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The Monthly
Jul 7, 2009
A Turkish Tale - Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide
Robert Manne
February 2007
'Who after all today is speaking about the destruction of the
Armenians?' Adolf Hitler to his generals on the eve of the invasion
of Poland, August 1939 There are two puzzles about the story at the
centre of Australian folklore, Gallipoli. One is obvious: why did the
story of the Australian troops' landing at the Dardanelles Straits
on 25 April 1915, and their subsequent participation in one of the
British Empire's most comprehensive military defeats, become the
country's foundation myth? The other puzzle has never been discussed,
but can be expressed as follows.
During the exact time Australian troops spent in hell on Gallipoli,
another event of world-historical importance was taking place
on contiguous ground: the Armenian Genocide. Some contemporary
scholars think that during this catastrophe, one million people were
murdered. The crime was committed by the leadership of the Ottoman
Turkish Empire: the empire which Australian troops, as part of the
Anglo-French force, invaded. The Gallipoli landings took place one
day after the mass arrest of the Armenian intelligentsia in Istanbul,
the date Armenians regard as the beginning of the genocide and thus
have set aside as their day of national mourning. Australians remember
25 April as their most solemn national day; the Armenians remember
24 April. As it happened, the Dardanelles campaign failed. In the
months between the landings at Gallipoli and the mid-December 1915
evacuation, the overwhelming majority of the million deaths took
place a few hundred kilometres east of the Dardanell!
es Straits: in eastern Anatolia, Cilicia and, after the terrible
death marches, in the deserts of Syria and Iraq.
And yet, despite the fact that the Armenian Genocide was one of
the great crimes of history; despite the fact that it took place on
Ottoman soil during the precise months of the Dardanelles campaign;
despite the fact that that campaign is regarded as the moment when
the Australian nation was born, so far as I can tell, in the vast
Gallipoli canon, not one Australian historian has devoted more than
a passing page or paragraph to the relationship, or even the mere
coincidence, of the two events. Concerning the Armenian Genocide, in
the space of two large volumes on Gallipoli, Charles Bean is silent;
Les Carlyon gives the issue three or four lines; John Robertson allows
half a page. Alan Moorehead, in his mid-'50s classic, is unusual by
devoting a full three pages to the Armenian Question.
Among Australians, only the poet Les Murray has managed to hold the
two events together in his mind. His strange creation, the German
Australian Fredy Neptune, is accidentally attached to the Turkish
Navy at the outbreak of the Great War. Fredy swears to himself that he
will desert if forced to fight Australians at Gallipoli. Soon after,
he witnesses, at the Black Sea port of Trebizond, Armenian women being
doused in kerosene and set alight. He is numbed by this experience
for the remainder of his life. Murray's epic begins with the words
of an Armenian poet: "These eyes of mine - How shall I dig them out,
how shall I, how?" For Murray, Armenia prefigures the horrors of the
twentieth century. For him and him alone, Gallipoli is imaginatively
proximate.
* Concerning the coincidence on Ottoman soil of the Gallipoli
campaign and the Armenian Genocide, there are many questions -
though Australian historians have not seen them - that are worth
discussing. Here is one. The Germans on the Western Front were not
held by the Australian troops in high regard: their Belgian atrocities
were exaggerated and neither forgiven nor forgotten. By contrast,
for reasons that are not easy to fathom, ever since the time of the
Anzac presence at Gallipoli, the Turkish enemy, responsible for crimes
against Armenians far more terrible, seems to have been respected,
not so much by the Australian troops but by those who recorded the
experience of Gallipoli on their behalf.
In the enormously influential Anzac Book, compiled by Charles Bean from
contributions of those who served, Bean included a poem of his own,
'Abdul'. It ended with the following verse: For though your name be
black as ink For murder and rapine Carried out in happy concert With
your Christians from the Rhine, We will judge you, Mr Abdul, By the
test by which we can - That with all your breath, in life, in death,
You've played the gentleman.
