By Robert Kaplan
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.
Robert M. Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist and historian
who has written on genocide and medical human rights abuse.
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