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Have We Forgotten? Gallipoli And The Armenian Genocide

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  • Have We Forgotten? Gallipoli And The Armenian Genocide

    HAVE WE FORGOTTEN? GALLIPOLI AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

    12:39 * 19.11.14

    By Robert Kaplan

    Re-published from Abcnet.au
    http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/10/31/4118672.htm#comments

    A century ago, in a misconceived encounter on the history-soaked
    precipices of Asia Minor, the sons of Anzac received their battle
    initiation against the German-trained forces of the Ottoman Empire.

    Now, in an annual event that grows in mythology and status in
    proportion to the passing of the years, is celebrated the shared
    combat ordeal of gallant "Johnny Turk" and the Bronzed Anzac.

    And why not? The Turkish forces, well prepared behind excellent
    defences, used their tactics to good effect, ably led by a professional
    officer who was to go on to bigger things, such as the fire destruction
    of Smyrna - namely, Kemal Ataturk.

    But, pause for one moment to consider a slightly different scenario.

    Let us suspend historical reality for the purposes of this exercise.

    What if, say, instead of Gallipoli, the Anzac forces were going into
    combat with an SS Battalion somewhere in Poland during the Second
    World War? Would we then, decades later, be joining up with our
    comrades in battle to celebrate what both sides had gone through,
    our enmities forgotten? Can one commemorate the shared experiences
    with enemy forces who acted as the military arm of a state carrying
    out a terrible genocide at the same time?

    For it was the night before the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915
    in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, then called Constantinople,
    when occurred the arrest, detention and subsequent liquidation of
    625 intellectuals, priests and leading figures of the Armenian Empire.

    This event is widely held to signal the onset of the first major
    genocide of the twentieth century, the most blood-drenched period in
    human history.

    What followed was a mass murder of an entirely innocent group of
    citizens in the Ottoman Empire by means that are still horrifying to
    contemplate. By the time Turkey sued for peace in 1918, up to 1.5
    million Armenians had been slaughtered, decimating the population
    of a group of people who had lived in the Fertile Crescent since the
    dawn of human settlement.

    And it did not stop there. The Assyrian people suffered at least 75,000
    victims, three-quarters of their population; the numbers have not been
    made up to this day. Later the Greeks in Asia Minor, in some of the
    bloodiest scenes of city sacking since the fall of Nineveh and Tyre,
    were driven out of ancient homelands, never to return. And, largely
    lost in the high tide of bloodletting at the time, there were pogroms
    of Jewish settlements in Anatolia.

    We have made our peace with the genocidal German and Japanese foes
    of the Second World War (there is no way the unrestrained butchery of
    the inhabitants of Manchuria, to say nothing of the Rape of Nanking,
    would not constitute a genocide). They have (at least partially,
    in the case of the Japanese) acknowledged their roles as aggressors
    and in the genocide (at least in the German case; the Austrians are
    still hoping their role will be forgotten). But we still would not
    ask the SS battalions to join us on Anzac Day parades.

    This is right and the way it should be.

    Yet these qualms do not trouble us in fostering our war links with
    the Turkish people - still led by the political descendants of
    the Ittihadist Party that planned, organised and carried out the
    Anatolian genocides.

    Part of the reason for this is wilful ignorance. The Turkish government
    vigorously enforces an official policy of denial, maintaining it as
    the duty of their diplomatic staff abroad to engage in a well-funded
    campaign of disinformation and protest should anyone publically state
    anything to the contrary.

    Genocide denied is an extension of the genocide perpetuated and an
    ongoing crime against human rights.

    Turkish nationalism, which runs coeval with its policy of genocide
    denial, remains the last outpost of unreconstructed pre-Second World
    War racial nationalism.

    Johnny Turk, by all accounts, was a brave fighter when well led and
    supported (which was often not the case), but can we separate the
    soldiers from their officers, leaders, politicians and bureaucrats
    who at the same time were engaged in exterminating an entire group of
    people - especially when that same state, a century later, continues
    to defile the memory of these victims by refusing to admit that the
    slaughter even occurred?

    So when we celebrate the Anzac spirit, let us remember that they were
    fighting for freedom, pure and simple, and a nation that insists on
    covering up, if not extinguishing history, to escape its culpability
    for genocide is not a nation with whom we can associate as equals. And
    nor should we until they desist from their deceitful denial of the
    awful truth of what their forces did to several million innocent and
    unprotected peoples under their sway after that day in April 1915.

    Let the Anzac ceremonies proceed with Johnny Turk - but be sure to
    let them know what we know, will not forget and will not deny until
    they face up to their culpability and can then re-join the ranks of
    enemies of honour, if not the nations of the world.

    http://www.tert.am/en/news/2014/11/19/armenia-genocide-robert-kaplan/

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