Robert Fisk
Monday 19 January 2015
The Gallipoli centenary is a shameful attempt to hide the Armenian Holocaust
As world leaders plan to commemorate the First World War battle for
Gallipoli, another horrific anniversary risks being overlooked
Soldiers standing over skulls of victims from the Armenian village of
Sheyxalan in 1915, believed to be victims of the Armenian Holocaust
AFP
When world leaders, including Prince Charles and the Australian and New
Zealand prime ministers, gather at Gallipoli to commemorate the First World
War battle at the invitation of the Turkish government in April, the ghosts
of one and half million slaughtered Christian Armenians will march with
them.
For in an unprecedented act of diplomatic folly, Turkey is planning to use
the 100th anniversary of the Allied attempt to invade Turkey in 1915 to
smother memory of its own mass killing of the Armenians of the Ottoman
Empire, the 20th century’s first semi-industrial holocaust. The Turks have
already sent invitations to 102 nations to attend the Gallipoli anniversary
on 24th April — on the very day when Armenia always honours its own
genocide victims at the hands of Ottoman Turkey.
READ MORE: A History of WW1: The Turkish holocaust begins
The difference between a Holocaust and a holocaust
The 1915 Armenian genocide: Finding a fit testament to a timeless crime
In an initiative which he must have known would be rejected, Turkish
President Recep Erdogan even invited the Armenian President, Serge
Sarkissian, to attend the Gallipoli anniversary after himself receiving an
earlier request from President Sarkissian to attend ceremonies marking the
Armenian genocide on the same day.
This is not just diplomatic mischief. The Turks are well aware that the
Allied landings at Gallipoli began on 25th April – the day after Armenians
mark the start of their genocide, which was ordered by the Turkish
government of the time – and that Australia and New Zealand mark Anzac Day
on the 25th. Only two years ago, then-president Abdullah Gul of Turkey
marked the 98th anniversary of the Great War battle on 18th March 2013 —
the day on which the British naval bombardment of the Dardanelles
Peninsular began on the instructions of British First Lord of the Admiralty
Winston Churchill. At the time, no-one in Turkey suggested that Gallipoli –
Canakkale in Turkish — should be remembered on 24th April.
The Turks, of course, are fearful that 1915 should be remembered as the
anniversary of their country’s frightful crimes against humanity committed
during the Armenian extermination, in which tens of thousands of men were
executed with guns and knives, their womenfolk raped and then starved with
their children on death marches into what was then Mesopotamia. The irony
of history has now bequeathed these very same killing fields to the
victorious forces of the ‘genocidal’ Islamist ISIS army, which has even
destroyed the Armenian church commemorating the genocide in the Syrian city
of Deir ez-Zour. Armenians chose 24th April to remember their genocide
victims because this was the day on which Turkish police rounded up the
first Armenian academics, lawyers, doctors, teachers and journalists in
Constantinople.
Like Germany’s right wing and revisionist historians who deny the Jewish
Holocaust, Turkey has always refused to accept the Ottoman Turkish Empire’s
responsibility for the greatest crime against humanity of the 1914-18 war,
a bloodletting which at the time upset even Turkey’s German allies.
Armenia’s own 1915 Holocaust – which lasted into 1917 — has been
acknowledged by hundreds of international scholars, including many Jewish
and Israeli historians, and has since been recognized by many European
states. Only Tony Blair’s government tried to diminish the suffering of the
Armenians when it refused to regard the outrages as an act of genocide and
tried to exclude survivors from commemorating their dead during Holocaust
ceremonies in London. Turkey’s claim – that the Armenians were unfortunate
victims of the social upheavals of the war – has long been discredited.
Several brave Turkish scholars – denounced for their honesty by their
fellow countrymen – have researched Ottoman documents and proved that
instructions were sent out from Constantinople (now Istanbul) to regional
officials to destroy their Armenian communities. Professor Ayhan Aktar of
Istanbul Bilgi University, for example, has written extensively about the
courage of Armenians who themselves fought in uniform for Turkey at
Gallipoli, and has publicised the life of Captain Sarkis Torossian, an
Armenian officer who was decorated by the Ottoman state for his bravery but
whose parents and sister were done to death in the genocide. Professor
Aktar was condemned by Turkish army officers and some academics who claimed
that Armenians did not even fight on the Turkish side. Turkish generals
officially denied – against every proof to the contrary, including
Torossian’s photograph in Ottoman uniform — that the Armenian soldier
existed.
