Australian witnesses and Anzac rescuers saw the Armenian Genocide firsthand in Turkey in 1915, yet their legacy of “fighting for humanity” remains unrecognised at home.
NSW public servant Varant Meguerditchian’s grandfathers were raised in the Australasian Orphanage located in Antilyas, a suburb of Beirut.
Thomas White, one of the first four airmen in the Australian military, remembered the silence of Tel Armen long after his forced 1500-kilometre journey across the Ottoman Empire ended.
Captured while attempting to cut telegraph wires behind enemy lines in late 1915, the prisoner of war arrived in the Armenian town to find it hollowed out.
“Only a few women and children of the Christian population remained,” White later wrote. “The male Armenians being conspicuously absent.”
From a small hill, White discovered the reason: 30 fresh graves that “spoke eloquently” of the town’s missing men.
He recalled the pleading eyes of an Armenian child he was powerless to help, and noted with horror that these massacres, “the Turk’s handiwork”, were not random, but “to order throughout the country”.
Though White published his account in 1928, the history he witnessed remains politically fraught. While Anzac troops rescued tens of thousands of destitute Armenians across the deserts of Jordan, Iraq and Syria, those efforts are largely forgotten. Today, Australia refuses to join the 40 other nations that formally recognise the Armenian Genocide – a tragedy that began just one day before the Anzac landings at Gallipoli.
Armenian-Australian historian Vicken Babkenian argues this lack of recognition fails the legacy and courage of men like White.
“The Australians – light horsemen, aviators and nurses – serving in the British Empire’s armies in the Middle East often encountered the Armenian victims of the Ottoman Empire … Like Australians in the Second World War who saw the concentration camps, they confronted some of the war’s most vulnerable victims. Those Australians who protected or rescued the war’s Armenian victims were truly fighting for humanity.”
Tom and Roger Harley with belongings of their grandfather, Anzac Thomas White, who was a first-hand witness to the horrific treatment of the Armenian population under Ottoman rule in World War I. Eamon Gallagher
“My grandfather was the type who had to run towards a gun as soon as he heard it go off,” says Tom Harley, the grandson of White, who was a daredevil, pilot and politician.
White served in two world wars, receiving a Distinguished Flying Cross, before becoming a cabinet minister in the Menzies government and ambassador to London.
But it was his three years as a Turkish prisoner during World War I that turned him into a writer, says Harley, whose family still has one boot where White kept his diaries, hiding the pages covered in tiny writing inside the soles. (The other boot is held in the Australian War Memorial.)
“My grandfather was both lucky and unlucky,” says Harley, who runs strategic advice firm Dragoman Capital. Thousands of POWs did not survive captivity.
White wrote his prison memoir, Guests of the Unspeakable, as a tribute to those who died. He was frank about the brutality of his Turkish captors, very different to the narrative of “decent Johnny Turk” that grew up here after Gallipoli.
White wrote unflinchingly of other horrors he observed, including Turkish treatment of Christian minorities who were part of the Ottoman Empire, most notably the Armenians.
From inside the Ottoman Empire during the war, White and his fellow prisoners of war – British, French, Russians and other Anzacs – witnessed the massacres and displacement of Armenian civilians.
Sometimes the servicemen walked along the same roads as Armenian women and children, hungry, sick and traumatised. At other times, they were held in the Armenians’ empty homes along their route.
White saw more evidence when they reached Hassanbeyli, “a large Armenian village of sandstone houses clinging to the mountainside” that was empty of its inhabitants. They had been “butchered a la Turque”, he wrote bleakly.
Later at the village of Ras al Ain, White observed an earlier stage of the deportation process, seeing “a large camp of Armenians, herded together after the general roundup from their homes, and waiting to be sent on marches that always had the same ending”. He learnt later that “a general slaughter of the unfortunates took place in 1918”.
When the captured servicemen reached their ultimate destination of Afyonkarahisar in western Turkey, a major holding town for prisoners of war, White and the others in his group were put into recently emptied Armenian homes.
However, after three POWs staged an escape, all the remaining Allied soldiers were moved together to the main Armenian church, a fortress-like structure with more limited chances to break free.
Even here, White observes, the prisoners displaced Armenians who had taken refuge in the church. He describes seeing Armenian women and children sitting on bundles of clothing, “looking very sad and miserable … Their menfolk had been killed, their house and furniture confiscated, and now they were being turned into the street from their last possible sanctuary.”