In all his subsequent work, Bean continued to claim that the Anzac
troops left Gallipoli with respect for the basic decency of the Turkish
troops more or less intact. In 1934, the founder of the Republic of
Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, reciprocated with fine conciliatory
sentiments of his own. I use the translation of Adrian Jones:
Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives are now lying
in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is
no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets where they lie
side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who
sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your
sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost
their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.
Bob Hawke completed the cycle in 1990, moving from respect for the
foot soldier, "Johnny Turk", to highest praise for the commander and
founder of the postwar regime: It is remarkable to reflect that the
tragedy of our first encounter has been the source of nationhood
for both our countries. It was through his brilliant defence of
the Gallipoli Peninsula ... that the great Mustapha Kemal Ataturk
demonstrated the singular qualities of leadership which enabled him
subsequently to create the Turkish Republic.
As it happens, from the time of Bean to the time of Hawke, the reality
of the Armenian Genocide was completely well known. During World War I,
it was widely reported in the Australian press - the Age, for example,
published 30 reports in 1915 alone - that a crime unprecedented in the
history of humanity had occurred, where as many one million Armenians
had been massacred. These reports drew upon a very long tradition of
Christian condemnation of Ottoman crimes and the more recent Liberal
rhetoric, from the time of the great Gladstonean agitation over the
"Bulgarian atrocities" of the "unspeakable Turk".
Yet not only did the knowledge of the Armenian Genocide have no
impact on the respect which official Australians expressed from the
first for the decency and the courage of Johnny Turk. For the past 90
years, the moral tension between what is fine about the tradition of
respect for the former enemy and what is callous about regarding the
genocide of the Armenians as so minor a matter that it cannot dent
that admiration has never been discussed.
Or almost never. In her recent Quarterly Essay, 'The History Question:
Who Owns the Past?', Inga Clendinnen argues perceptively that the
Turkish enemy at Gallipoli is respected "because they cared for our
dead, but also because they were there. They had seen the Anzacs in
hallowed action." Nonetheless, "remembering the Armenians", she adds,
"we flinch". To her credit, Clendinnen has at least noticed there
is an issue here, something which most Australians have not. Yet
her brief discussion is hardly satisfactory. For my part, I do not
think there is evidence of Australians flinching at the thought of
the million Armenian deaths. And even if there is, can it be argued
that in the face of one of the most terrible crimes of which history
has record, with which we became indirectly entangled by our proximity
at Gallipoli, it is enough to flinch?
I am all too aware that the myth of Johnny Turk is benign. It is
a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But
I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide
continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.
* There is another puzzle about the coincidence in time and place of
Gallipoli and the Armenian tragedy. In the scores of books written
about Australia and Gallipoli, why has no Australian historian ever
asked the question that should have occurred most naturally to a
member of the profession: namely, did the Anglo-French Dardanelles
campaign play any role in the Ottoman regime's decision for genocide?
Until relatively recently, the historical argument over the
Armenian Genocide has been dominated by the interpretative conflict
between nationalist scholars representing the victims and the
perpetrators. Armenian historians, such as Vahakn Dadrian and
Richard Hovannisian, have argued that the determination to destroy
the Armenians was rooted in pan-Islamic and pan-Turkish ideology,
and that the decision to unleash the genocidal attack was long
premeditated. For their part, Turkish nationalist historians have
denied that any genocide took place, with an attitude that has been
neatly summarised by Ronald Suny:
For deniers of genocide there is simply no need to explain an event
that did not occur as stipulated by those who claim it did. What did
occur, in their view, was a reasonable and understandable response
of a government to a rebellious and seditious population in a time
of war ... The denialist viewpoint might be summarized as: There was
no Genocide, and the Armenians are to blame for it!
Given the attitude on both sides, it is not surprising that the highly
political pitched battles between the Armenian and Turkish nationalist
historians have been both astonishingly bitter and rather sterile.
The work of recent non-nationalist historians has been more
fruitful. They have emphasised the role of war and imperial
disintegration in the origin of the genocide. In addition to ideology
and premeditation, they have suggested a more dynamic historical
process, which one of these new scholars, Donald Bloxham, borrowing
from a parallel debate about the origins of the Holocaust, has labelled
"cumulative radicalisation". The ideas associated with these new
scholars, that the decision to embark upon the total destruction
of the Ottoman Armenians emerged gradually and as part of a wartime
process of imperial crisis, helps us understand the kind of relation
that exists between the Armenian Genocide and the Gallipoli campaign.
Stripped to its essentials, the new story goes like this. Throughout
the nineteenth century, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was "the
sick man of Europe", gradually losing more and more of its European
territories. This process of decline culminated in the great losses
of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the acceptance by the Ottomans in
1914 of a so-called Reform which allowed Russia the right to offer
formal protection to the most important remaining Christian minority
population in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians of Anatolia. This kind
of "humanitarian intervention" from Christian Europe represented an
increasingly unbearable humiliation for the Ottomans, to which the
Armenians were extremely vulnerable. Before the war of 1914, in part
because of earlier similar interventions, they had already suffered
grievous losses: at least 100,000 of their people were killed in the
1890s during the rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. A further 20,000 died
in 1909 at Adana.
Tsarist Russia was the most serious long-term enemy of the Ottoman
Empire. When war broke out between the Germans and the Russians in
August 1914, the Ottoman government, now dominated by the revolutionary
Young Turks, seized the opportunity to repudiate the hated Reform and
to form a military alliance with Germany. The tsarist government, in
response, promised that if the Armenians of Turkey rose in support,
a brighter independent future beckoned. In September, Russia suffered
a crushing defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg. In November, the
Turks attacked the Russian Black Sea fleet. Turkey was now at war
with the Entente. At Sarikamis, in January 1915, the Ottoman Third
Army was almost entirely destroyed by the Russians. To support the
Russians and to bring about the surrender of the Ottomans, in March
1915 the British and the French mounted a naval action in the hope
of breaking through at the Dardanelles and reaching Istanbul. When
the naval action failed, they landed tro!
ops at Gallipoli on 25 April with the same strategic end in mind.
Although the best contemporary non-nationalist historians of the
Armenian Genocide - the Turk Taner Akcam and the Briton Donald Bloxham
- differ on the question of when the decision for genocide was arrived
at, and even over whether there was one particular decision or many,
both accept that it was this constellation of events - the advance
of the Russian Army in the Caucasus; the Anglo-French attack at the
Dardanelles; the growing fears concerning the loyalty of the Ottoman
Empire's most important remaining Christian minority, the Armenians
of Anatolia - that acted as the trigger for, if not the cause of,
the Armenian Genocide.
Akcam, whose analysis of the mechanics of the genocide is the
most convincing I have read, believes the fundamental decision to
unleash the deportations and the massacres of the Armenians was taken
during meetings of the central committee of the Young Turks' party,
the Committee of Union and Progress, in March 1915, at the time of
the beginning of the Dardanelles naval campaign. The main engineer
of the genocide was Dr Bahaettin Shakir, who had convinced the CUP
leadership that at this time of crisis for the Empire, the "internal"
enemy, the Armenian, was as dangerous as the "external" - the Russian,
the British and the French.
In his Empire to Republic (2004), Akcam expresses his views about
the link between the external and the internal threats to the Ottoman
Empire by the time of World War I in general, and between the Armenian
Genocide and Gallipoli in particular, in the following way.
[As Norbert Elias argued]: "The stronger the downward tendency
toward decline, the greater the coarseness of means used to stop
this progression ... Having their backs against the wall turns the
fierce defenders of civilization into its greatest destroyers. They
quickly become barbarians." I believe this was the Ottoman mindset
before and during the First World War. For that reason it seems to
me no coincidence that the decision behind the Armenian Genocide was
made during the fierce battles of the Gallipoli campaign, when the
Ottoman Empire's very existence seemed to balance between life and
death. The hopeless situation into which Ottomans had fallen produced
a willingness to rely on extraordinary acts of cruelty.
