several hundred metres away from houses is now the only option. A Reuters reporter watched recently as residents brought several plastic bottles and metal cans of water loaded onto two donkeys back home. The journey took them around 30 minutes.

FEARS OF WAR

Gabrielyan's daughter-in-law, Minara, cried as she showed pictures of her brother, who was killed in combat on the same night when the peace deal was agreed.

She says she is scared to live in their house, which is only hundreds metres away from Azeri outposts, which are visible on sunny days.

"We don't know now what it is – war or peace? We can't go out freely or sleep calmly at night. We wake up from every noise because we are afraid," she said.

A Reuters reporter saw an Azerbaijani soldier on guard on a hillside overlooking the village, just several dozen metres away from ethnic Armenian military positions.

Lenser Gabrielyan picks up fragments of exploded shells when walking in a nearby field, still criss-crossed with trenches, and says it worries him that his grandchildren have to live so close to a hostile army.

"We're staying here," he said. "(But) I don't know what will happen. It is dangerous".

Since the impressive victory of Armenia’s non-violent ‘Velvet Revolution’ in 2018, the early euphoria and enthusiasm in support of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has waned considerably. After posting gains in democratisation, capped by a long overdue free and fair election in December 2018, the Armenian government embarked on a popular campaign to combat corruption.

But Prime Minister Pashinyan overreached, launching an effort to not only reform but also reconstitute the court system. Amid the so-called ‘court crisis,’ Armenia was then overwhelmed by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, which quickly expanded from a public crisis into an economic disaster. Against that backdrop, the unexpected loss in the war for Nagorno Karabakh by November 2020 triggered an unprecedented political crisis in Armenia, with democracy under assault, reform imperiled, and the political fate and future of the Pashinyan government now very much in question.

The Nagorno Karabakh conflict has both defined the political discourse and driven the development of modern politics in Armenia.  As a conflict that first erupted in the waning days of the Soviet Union, the Karabakh issue predates modern Armenian independence.  And for every Armenian government since independence, Nagorno Karabakh has served as a fundamental pillar of politics.  The relevance of the Karabakh conflict has not only shaped the development of Armenian statehood but, under previous Armenian governments, has also fostered shortcomings in democracy and tolerance for corruption, often excused by a dubious justification based on the imperatives of wartime national security.

Given the role of the Karabakh conflict as a foundation for Armenian politics, the unprecedented defeat in the war for Nagorno Karabakh has forced Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan into new and unchartered political terrain. Moreover, since an unprecedented military defeat and unexpected loss of territory that included significant parts of Karabakh in November 2020, the Armenian government faces a lingering political crisis that only continues to reverberate throughout Armenian society.

The domestic political challenge to the government, with calls for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to resign, is both less and more than it seems, however. On the one hand, the political vulnerability of the Pashinyan government is neither as serious nor as significant as recent developments suggest – for two reasons. First, despite the initial shock of the Prime Minister’s acceptance of a Russian-brokered agreement that ended the war with an Armenian capitulation, demonstrations against the government have been largely ineffective. 

Although determined to resist demands for his resignation, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has sought to diffuse the crisis.

And despite the frustration and shock over Armenia’s defeat in the war, the political opposition remains deeply unpopular and widely discredited. In a display of desperation over determination, the opposition’s attempts to leverage dissent and discontent into street protests have failed, both in terms of much fewer demonstrators and with a lack of any alternative policy position. The opposition’s stubborn reliance on outdated tactics and maximalist demands for the resignation of the democratically elected government and the appointment of a transitional government selected by the opposition are impractical and implausible. Against this backdrop, even the need for a snap election is not enough to either satisfy the opposition or to salvage their unpopularity.  Many still see the disparate opposition as driven more by its own self-interest than any defense of national interest, effectively just pursuing a campaign to regain power.      

Moreover, a second reason that the political challenge is less acute lies in the absence of any credible rival or alternative to Pashinyan. In fact, Pashinyan had no choice and little alternative but to accept the Russian agreement. It was the only feasible way to save lives and salvage what remained of Nagorno Karabakh. In this context, the fall of Shushi, the second largest city in Karabakh, came to be the turning point, making any further fighting unsustainable and risking the complete loss of Karabakh.

Nevertheless, although the threat from the political opposition may be insufficient to force the resignation of the Prime Minister, the political future of the Pashinyan government is certainly an open question. The weakness of the government’s position is driven by two broader factors.  First, Pashinyan has become increasingly stranded in unchartered political waters, as no political leader or party has ever faced the challenge of governing without the essential element of domestic discourse and public policy. Second, and somewhat ironically, the political fate and future of Prime Minster lies more in his own hands than in the actions of the opposition. More specifically, Pashinyan’s rather reckless and impulsive style of leadership has done more to undermine his standing than anything that the opposition has done or said. 

Although determined to resist demands for his resignation, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has sought to diffuse the crisis. His initial response, consisting of a sweeping dismissal of six cabinet ministers followed by the presentation of a six-month ‘action plan’ of policy measures, was largely dismissed as doing little to demonstrate accountability.

As the crisis continued, however, the Pashinyan government slowly began to accept the need for a snap election. This belated acknowledgement means a contest later this year, to replace a parliament more than two years before the expiration of its mandate. Thus, with a lingering political crisis only exacerbating a deepening political polarisation, the necessity for a new election stands out as the most constructive way to resolve the dissent and division.  And a fresh mandate from a new parliamentary election would be based on the recognition that the political landscape has changed dramatically.

By seeking a fresh mandate, the government is expected to secure a reduced, but still working majority of seats in the new parliament. For the opposition, the snap election will be a challenge, as they face a difficult time in garnering any significant number of seats given their lack of popular standing and their failure to offer any alternative policies. In that context, the strength of the government’s position is driven as much by the lack of any credible rival or political alternative than by any deep appeal or support, however.  Thus, Armenia is now poised to enter a new period of politics, as both the beginning of the end of Armenian politics defined by the past narrative, and as the end of the beginning for the early euphoria of support for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his embattled government.