GALLIPOLI DIGGERS AND THE ‘FORGOTTEN’ HOLOCAUST
Eureka Street
?aeid=12475
April 20 2009
Australia
Anzac Day is a day history has immortalised. We know 25 April 1915
was when the ‘digger’ — one of Australia’s most identifiable and
beloved icons — dug the first trench into the rocky canyon at
Gallipoli that would soon be his grave. Albeit a military disaster,
many recognise the battle as a defining moment, one that forged
a nation.
That same day, the same place and the same battle also mark a nation’s
destruction. The battle at Gallipoli was the first stage in an effort
to systematically exterminate the Armenian race. Denied by Turkey,
and unrecognised by the United States, the Armenian Genocide —
dubbed ‘The Forgotten Holocaust’ — has slipped from the memory
of a world that has grown accustomed to atrocity.
But it happened. Everyone knows it did. It’s the reason 1.5 million
Armenians remain unaccounted for, and why their skulls and bones are
still embedded in the clay of the north-Syrian river banks. It’s the
reason modern Armenia’s borders lie far away from its historic home.
Just as two decades later Hitler deported Jews to concentration camps
in Poland, the Pashas — the Ottoman rulers — expelled the
Armenians from their homeland.
Due to nothing more than a fear of Armenians siding with the Russians,
and a desire to create a uniformly ethnic pan-Turkic state from
Anatolia to central Asia (hindered only by Armenia), the Turkish
nationalists embarked on the most horrific crime against humanity
the world had seen.
At the Gallipoli landing, the Turks conscripted hundreds of Armenians
in the momentous battle for nothing more than cannon fodder. As they
ran unarmed into our troops’ firing line, it was mass-execution.
The Ottoman government executed 600 of the Armenian educated-elite in
Istanbul on 24 April, the very day before the Gallipoli landing, and,
immediately afterwards pursued the rest in the Anatolian highlands.
>From 1915, tens of thousands of Armenian families crossed a desert
the locals called Der-el-Zor, but which the survivors would later
name the Desert of Death. They marched for weeks at a time, snaking
across the desert, not daring to fall behind in the heat. They faced
death by starvation or execution.
Survivors tell of seeing women taken from the rows of prisoners into
the fields, hearing screeches, gunfire and, after a time, seeing the
soldiers returning alone. Thousands were marched into underground
caves in what were the world’s first gas chambers.
Mamikon came from a village near the border of Azerbaijan. His parents
hid him from the government so he would not be conscripted to be killed
at the Dardanelles or forced to join a labour camp at far-away places
like Baghdad. Mamikon was a 16-year-old boy.
At his village, they were starved of water. In desperation his mother
would cut her fingers and feed her blood to her son so he would not
die of thirst.
Children like him from villages all across Armenia were hidden from the
government, often in the homes of sympathetic Turkish neighbours. And
they watched the Armenians of their villages rounded up and marched
off, never to return.
>From behind the dark windows of their refuge, they would hear soldiers
descend on defenceless Armenian women and elders, killing them with
guns or with scythes. After the last cry was stilled, only the lucky
ones were left there in a silent village.
‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’ joked Adolf Hitler as he embarked
on a holocaust of his own. While he was mistaken in thinking that his
genocide of European Jewry would be similarly overlooked, his words
ring sadly true. Turkey denies the claims of an Armenian genocide
and manipulates history to conceal anything that suggests otherwise.
In fact, the Turkish government does not even acknowledge that
Armenians ever lived in those areas from which they were deported and
killed: not even by the banks of the vast and glimmering Lake Van,
the ancient capital where Armenian nationality was forged among the
Nairi tribes over 2000 years ago; or on the white-capped Mount Ararat
that soars into the clouds above it, the very symbol of Armenia,
the centrepiece of its national flag.
In 2007, tens of thousands of Armenians and Turks gathered in Istanbul
to commemorate the life of Hrant Dink, a decorated writer who demanded
recognition of this genocide and spent his life’s work striving to
bridge the rift between the two nations.
‘Hepimiz Hrant’iz! Hepimiz Ermeni’yiz!’ read the banners that
stretched across the wide streets of Istanbul on 19 January: ‘We are
all Armenian. We are all Hrant Dink.’
The last to leave the office building of the local Armenian newspaper,
The Agos, Dink was confronted by two assassins who appeared from
the shadows. They were young boys, ultra-nationalists. Pulling their
pistols, they fired two bullets to his head and two to his chest.
He was not starved, he was not gassed, his wife and daughters were not
raped and his children were not burned alive, but, in the words of the
decorated British journalist, Robert Fisk, Dink was the 1,500,001st
victim of the genocide. ‘At least the world will not forget him
so easily.’
His death stands as an example of the continuing hatred and intolerance
that initially wrought this crime against humanity over 90 years ago.
Nicholas Toscano is a freelance writer and a student of Classics
and Creative Writing at Melbourne University. He has a Diploma in
Modern Languages.
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