Akcam's most recent work, A Shameful Act (2006), makes the link
between Gallipoli and the initiation of the Armenian Genocide even
more explicit: Almost everyone believed that the capture of Istanbul
was only a question of time ... It was not a coincidence that the
Armenian genocide took place soon after the Sarikamis disaster
and was contemporaneous with the empire's struggle at Gallipoli
... A nation that feels itself on the verge of destruction will
not hesitate to destroy another group it holds responsible for its
situation ... A prediction made by the German ambassador Wangenheim
is worth mentioning. With the outbreak of the war in August 1914,
Henry Morgenthau [the US ambassador] warned him that the Turks would
massacre the Armenians in Anatolia, to which Wangenheim replied,
"So long as England does not attack Canakkale [the Turkish fortress
at the Dardanelles] ... there is nothing to fear. Otherwise, nothing
can be guaranteed." However, this is precisely what happened.
Donald Bloxham, in The Great Game of Genocide (2005), thinks the
final decision(s) for the genocide came later than March 1915, Akcam's
view. Nonetheless, he too links the process with key moments in the
Dardanelles campaign. Like Akcam, Bloxham thinks the critical meetings
of the CUP central committee with Dr Behaettin Shakir, in mid-March
1915, were associated with the Anglo-French attacks of 5-17 March on
the Dardanelles' outer forts. Bloxham believes that the arrests of
the Armenian intelligentsia on 24 April were triggered by the news
that the British and the French were about to land their troops at
Gallipoli. One month into the Gallipoli land campaign, the leaders
of Britain, France and Russia issued the following solemn warning:
In light of these crimes [against the Armenians], which Turkey has
perpetrated against humanity and civilisation, the Entente powers
openly inform the Sublime Porte that they will hold members of the
Ottoman Empire and their subordinates who are involved in the massacre
personally responsible for this crime.
This was the first time in international relations that the potent
phrase "crimes against humanity" had been used. In Bloxham's
narrative of cumulative radicalisation, these words play a crucial
role. Following this threat, with nothing more to lose, the Turkish
regime abandoned all restraint. "From the very next day", he argues,
"eyewitnesses suggest that the atrocities intensified yet further."
In his essay 'Explaining Genocide? The Fate of the Armenians in the
Late Ottoman Empire', Ronald Suny provides even more direct evidence
linking the Gallipoli campaign with the Armenian Genocide. For Suny,
the most telling witness to the thinking of the Ottoman political
leadership, at the time of the Armenian catastrophe, was the ambassador
of the then neutral US, to whom two leading members of the ruling
Young Turk triumvirate, Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha, spoke with a
quite extraordinary frankness.
Talaat explained the situation to Morgenthau, in a conversation of
1915, like this: [The Armenians] have assisted the Russians in the
Caucasus and our failure there is largely explained by their actions
... It is no use for you to argue ... We have already disposed of
three-quarters of the Armenians ... The hatred between the Turks
and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish
with them. If we don't, they will plan their revenge ... I have
accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem than Abdul
Hamid did in thirty years.
As evidence of the extremity of the massacre accumulated, Morgenthau
requested a meeting with the war minister, Enver Pasha. This is what
he learned: The Armenians had a fair warning ... of what would happen
to them in case they joined our enemies ... You know what happened at
Van. They obtained control of the city, used bombs against government
buildings, and killed a large number of Moslems. We knew that they were
planning uprisings in other places. You must understand that we are now
fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles and that we are sacrificing
large numbers of men. While we are engaged in such a struggle as this,
we cannot permit people in our own country to attack us in the back. We
have got to prevent this no matter what means we have to resort to ...
The meaning of this evidence seems clear. In the drive towards the
Armenian Genocide, the crisis precipitated by the Entente bombardments
of the Dardanelles fortresses in March 1915 and the troop landings
at Gallipoli on 25 April - in association with the slow advance of
the Russian Army in the Caucasus - played a highly significant part.
In pointing this out, I hope not to be misunderstood. To argue that the
Dardanelles campaign was one of the crucial triggers for the Armenian
Genocide is not to argue that the Entente leaders bear even a partial
moral responsibility for the catastrophe that occurred. Once the
Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers and attacked the Russian
Black Sea fleet, the bombing of the Straits fortresses and the
troop landings at Gallipoli were entirely legitimate, if ill-judged,
acts of war. Indeed, not only do the Entente powers bear no moral
responsibility for the genocide: if the Dardanelles campaign had
succeeded and the Ottomans had surrendered, hundreds of thousands of
Armenian lives might have been saved. Nor, in outlining the wartime
circumstances surrounding the decision for genocide, am I seeking
to dilute in any way the gravity of the Turkish crime. No maxim is
more important for the historian than the one that tells us that to
explain is in no way to excuse.
* Why have Australian historians - from Bean to Carlyon - shown no
interest in the moral or historical relationship between Gallipoli and
the Armenian Genocide? The clue is to be found, I believe, in a passage
from a work by the American historian Peter Novick, The Holocaust in
American Life, where he distinguishes between the practice of "history"
and what he calls, borrowing from the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs,
"collective memory":
Collective memory ... is not just historical knowledge shared by a
group. Indeed, collective memory is in crucial senses ahistorical,
even anti-historical ... Collective memory simplifies; sees events from
a single committed perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any
kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes ... Typically a collective
memory, at least a significant collective memory, is understood to
express some eternal or essential truth about the group - usually
tragic. A memory, once established, comes to define that eternal
truth, and, along with it, an eternal identity, for the members of
the group. Serbs' central memory, the lost battle of Kosovo in 1389,
symbolizes the permanent Muslim intention to dominate them. The
partitions in Poland in the eighteenth century gave that country an
"essential" identity as "the Christ among nations", crucified and
re-crucified by foreign oppression ... Thinking about collective
memory in this way helps us to separate ephemera!
l and relatively inconsequential memories from those that endure and
shape consciousness.
Gallipoli has long been, and still is, Australia's overwhelmingly
most important collective memory. Why? There have been two main
explanations. The Left has emphasised the curious propensity of
Australians to mythologise only audacious or noble exploits that end in
tragedy: Burke and Wills, Ned Kelly, Phar Lap, Gallipoli. Conservatives
see Gallipoli as the place where the national character was discovered
and revealed to the world. Which view is more plausible?
To try to discover whether Gallipoli was remembered as a triumph
or a defeat, I recently read through a book of sermons delivered
in Queensland on Anzac Day in 1921. Although there was a great deal
about the debt that was owed to those who had laid down their lives for
their Country and their Empire - almost unanimously thought of as one -
the emphasis was overwhelmingly on triumph. Here is a characteristic
passage: The first Anzac morning they conquered, they looked death in
the face and never flinched, and their glorious feat imprinted with
indelible fame the name of Australia upon the map of the world ... [It]
proved that we were in resource, in courage, endurance and every manly
and national quality, the equal of the older nations of the world
... Hitherto we had accepted ourselves, our country, and our world
position at the valuation of the outsider, and, to say the least of it,
that valuation was by no means a generous one. Henceforth and forever,
we know our worth; we have proved it in the face of mankind ...
The glorious April Anzac landings were linked in the sermons not to
the immediate defeat at the Dardanelles but instead to the eventual
defeat of Germany. The fact that Gallipoli was a strategic disaster was
almost entirely ignored. Even the brilliant success of the December
evacuation was barely mentioned. For Australians, Gallipoli was
neither Burke and Wills writ large nor a prefiguring of Dunkirk.
The myth of Gallipoli did not emerge gradually. It was imprinted on the
national imagination following the publication throughout Australia,
on 8 May 1915, of the first account of the landings by the British war
correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Here are some of the sentences
from that first report: There has been no finer feat in this war
than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights
... These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy
to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres and
Neuve Chapelle ... The Australians were determined to die to a man
rather than surrender the ground so dearly won ... These Colonials are
extraordinarily good under fire, often exposing themselves rather than
take the trouble to keep under the shelter of the cliff ... General
Birdwood told the writer that he couldn't sufficiently praise the
courage, endurance, and soldierly qualities of the Colonials ... The
courage displayed by these wounded Australians will never be forgotten
... Though many were shot almost to bits, without hope of recovery,
their cheers resounded ... They were happy because they knew they
had been tried for the first time and not found wanting.