Two Australian Light Horsemen watch Armenian women sew at The Port Said refugee camp in 1918. Courtesy of James Cannavino Library, Archies and Special Collections Marist College USA
It wasn’t only Australian POWs who were witnesses to Ottoman deportation and the murder of Christian minorities. Anzac troops in the Middle East, advancing through Syria and Jordan towards the war’s end in 1918, encountered thousands of Armenian and other Christian refugees. They also helped many of them.
In the book, Armenia, Australia and the Great War, Babkenian and co-author Peter Stanley recount one such incident in Jordan, near Salt on the road west of Amman, when Anzac troops came upon a group of ragged refugees, including about 100 children.
The troops escorted the refugees along the road to Jerusalem. That city had been under British control since Christmas 1917, following battles involving Anzac troops.
Babkenian writes that Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Mills of the 4th Anzac battalion of the Imperial Camel Corps carried a four-year-old Armenian girl, “sleeping in his arms, on his camel”, into Jerusalem.
The Armenian Genocide started the day before the Anzac landing at Gallipoli Cove on April 25, 1915. Turkish authorities arrested some 240 Armenian leaders across the capital, Constantinople.
Whether the genocide and the Anzac landing are linked is a matter of academic debate. Some historians argue that the Ottoman attacks on Armenians were a reaction to planned Russian and British military attacks, including at Gallipoli.
From this distance, Australians generally see Gallipoli as an ill-fated military operation, but that outcome was not known at the time and Turkish leaders felt trapped by the pending attacks.
Historian Vicken Babkenian, co-author of Armenia, Australia and the Great War. Louie Douvis
With the war going badly, the Ottoman government regarded its Christian populations – Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks – as internal enemies, claiming they supported the country’s wartime Christian foes.
They would later argue that the arrest of the Armenian intellectuals on April 24 was to ensure the British invaders would not find support if they reached the Turkish capital following a success at Gallipoli.
Other historians dispute this. They note massacres of Armenians and other Christians went back decades, and tens of thousands were either deported or killed in two attacks earlier in 1915.
They argue this indicates that an attack was being planned in any event by the government led by the Young Turks, who had overthrown decades of autocratic rule in 1908. The Gallipoli campaign may have escalated the Turkish timeline, or it may even have been exploited by the Ottomans as providing an excuse to act, but it was not causal.
“I served for two years in the Australian Army Reserve … as thanks to a country that has given my family so much opportunity.”
This is more a battle of narratives than of facts. The facts of the genocide are well-known. In 1914, Henry Morgenthau snr was the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and received briefings about the massacres and deportations as they were unfolding.
Morgenthau operated as a source for documentation of events and was one of several diplomats to confront the Turkish prime minister, grand vizier Talaat Pasha.
He wrote this up in Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, a book published as the war ended in 1918. There, he recorded Pasha telling him in August 1915 that “our Armenian policy is absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.”
Morgenthau quoted Pasha as saying he believed the Armenian deportations would avenge the Balkan wars of 1912-13, when Turkey had lost territory and Muslims had been expelled. “We have already disposed of three-quarters of the Armenians; there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzeroum. The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge.”
Every year, Armenians worldwide remember their displacement on April 24, one day before Australians mark Anzac Day. Historian Babkenian often attends both ceremonies.
He’s been fascinated by these stories since the 1990s, when he was a young researcher at the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “I wanted to know why this story was so little-known or accepted,” he says.
Badges from another time: Australians were well-informed on the plight of Armenians during World War One. Louie Douvis
“I found that the State Library of NSW had a whole section called Armenian Massacres, on index cards, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even before World War I. And I thought I have to look into this.”
Babkenian located in-depth coverage of Armenian issues in Australian newspapers – including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – during the First World War. The Age published more than 40 articles in 1915 alone, with headings such as “Armenians Butchered”, “Million Armenians Massacred” and “More Armenians Massacred-Girls Sold in Open Market”.
This, he realised, was not a story that was unknown to Australians at the time.
Australians also made generous donations to Armenian relief funds, beginning during the war and continuing well after it. “This was a whole area I had no idea about – certainly not the aid work nor the pioneering role taken by women,” says Babkenian.
NSW public servant Varant Meguerditchian is one beneficiary of Australian generosity. Both his grandfathers were raised in the Australasian Orphanage in Beirut. It opened its doors to some 1700 orphans in 1922, remaining in operation until the last child turned 18 a decade later.
Varant Meguerditichian, a descendant of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, with his paternal grandfather’s orphanage identification card. Louie Douvis
Meguerditchian’s grandfathers described the institution’s core characteristic as its equality. “Everyone was treated equally. They might not have had much, but they each had the same amount of not much,” he explained. “The same small blanket, the same small portion of food.”
