AUSTRALIA WON’T ATTEND ARMENIAN MASS KILLINGS CENTENARY COMMEMORATIONS
SBS Radio, Australia
March 31 2015
Is Australia’s decision not to send representatives to Yerevan for
events marking the centenary of what’s known as the Armenian genocide
an outright snub of Armenia or a carefully manoeuvred diplomatic
balancing act?
By Kristina Kukolja
(Transcript from SBS World News Radio)
Is it an outright snub or a carefully manoeuvred diplomatic balancing
act?
The Australian government says it won’t be officially represented
in Yerevan next month at the centenary commemorations of the mass
killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.
That’s widely referred to as the Armenian genocide – terminology
rejected by Turkey.
The Yerevan events will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the
Anzac landing in Gallipoli, to which Prime Minister Tony Abbott is
expected to lead a high-level delegation.
Kristina Kukolja has the details.
(Click on the audio tab above to hear the full report)
While there is no international consensus on the matter, over 20
countries have officially recognised the massacre of Armenians by
Ottoman Turkish soldiers as genocide.
The leaders of some of those nations will be in Armenia next month
at the invitation of the Armenian president to attend the 100-year
commemoration.
Australia isn’t among the countries to officially adopt the term
“Armenian genocide” at a national level, although two state parliaments
have done so.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade won’t confirm whether
Australia was invited to attend commemorative events in Yerevan.
But the Department has told SBS the Australian government will not
be sending a representative.
When asked about the reason for the decision, and whether an official
invitation was received, the Department declined to comment further.
Vache Kahramanian, from a group known as the Armenian National
Committee of Australia, says he’s seen the Armenian government’s list
of official invitees.
He says it includes Prime Minister Tony Abbott and a number of other
federal MPs.
Vache Kahramanian says he’ll be very disappointed if all of the
Australian MPs invited decline to go to Yerevan.
“The events that are occurring in Yerevan on the 22nd and 23rd of
April, which a large number of Australian members of parliament have
been invited to, is to take part in a forum titled “No to genocide”.
This is not only dedicated to the centenary of the Armenian
genocide, but a global forum which is going to attract more than
1,000 international attendees, including the president of France, the
president of Uruguay and many other distinguished world leaders who
will take part. And for Australia not to take part in a forum dedicated
to the eradication of the crime of genocide is very saddening.”
Armenia puts the number of its people killed by the Turks between
1915 and 1922 at around 1.5 million.
It says many more were forcibly deported from territories held by
Ottoman Turk forces.
Historians tell of other minorities — the Assyrians, Chaldeans,
Syriacs and Greeks — as being targeted.
These groups want the modern Turkish state to recognise its
predecessor’s actions as genocide.
Turkey does not dispute that many deaths and what it calls
‘relocations’ did occur, but it does dispute the Armenians’ estimated
death toll, and rejects outright the use of the word “genocide”.
Diplomatic cables between Canberra and Ankara, obtained under Freedom
of Information laws, show that last year the matter arose in a letter
from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to her then Turkish counterpart,
Ahmet Davutoglu.
An extract from the letter reads:
“Recognising the important interests at stake for both countries, I
assure you that there has been no decision to change the long-standing
position of successive Australian Governments on this issue… The
Australian government is sympathetic to the Armenian people and other
communities that suffered such terrible losses during the tragic events
at the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Australian Government does not,
however, recognise these events as genocide.”
Vache Kahramanian, from the Armenian National Committee, sees it as
Australia caving in to Turkish pressure.
“I interpret that particular passage as Ankara’s ongoing gag order on
Australia on the issue of the Armenian genocide. For a very long time
we’ve heard from many members of parliament throughout the country
that Turkey continues to use Gallipoli and the centenary of Anzac
Day as a bargaining chip to ensure that Australia does not formally
recognise the Armenian genocide. And what Julie Bishop in her statement
as Foreign Minister makes to her then counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu is
that Australia will not change its position to safeguard all interests
and is happy to allow this important issue of human rights to be used
as a political bargaining chip.”
A Holocaust and genocide expert from the University of Technology
in Sydney, Dr Panayiotis Diamadis, also sees Turkey using Anzac Day
sensitivities to apply pressure on Australia over the issue.
“If the federal government makes any more statements or moves that
look like recognition of the three genocides of the native peoples
of Anatolia, it will seriously disrupt the centenary commemorations
of ANZAC in the Turkish republic this year. That is essentially what
has been said to us by parliamentarians and that’s how I interpret the
particular passage, and that’s how I interpret the whole letter. It’s
a letter from the Foreign Minister only a few days after the
commemorations last year in which a very senior ranking member of the
federal government essentially called on the parliament to recognise
the genocide. And it’s reassuring, a very bureaucratic response.
Personally, I think it’s rather sycophantic to do with reassuring them,
smoothing the waters, making sure nothing affects the ANZAC centenary
and the so-called year of Australia in Turkey.”
