Remembrance of things past

South China Morning Post
May 2, 2005

Perspective in history is a necessary but elusive goal. Comments in my
last article about Japan and its textbooks endeavoured to put them into
a wider historical context. But that clearly touched a very raw nerve,
and I received a flood of letters, some remarkably abusive. So here, I
will look at some other aspects of history – but steer clear of China.

It is a truism that some episodes of history acquire symbolic
importance out of all proportion to their practical importance at
the time. Let us look back to 1915, whose anniversaries are producing
plenty of examples.

Last Monday was Anzac Day, which commemorates the Australian and
New Zealand Army Corps’ losses in the Gallipoli campaign against
Turkey during the first world war. Gallipoli, where more than 8,000
Australians died during a nine -month campaign, is deeply embedded in
the Australian psyche and national mythology. Heroism was embellished
by some flamboyantly inaccurate accounts by the father of newspaper
baron Rupert Murdoch, and later, fact and fiction merged to become
a touchstone of nationalist sentiment. More French and twice as many
Britons died there as Australians, and more Australians were killed
the following year on the Somme and again in Flanders in 1917 than
at Gallipoli. But Gallipoli was symbolic because it was the first
bloodying of the new nation in a major battle and was one in which
Australia and New Zealand played roles out of all proportion to
their size.

For non-Australian history, Gallipoli was a less important encounter
than one which occurred at the very beginning of 1915, but which few
people in the west or Australia have heard of – let alone seen fit to
commemorate. That was the Battle of Sarikamis when, in a few days,
80,000 Turks lost their lives to Russian forces and frostbite in
midwinter in the mountains of eastern Anatolia.

More important still, Sarikamis led to the Russian advance, and
Russia’s creation of a (Christian) Armenian state on Turkish soil.
This last advance of Tsarist Russia, in turn, sparked massacres of
Armenians throughout the Turkish part of the Ottoman empire. The
Gallipoli invasion by western Christians the same year added fuel to
Turkish Muslim communal violence and perhaps 500,000 deaths.

Genocide of Armenians or not, the aftermath of Sarikamis has left
a wound as deep as the Nanking massacre and continuing rows over
Turkish guilt and Turkish textbooks. This issue may yet decide the
crucial question of Turkish membership of the European Union.

Did Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his British counterpart
Tony Blair, who attended last week’s Gallipoli commemoration, know
about Sarikamis? Or were their school books also selective in the
choice of heroism and cruelty?

Judging by recent editorials, Southeast Asian textbooks may have some
gaps, too. How honest are the Thai ones about their wartime alliance
with Japan? In the Philippines, many members of the nationalist elite,
including then president Corazon Aquino’s future father-in-law, were
in the puppet government of president Jose Laurel. He fled briefly
to Japan but Laurel was never prosecuted, returned to politics and
was nearly elected president in 1949.

It is hard to blame the Filipinos, who had to exchange one yoke
for another. Japanese occupation was unpleasant, but the biggest
losses came with liberation in 1945 when “American Caesar” General
Douglas MacArthur ordered an all-out assault on Japanese-occupied
Manila. It cost 100,000 lives, mostly Filipinos, from air and
artillery bombardment in what was the bloodiest city battle of the
second world war after Stalingrad. Maybe it is best for people to
forget some history, but historians should not.Philip Bowring is a
Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator