The Armenian Genocide. Lest we forget.

On 24 April 1915, on the eve of the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli on the Western edge of the Ottoman Empire, a little to the East in Constantinople, the cream of Western Armenian intelligentsia resided. They included nearly 200 writers, 160 painters, 55 composers, 170 lawyers, 175 professors and teachers and 340 medical professionals (physicians, pharmacists and dentists).

All were arrested without cause and without warrants. All were sent to eastern Anatolia. All were initially exiled and all were subsequently slaughtered.

The Genocide had begun.

Twenty-five years before Nazi Germany’s leadership met in Wannsee to “solve” Europe’s Jewish problem, the Final Solution to the Armenian Question was put into practice in 1915 and its horrors lasted 8 years. It involved the systematic, organised and comprehensive annihilation of a race: the Armenian Christians. Simply because they were Christians.

The manner of their slaughter and the numbers butchered are immaterial at law when deciding if the massacres rise to the level of the G-word. What is material is that a people were targeted by the state as unfit to live because they were Christians.

Like the Nazis that followed the Ottomans, good if not meticulous record keeping was a hallmark of their barbarism. One of the triumvirate known as the Three Pashas that ruled over the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, Talaat Pasha soon after the killings of April 1915 made the following four decrees:

• 27 May 1915: Laws mandating blanket deportations (one way into the Syrian desert);
• 10 June 1915: “Abandoned Property Commissions” (Emval-i Metruke Komisyonu) were erected to manage the daily conduct of the confiscations. The point of this was to decimate the Armenian economy;
• 26 Sept 1915: Laws to delegate and implement the confiscation “of all buildings and land of the deportees” (after all, Constantinople knew these folks were not going to return); and
• 8 November 1915: More laws to legitimise property confiscation, in particular buildings and land held by the Church.

The orgy of slaughter that began in 1915 should not be confused with a mid 1890s string of massacres that saw up to 300,000 Armenians butchered throughout the Ottoman Empire in what is known as the Hamidian Massacres.

When the ANZACs landed there were two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire according to the University of Minnesota’s Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. By 1922, there were fewer than 390,000. Over 1.5 million were killed in what historians consider genocide. Turkish genocide deniers however reject Armenian claims and call the allegations the “Great Lie”. These apologists are more than mere deniers who rebuff the organised annihilation of Christians; they scandalously invert history claiming Armenians themselves committed genocide on the Ottomans.

Enter Geoffrey Robertson, QC. He is known by many as an eminent Australian ex-pat barrister who practices constitutional, criminal, media and human rights law in London. But to a generation of Australian Gen Xers and their parents, Kathy Lette’s husband is better known for hosting ABC-TV’s fabulous Hypothetical series.

 In An Inconvenient Genocide: Who remembers the Armenians? Robertson makes clear that human rights abuses against Armenians were daily events. Killings, deportations, marches into the middle of the Syrian desert, denial of food, water and shelter, forced labour until death were commonplace.

If it weren’t enough for the Ottomans to be maltreating the wretched victims of terror on their death marches, criminal mobs as well as Kurdish gangs would relentlessly attack convoys of ambulating barely breathing carcasses of human misery. With their emaciated infants in tow.

Robertson defines, elaborates and explains the how and the why of the Ottoman government’s policy of extermination of its Christian minorities.

He examines in great detail the history of the Ottoman Empire and pays attention to the status of dhimmis. This is best summed up as Islamic Apartheid, in essence, tolerated infidels: non-Muslims living under Muslim rulers and subject to legislative discrimination in employment, taxation and religious assembly. Basically, guests in their own homes.

Robertson introduces vast amounts of evidence from eyewitness accounts of the appalling events.  Much of this was well documented at the time by Western diplomats: Americans, British and French amongst others. The Ottomans’ natural allies, the Germans, officially kept schtum in Berlin while their subordinates on the ground wrote in great detail about eastern Anatolia turning into the world’s biggest abattoir.

Robertson looks at the law, applies the law, studies the politics of the time (and of our time) and proves beyond reasonable doubt that what was planned and executed between 1915 and 1923 was legally “genocide”.

Turkish denials notwithstanding.

Interestingly in 1943 the very term “genocide” was coined by Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the atrocities of the worst kind, specifically those committed against the Armenians.

It is imperative to understand the immorality and the harm of denying genocide. As the prominent scholar of genocide, Peter Balakian in “Combating Denials of the Armenian Genocide in Academia” in Encyclopedia of Genocide Volume I notes: “the denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide; it seeks to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators; and denying genocide paves the way the way for future genocides by making it clear that genocide demands no moral accountability or response.”

Altuğ Taner Akçam, historian and sociologist, is one of the first Turkish intellectuals to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian Genocide and holds the only endowed chair dedicated to research and teaching on this subject at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. His book, A Shameful Act : The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was championed by Orhan Pamuk, Turkish novelist, Nobel Prize winner in Literature and outspoken critic of Turkey’s official genocide denial who in 2006 called the book "the definitive account of the organised destruction of the Ottoman Armenians”.

The West’s deplorable silence on the systematic decimation 100 years ago of 1.5 million Christians from the country to first adopt at Christianity as the state religion in 301A.D. continues by the majority of nations the world over, including the United States, despite grass roots efforts to have this horror recognised.

Most recently, candidate for President of the United States, Barack Obama, the cunning politician that he is, in a letter dated January 2008 ingratiated himself with the Armenian communities of central and southern California, admitting there was genocide committed by the Otttomans. But suddenly when he became President he changed to ape the deniers and refused to use the G-word.

Two state governments in Australia and 43 states the United States have discovered the courage to stand up to vested interest groups and explicitly recognised the Genocide. But it’s national governments that matter.

On the topic, the associated annihilation by the Ottomans of almost one million Greeks and three hundred thousand Assyrians also demands urgent recognition.

This ANZAC Day by all means we must remember the 62,000 Australians and 18,000 New Zealanders who gave their lives in the War to End All Wars so that we could enjoy our freedoms today.  Of these, 8,709 Australians and 2,779 New Zealanders died at Gallipoli.

But we should also find the time and more importantly, find those politicians courageous enough to stand also up for the 1,500,000 Armenians who 100 years ago were beaten, raped, degraded, dehumanised, delegitimized, starved and butchered in an orchestrated campaign to eradicate the Christian religion, culture and adherents in Anatolia.

Let’s hope that in the days after, if not the days before the Gallipoli Dawn Service, that our leaders find the courage to reject chronic Turkish denialism of the genocide. The well-oiled global effort to dilute, rebut, minimise, belittle and explain with assertions of moral equivalence every reference to the events which encompassed an intentional orchestrated genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor must be exposed for the nefarious and fascist bullying which it is.

On the 100^th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire’s sponsored barbarism, either Abbott or Bishop must find the strength to fly to Yerevan to mourn with a Christian people who suffered unspeakable atrocities in an event that Pope Francis rightly called the “First Genocide of the 20^th Century ”.

Lest we forget