By accident, Ashmead-Bartlett's electrifying account of the Gallipoli
landings arrived several days before the more prosaic version by
the Australian Charles Bean. It mattered that the mode of the first
account was unashamedly heroic. Even more importantly, it mattered
that this first account came from a British and not an Australian
correspondent. The moment of birth proved crucial.
In his Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2006), John Hirst best
explains the significance of all this. The Gallipoli landing was the
first time that an Australian unit not incorporated within an Imperial
formation had been involved in a major military operation. "The
history of the colonial psyche is the struggle to manage the disdain
of the metropolis": before 25 April 1915, niggling questions about
Australian manhood, character and the convict taint had not yet been
resolved. On 25 April, they largely were. Under the British gaze,
Australians "had been tried" and "not found wanting".
In the final pages of his first volume on Anzac and Gallipoli, in one
of the seminal passages in Australian literature, Charles Bean takes
us to the second reason why the story of the Gallipoli landings has
lodged at the centre of Australian collective memory. Bean asks the
simple question, "What motive sustained them?" It was not, he tells us
"love of a fight". It was not "hatred of the Turk". It was not "purely
patriotism, as it would have been had they fought on Australian soil",
"nor was it the desire for fame". What, then?
We arrive at the passage which best explains how Gallipoli has shaped
national consciousness and which takes us to the heart of national
self-belief: It lay in the mettle of the men themselves. To be the
sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his
firmness ... to have made it necessary for another unit to do his own
unit's work; to live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge
that he had set his hand to a soldier's task and lacked the grit to
carry it through - that was the prospect that these men could not
face. Life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they
could be true to their idea of Australian manhood.
The landings instantly convinced Australians that from the scattered
British-settler colonies, a new nation had been born. Perhaps even
more importantly, Australians believed that the landings demonstrated
to the world in general and to the British metropolis in particular
who they were. It was thought to reveal certain eternal truths
about Australians. They were courageous; they were manly; they were
practical; they were laconic; they were naturally egalitarian; they
were stoical; they were young; they were innocent. Most importantly,
in a time of trouble, they stood by each other, as mates.
The great political feat of Federation had barely touched the
popular imagination. Only with the glorious Gallipoli landings did
the Australian people feel, as an imaginative reality, that their
nation had been born.
The story of Gallipoli has been told somewhat differently from one
generation to the next. In the interwar years, it spoke of military
valour and Empire loyalty; after Vietnam, in the Peter Weir and David
Williamson version, about the betrayal of Australia by the British
and of the futility of fighting other people's wars. Yet for 90 years,
the central meaning has remained steady. From the moment of its birth
as foundation myth, Gallipoli has been about Australian identity, a
central pre-occupation, a gnawing problem. The story endured because
it captured, in essence and outside historical time, what Australians
have always believed to be the character and the core values of the
nation. For this reason, the popular appetite for new versions of the
Gallipoli story remains apparently insatiable. Hardly a year passes
without a new Gallipoli book or a film. Gallipoli is Australia's
only sacred soil. For Australians, the Gallipoli landing is still,
as it was in 1915, the most sig!
nificant event of their country's history.
In the mythic structure of the story, bitterness about the enemy
has no part. Johnny Turk is remembered with respect, or even fondly,
merely for being present when the Australian nation was born and when
Australians discovered who they were. Of even less significance in
the story of Gallipoli are the tribulations of the Ottoman Empire in
its death throes, or the astonishing tragedy that was overtaking the
Armenians at the same time and place, for which the bombardments and
the landings provided critical triggers.
In world history there is an intimate connection between the
Dardanelles campaign and the Armenian Genocide. In the Australian
collective memory of Gallipoli, the Armenian Genocide simply has no
role. I suspect it never will.
* There is one further delicate question I wish to raise. In the
comment quoted earlier in this essay, Bob Hawke pointed to the rather
remarkable fact that for both Australia and Turkey, Gallipoli played
a part in national birth. For Australia, I have already suggested
why. For Turkey, the reason is even more straightforward. Gallipoli
was the first of the military victories, under the leadership of
Mustapha Kemal, from which eventually, after the Wars of Independence,
the modern Turkish Republic would be born.
