Australia, Armenia, and Turkey, 1915 t0 now

The Turks have denied for more than a century the historically proven and distinctly unhumanitarian serial killings of Armenian men in each village across Anatolia along with their families’ forced removal from homes. These undeniable historic horrors that began on April 24, 1915, under Ottoman Minister for the Interior Talaat Pasha, and continued after 1918 under Kemal as supreme commander are now known as the Armenian Genocide.

Mustafa Kemal – known as ‘Atatürk’, the father of modern Turkey, was a clever bugger. At first, when his position was at its weakest in late 1918 and 1919, he denounced the guilty parties responsible for the mass murder of Armenians and Greeks. He promised to prosecute the wartime leaders for trying to exterminate Turkey's Armenian and other non-Muslim population.

But instead, he advanced his real plan, single-mindedly calling on his troops to resist the Versailles-ordained break-up of the Ottoman Empire, to oust the British, French, Italian and Greek occupiers and unite Turkey into a modern, European-style republic. As the allies gave up trying to bring their ex-Ottoman regions into line, Kemal welcomed back many of the former leaders detained by the British in Malta, pardoning instead of punishing them.

Significant in Kemal’s actions from 1919-22 was the continued murdering of Armenians. But when opening his inaugural Turkish Republic parliament in 1923 as its founding president, Kemal emphasised from Day One to his Cabinet stacked with fellow war criminals that the official line on any mass murder accusation was: bad things happen in war.

There were occasions, he declaimed, where Armenians engaged in armed resistance to Ottoman rule and these uprisings had to be put down, but no civilians were murdered. There were never forced death marches into the desert, nor mass hangings and shootings. These were just hysterical tales from people under duress of war.

This is akin to former colonial leaders in the 1890s Australia talking about ‘clearing the land’ for pastoral and crop development, talk that led to white settler genocide against original First Nations people.

Meanwhile, in the small, mountainous southern Caucasus homeland that fits twice inside Tasmania, a century-long silence betrays three million Armenians and their fellow six million global Armenian diasporans traumatised by the1915-22 genocide of 1.5 million Armenians.

Descended from forebears ignored in 1919-20 by powerbrokers and border-bargainers at Versailles, every living Armenian retains a visceral horror of those years through countless family oral histories. Many old online documents reveal the atrocities committed on the Armenians by Kemalist forces reclaiming territories briefly occupied by the French, Italians and Greeks. Untold amounts of ancestral Armenian family property and gold were stolen by the new Turkish republic, which has until this day denied all wrongdoing.

And we, in Australia, are complicit with their lies. Despite South Australian (2009) and New South Wales (2013) parliaments formally acknowledging the Armenian Genocide, with the 2015 Centenary Gallipoli commemoration at stake, our Federal government turned a blind eye to it and continues to do so to this day.  

In June 2014 Foreign Minister Julie Bishop wrote to the Australian Turkey Advocacy Alliance: ‘The Australian government acknowledges the devastating effects which the tragic events at the end of the Ottoman Empire have had on later generations and on their identity, heritage, and culture. We do not, however, recognise these events as genocide.’

Australia, supposedly a civilised nation, accepts Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide. We deny compelling truths and maintain a faux friendship with the nation that has never admitted to murdering 1.5 million Armenians.

In addition, we have collectively forgotten the very real interactions between Australians and Armenians during and for a few years after the First World War. A tentative relationship evolved out of our huge humanitarian aid program to feed, clothe and support genocide survivors and offer opportunity in life to thousands of Armenian orphans.

Wartime papers carried daily stories from 1916 on Turkish atrocities against Armenians. Australians embraced the suffering of Armenians and did something about it. Reverend James Cresswell, a South Australian congregationalist minister, was a key inspirational and organisational figure.

Why don’t we celebrate something that was not just good, but great?

Has Neoliberalism shafted humanitarianism for not being profit-driven?

Has the bottom line caused compassion to bottom out?

If Australia were ever to live up to its commitment to the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and officially acknowledge the Armenian Genocide – and, for that matter, the ‘frontier war’ massacres of First Nations people - the first thing that would happen would be Türkiye President Erdogan cancelling our annual Gallipoli commemoration, gifted to Australia on our acceptance of Kemal as Atatürk, noble foe and hero, along with Türkiye’s renaming Ariburnu as Anzac Cove.

The whole Anzac legend would be compromised. Mistakes would have to be admitted, with political pain for no gain. Only truth.

What Prime Minister is game enough to do that?

Glorification of our military past further heightens emotion in Australia around Anzac Day’s ceremonial solemnity. It confers a comparable gravitas on 8,000 Australian Gallipoli casualties to the millions of fallen commemorated in all wars each Remembrance Day. In uninformed minds, ‘our boys’ fought at Gallipoli for ‘our freedom’.

While commemorating our Australian losses as a nation in 1915 remains appropriate, allowing a mythical Gallipoli epic narrative to substitute naive emotion for historical understanding of the truth does nothing for the memory of the fallen, who become pawns in a flawed reimagining of history.

And so, Aussies stand by and act dumb, as if the Armenian Genocide was the concocted myth, while the Turks continue their incremental genocide against Armenians via their lapdog Azerbaijan’s illegal and immoral September 2020 attack on the independent Armenian enclave of Artsakh.

Australian mainstream media has ignored thousands of Armenian deaths and the displacement of a hundred thousand Artsakh refugees in the past year into the impoverished nation of Armenia.

And every April 25 a spin-heavy media bandwagon merges the circuses of sporting and military glory, conjuring flags and sepia martial imagery with filth and corpses washed away.

Aussies get emotional over bronzed heroes in ageless camaraderie as the parting echoes of The Last Post and the silence before the bounce of the ball underscore the powerful imprimatur that ‘we’ are all Anzacs under the Southern Cross, and look after our mates.

The white Anglo ones, at least.

We bought our annual Gallipoli commemoration.

But in doing so, we put a hefty mortgage on the truth.