[image: Ottoman soldiers posing in front of Armenians they had hanged in
public in Alep in 1915]
Ottoman soldiers posing in front of Armenians they had hanged in public in
Alep in 1915
But now Turkey has changed its story. Turkish foreign minister Mevlut
Cavusoglu recently acknowledged that other ethnic groups – including many
Arabs as well as Armenians – also fought at Gallipoli. “We [Turks and
Armenians] fought together at Gallipoli,” he said. “That’s why we have
extended the invitation to President Sarkissian as well.” The Armenian
president’s reply to Erdogan’s invitation even mentioned Captain Torossian
– although he sadly claimed that the soldier was also killed in the
genocide when he in fact died in New York in 1954 after writing his memoirs
– and reminded the Turkish president that “peace and friendship must first
be hinged on the courage to confront one’s own past, historical justice and
universal memory… Each of us has a duty to transmit the real story to
future generations and prevent the repetition of crimes… and prepare the
ground for rapprochement and future cooperation between peoples, especially
neighbouring peoples.”
Armenians hold their commemorations on April 24th – when nothing happened
at Gallipoli – because this was the day on which the Armenian intellectuals
were rounded up and jailed in the basement of Constantinople’s police
headquarters prior to their deportation and — in some cases — execution.
These were the first ‘martyrs’ of the Armenian genocide. By another cruel
twist of history, the place of their incarceration is now the Museum of
Islamic Arts – a tourist location to which Prince Charles and other
dignitaries will presumably not be taken on 24th April. These killings
marked the start of the Armenian people’s persecution and exile to the four
corners of the earth.
Professor Aktar’s contribution – along with that of historian Taner Akcam
in the US — to the truth of Turkish-Armenian history is almost unique. They
alone, through their academic research and under enormous political
pressure to remain silent, forced thousands of Turks to debate the terrible
events of 1915. Many Turks have since discovered Armenian grandmothers who
were ‘Islamised’ or seized by Turkish militiamen or soldiers when they were
young women. Aktar also points out that other Armenian soldiers – a First
Lieutenant Surmenian, whose own memoirs were published in Beirut 13 years
after Torossian’s death – fought in the Turkish army.
[image: An image from 1915. Turkey deported two thirds of the Armenian
population; many were either killed or died of starvation during the
journey]
An image from 1915. Turkey deported two thirds of the Armenian population;
many were either killed or died of starvation during the journey
He has little time, however, for either the Turkish government or Armenian
president Sarkissian. “If you want to honour the Armenian officers and
soldiers who… died for the fatherland (Turkey) in 1915, then you should
invite the Armenian patriarch of Istanbul,” Aktar told me. “Why do (they)
invite President Sarkissian? His ancestors were probably fighting in the
Russian Imperial Army in 1915. He is from Karabagh [Armenian-held territory
that is part of Turkish Azerbaijan] as far as I know! This is a show of an
‘indecent proposal’ towards President Sarkissian… it is rather insulting!”
Many Armenians might share the same view. For several months, Sarkissian
was prepared to sign a treaty with Turkey to open the Armenian-Turkish
frontier in return for a mere formal investigation by scholars of the
genocide. Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported him, along
with sundry politicians and some Western journalists based in Turkey. But
the Armenian diaspora responded in fury, asking how Jews would feel if
friendship with Germany was contingent upon an enquiry to discover if the
Jewish Holocaust had ever occurred. In the First World War, American and
European newspapers gave massive publicity to the savagery visited upon the
Armenians, and the British Foreign Office published a ‘black book’ on the
crimes against Armenians of the Turkish army. The very word ‘genocide’ was
coined about the Armenian holocaust by Raphael Lemkin, an American lawyer
of Polish-Jewish descent. Israelis use the word ‘Shoah’ – ‘Holocaust’ —
when they refer to the suffering of the Armenians.
The Turkish hero of Gallipoli, of course, was Lieutenant Colonel Mustapha
Kemal – later Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state – and his own
19th Division at Gallipoli was known as the ‘Aleppo Division’ because of
the number of Arabs serving in it. Ataturk did not participate in the mass
killings of Armenians in 1915, but some of his associates were implicated –
which still casts a shadow over the history of the Turkish state. The
bloody Allied defeat at Gallipoli was to cast a shadow over the rest of
Winston Churchill’s career, a fact well known to the tens of thousands of
Australians and New Zealanders who plan to come to the old battlefield this
April. How much they will know about an even more horrific anniversary on
April 24th is another matter.