Yet, in the circumstances concerning their birth, Australia and Turkey
share another legacy. In the birth of both nations there was, for
another people, a dreadful price to pay. I do not believe that there is
a moral equivalence between the Dispossession of the Aborigines and the
Armenian Genocide. I do believe that the histories of both Australia
and Turkey have been burdened by the shadows cast by these events.
Ernest Renan once argued that an act of forgetting can be discovered in
the foundation of all nations. Sigmund Freud agreed: "It is universally
admitted that in the origin of the traditions and folklore of a people
care must be taken to remove from the memory such a motive as would
be painful to the national feeling." According to Renan and Freud,
all countries seem to feel the need for a noble myth of origin from
which dark deeds and moral ambiguities have been erased.
For the entire course of its history, the Turkish Republic has managed
this difficulty by a ferociously enforced state policy of denialism
in regard to the genocidal crime that coincided with, and stained,
its national birth. For almost 70 years following Federation,
Australia coped with this problem in a somewhat different way, by
what WE Stanner called "the Great Australian Silence" concerning the
Dispossession and its aftermath, and by what he described as "the cult
of forgetfulness on a national scale". For 30 years, it looked as if
the era of forgetfulness was over. Since the enthusiastic embrace of
Keith Windschuttle's denialist history, by the Howard Government and
the conservative mainstream, that is no longer clear.
The very future of Turkey - whether, both literally and metaphorically,
she will or will not enter Europe - will be partly determined
by whether or not the denialist legacy regarding the Armenian
Genocide can be transcended or will endure. In a less dramatic way,
both the future of Australia and the character of the nation will
be determined by whether or not we can learn, without flinching,
to hold the memories of the triumph of Gallipoli and the tragedy of
the Dispossession together in our minds.
Robert Manne first raised the issue of Gallipoli and the Armenian
Genocide at the History Council of Victoria's 2006 Annual Lecture.
Jul 7, 2009
A Turkish Tale - Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide
Robert Manne
February 2007
'Who after all today is speaking about the destruction of the
Armenians?' Adolf Hitler to his generals on the eve of the invasion
of Poland, August 1939 There are two puzzles about the story at the
centre of Australian folklore, Gallipoli. One is obvious: why did the
story of the Australian troops' landing at the Dardanelles Straits
on 25 April 1915, and their subsequent participation in one of the
British Empire's most comprehensive military defeats, become the
country's foundation myth? The other puzzle has never been discussed,
but can be expressed as follows.
During the exact time Australian troops spent in hell on Gallipoli,
another event of world-historical importance was taking place
on contiguous ground: the Armenian Genocide. Some contemporary
scholars think that during this catastrophe, one million people were
murdered. The crime was committed by the leadership of the Ottoman
Turkish Empire: the empire which Australian troops, as part of the
Anglo-French force, invaded. The Gallipoli landings took place one
day after the mass arrest of the Armenian intelligentsia in Istanbul,
the date Armenians regard as the beginning of the genocide and thus
have set aside as their day of national mourning. Australians remember
25 April as their most solemn national day; the Armenians remember
24 April. As it happened, the Dardanelles campaign failed. In the
months between the landings at Gallipoli and the mid-December 1915
evacuation, the overwhelming majority of the million deaths took
place a few hundred kilometres east of the Dardanell!
es Straits: in eastern Anatolia, Cilicia and, after the terrible
death marches, in the deserts of Syria and Iraq.
And yet, despite the fact that the Armenian Genocide was one of
the great crimes of history; despite the fact that it took place on
Ottoman soil during the precise months of the Dardanelles campaign;
despite the fact that that campaign is regarded as the moment when
the Australian nation was born, so far as I can tell, in the vast
Gallipoli canon, not one Australian historian has devoted more than
a passing page or paragraph to the relationship, or even the mere
coincidence, of the two events. Concerning the Armenian Genocide, in
the space of two large volumes on Gallipoli, Charles Bean is silent;
Les Carlyon gives the issue three or four lines; John Robertson allows
half a page. Alan Moorehead, in his mid-'50s classic, is unusual by
devoting a full three pages to the Armenian Question.