His father’s father, Aharon, was from Hasanbeyli, the village where Thomas White was held as a prisoner of war after the Armenian inhabitants had been deported. His mother’s father, Mihran Terzian, was from a village near Cappadocia in Turkey.
Varant Meguerditichian’s paternal grandfather Aharon as a young man. Louie Douvis
Both boys survived the deaths of their parents during massacres in World War I; his mother’s father was also then abducted by a Kurdish clan, and was only saved by his older sister coming to free him. All the children ended up in care. After the war, the two boys were moved to the Australasian Orphanage.
Though conditions were spartan, all the orphans were taught a trade. “My father’s father was a carpenter and that was the trade he learnt there, he worked in it all his life. My mother’s father was a metalworker and he learnt that there too.”
Meguerditchian remembers his grandfather, Aharon, telling him that when he turned 18, the orphanage said his time was up and gave him a blanket and a bag to take with him.
“He had nowhere to go. He spent that night outdoors, sleeping near the gates of the orphanage. When he woke up, he realised he was on his own now and had to organise a life for himself.”
Meguerditchian adds reflectively, “My own personal connection is I am a descendant of survivors and I also served for two years in the Australian Army Reserve. I never saw active duty, but always considered my service in the Australian Army as thanks to a country that has given my family so much opportunity.”
The Australian government has not officially recognised the Armenian Genocide.
Dr Deborah Mayersen, a senior lecturer in political studies at the University of NSW, argues there is no doubt that the Turkish acts against the Armenian population fit within the definition of genocide. “It’s not controversial,” she says.
But Turkey has long denied that the genocide of its Christian populations was a planned event. Turkish officials dispute the numbers – claiming no more than 300,000 died; they dispute the intent, arguing the deaths were more sporadic, a response to Armenian support for Russia and not a planned campaign, carried out under instruction from the country’s new political leadership.
Some of the 1700 Armenian orphans at the Australasian orphanage in Beirut taken in 1923. Courtesy Missak Kelechian
And there lies the rub, says Mayersen. “The Turks are caught in a bind. If they accept that these events happened, then they will be damaging the founding myth of the new Turkish Republic.
“It would make their founding father, Kemal Ataturk, into a genocidaire, and they can’t accept that.”
Interestingly, the British did exert pressure on Turkey after World War I to prosecute some of the leaders responsible for the murder of the Armenians.
Former prime minister Pasha, known as the architect of the genocide, ran away from Turkey as the war ended in 1918. He was tried in absentia – though it should not have been too hard to bring him back from his new home in Berlin – found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was not enforced.
Instead, in 1921 he was assassinated by an Armenian radical. He was tried in his turn and found not guilty by virtue of insanity in a German court, after a trial lasting less than one day.
Decades of determined Turkish denial, and a lack of clear records and photographs such as were found in Germany after the collapse of the Nazi regime, led many nations, including the US, to conclude that the issue was too controversial to touch. It was not until 2021 that the US, under then-president Joe Biden, recognised that the Armenian Genocide took place.
Meanwhile, Israel is an interesting case – half in and half out. Turkish pressure on Israel not to recognise the Armenian Genocide was intense, as I observed during my time as a Middle East correspondent.
Seeking a good relationship with Turkey, both a regional power and a former ally, Israel acceded and did not recognise the Armenian Genocide. It didn’t give in, despite prolonged Armenian campaigns, including by its own local Armenian population, as well as the importance Israel itself places on genocide memorialisation.
Then in August last year, during a media interview, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did make the concession. This came after relations between Israel and the government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan soured, even curdled, particularly over Ankara’s accusations that Israeli actions in Gaza amounted to genocide. Still, the last formal step of recognition by Israel’s parliament has yet to take place.
Australia has not acted either, seeking not to antagonise Ankara, apparently to maintain the annual Gallipoli memorial ceremonies held on Anzac Cove.
“And also we’re wusses,” says Mayersen. “Our government should show some leadership and recognise the Armenian Genocide. Turkey is important, but more than 40 other countries have done it.
“If we did, it would be a storm in a teacup. Perhaps it would be easier if all the remaining countries got together and recognised it formally at one time. But somehow, that opportunity is always missed.”
Irris Makler was a Jerusalem correspondent for many years, reporting from Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Syrian and the West Bank and Gaza.
https://www.afr.com/world/europe/the-forgotten-genocide-and-the-anzacs-who-bore-witness-20260421-p5zpqm
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