The diplomatic cables acknowledge Turkey’s threat to ban New South
Wales MPs from attending this year’s Gallipoli commemoration, after
the state parliament passed a motion recognising the First World War
massacre of Armenians and other group as genocide.
Vache Kahramanian says federal Treasurer Joe Hockey was invited
in April last year to attend an Armenian community commemoration
in Sydney.
Mr Hockey, who is of Armenian-Palestinian descent, did not attend.
SBS has seen a letter the organisers say was instead sent by the
Treasurer, part of which reads:
“Back in 1915 the word “genocide” did not exist, as the UN Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was only
adopted in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But there is
simply no other word for what happened to the Armenian people of
Ottoman Turkey.”
It goes on to say:
“Many countries have officially recognised the Armenian genocide,
and as next year Australia will celebrate the Centenary of ANZAC I
live in hope that the government of Turkey will recognise that it has
the opportunity to reconcile its past in a way that allows us all to
move forward in peace and understanding.”
Ertunc Ozen, from the Australian-Turkish Advocacy Alliance, says he’s
aware of the correspondence.
“It is inappropriate for an Australian or any other government
or minister in that government to be making declarations or
affirmations about foreign historical events. That parliaments are
not the appropriate place to determine the legal characterisation of
historical events, we feel, is self-evident. What we’ve seen occurring
in New South Wales, in particular, and in some countries around the
world is the continuation of this megaphone diplomacy, very strong
lobbying to try and get governments to recognise an event as genocide,
or otherwise as though the recognition somehow makes the event more
likely to be genocide or not.”
One of the diplomatic cables reveals that Mr Hockey’s statement
received a lot of press coverage in Turkey.
Others detail a flurry of diplomatic activity between Australian and
Turkish officials in both countries in the weeks after the letter
emerged.
The documents show Turkey being assured there would be “no change to
the Australian government’s long-standing position” not to intervene
in the debate, and “not to recognise tragic events at end of Ottoman
empire as genocide.”
Turkey was also assured that Australia’s states and territories had
no constitutional role in the formulation of foreign policy.
Several pages of the Turkish response have been completely redacted.
But months after the exchanges began, Australian diplomatic staff
in Ankara were describing senior officials’ talks with Turkey as
constructive.
Ertunc Ozen, of the Australian-Turkish Advocacy Alliance, thinks
Turkish government concerns may be justified.
“If there is going to be this international concerted lobbying effort
to have foreign governments recognise another country’s historical
events as one thing or another, I think, any government or, certainly,
the Turkish government is well within its rights to want some assurance
about the position Australia does or does not take about this. The
Turkish government and Turkish community groups are forced to respond
to the very well organised and strident lobbying and campaign efforts
of the Armenian lobby groups around the world.”
The diplomatic documents also show the Turkish government’s apparent
concern about Armenia’s plans for its centenary commemorations
this year.
They quote President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying Turkey needed
to be prepared to ensure those events were marked in what it calls
“an objective, scholarly and realistic way.”
According to one cable, Mr Erdogan accuses the Armenian diaspora of
desiring to reflect what he calls the ‘1915 events’ in a “particular
and one-sided way, to take them out of their historical reality,
and to turn them into a political campaign”.
In the same account, Mr Erdogan promises that Turkey would use
“history, scholarship and scholarly data” in response to what he calls
“black propaganda.”
The Armenian National Committee’s Vache Kahramanian says, for all
the declassified cables do reveal, they still don’t come close to
telling the full story.
“It troubles me, as an Australian citizen, to wonder why and what
Australia has to hide in coming to rightfully recognise a genocide
that occurred a century ago. It is troubling that DFAT and the
government must redact documents which, I’m sure, contain incriminating
arguments against the government and which has put them in a dilemma
in recognising the Armenian genocide.”
The mass killings of Armenians last century were widely recorded in
the Australian media at the time.
City and regional newspapers wrote of the slaughter and starvation
of Armenian men, women and children.
They described deportations of civilians in the hundreds of thousands,
desert death marches and forced religious conversions.
Dr Panayiotis Diamadis says these events have important historical
connections to Australia, and should be part of any First World
War remembrance.
“There were Australians, particularly in the Middle East, ironically
in many ways in Syria and Iraq, picking up genocide survivors and
protecting them from further attack, particularly in what is now Iraq.
In the northern summer of 1918 a group called the Dunster force,
we have the Australian Prisoner of War memoirs, which are now in the
war memorial in Canberra which have been collecting dust for decades
until they started coming out a decade ago, and one of the links is
that a lot of the prison camps they were held in across the Ottoman
empire were churches, monasteries, schools and homes of the deportees
of the genocide victims and survivors. The two anniversaries not only
can coexist, they are so intertwined that we cannot separate them.”
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