Among Australians, only the poet Les Murray has managed to hold the
two events together in his mind. His strange creation, the German
Australian Fredy Neptune, is accidentally attached to the Turkish
Navy at the outbreak of the Great War. Fredy swears to himself that he
will desert if forced to fight Australians at Gallipoli. Soon after,
he witnesses, at the Black Sea port of Trebizond, Armenian women being
doused in kerosene and set alight. He is numbed by this experience
for the remainder of his life. Murray's epic begins with the words
of an Armenian poet: "These eyes of mine - How shall I dig them out,
how shall I, how?" For Murray, Armenia prefigures the horrors of the
twentieth century. For him and him alone, Gallipoli is imaginatively
proximate.
* Concerning the coincidence on Ottoman soil of the Gallipoli
campaign and the Armenian Genocide, there are many questions -
though Australian historians have not seen them - that are worth
discussing. Here is one. The Germans on the Western Front were not
held by the Australian troops in high regard: their Belgian atrocities
were exaggerated and neither forgiven nor forgotten. By contrast,
for reasons that are not easy to fathom, ever since the time of the
Anzac presence at Gallipoli, the Turkish enemy, responsible for crimes
against Armenians far more terrible, seems to have been respected,
not so much by the Australian troops but by those who recorded the
experience of Gallipoli on their behalf.
In the enormously influential Anzac Book, compiled by Charles Bean from
contributions of those who served, Bean included a poem of his own,
'Abdul'. It ended with the following verse: For though your name be
black as ink For murder and rapine Carried out in happy concert With
your Christians from the Rhine, We will judge you, Mr Abdul, By the
test by which we can - That with all your breath, in life, in death,
You've played the gentleman.
In all his subsequent work, Bean continued to claim that the Anzac
troops left Gallipoli with respect for the basic decency of the Turkish
troops more or less intact. In 1934, the founder of the Republic of
Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, reciprocated with fine conciliatory
sentiments of his own. I use the translation of Adrian Jones:
Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives are now lying
in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is
no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets where they lie
side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who
sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your
sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost
their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.
Bob Hawke completed the cycle in 1990, moving from respect for the
foot soldier, "Johnny Turk", to highest praise for the commander and
founder of the postwar regime: It is remarkable to reflect that the
tragedy of our first encounter has been the source of nationhood
for both our countries. It was through his brilliant defence of
the Gallipoli Peninsula ... that the great Mustapha Kemal Ataturk
demonstrated the singular qualities of leadership which enabled him
subsequently to create the Turkish Republic.
As it happens, from the time of Bean to the time of Hawke, the reality
of the Armenian Genocide was completely well known. During World War I,
it was widely reported in the Australian press - the Age, for example,
published 30 reports in 1915 alone - that a crime unprecedented in the
history of humanity had occurred, where as many one million Armenians
had been massacred. These reports drew upon a very long tradition of
Christian condemnation of Ottoman crimes and the more recent Liberal
rhetoric, from the time of the great Gladstonean agitation over the
"Bulgarian atrocities" of the "unspeakable Turk".
Yet not only did the knowledge of the Armenian Genocide have no
impact on the respect which official Australians expressed from the
first for the decency and the courage of Johnny Turk. For the past 90
years, the moral tension between what is fine about the tradition of
respect for the former enemy and what is callous about regarding the
genocide of the Armenians as so minor a matter that it cannot dent
that admiration has never been discussed.
Or almost never. In her recent Quarterly Essay, 'The History Question:
Who Owns the Past?', Inga Clendinnen argues perceptively that the
Turkish enemy at Gallipoli is respected "because they cared for our
dead, but also because they were there. They had seen the Anzacs in
hallowed action." Nonetheless, "remembering the Armenians", she adds,
"we flinch". To her credit, Clendinnen has at least noticed there
is an issue here, something which most Australians have not. Yet
her brief discussion is hardly satisfactory. For my part, I do not
think there is evidence of Australians flinching at the thought of
the million Armenian deaths. And even if there is, can it be argued
that in the face of one of the most terrible crimes of which history
has record, with which we became indirectly entangled by our proximity
at Gallipoli, it is enough to flinch?
I am all too aware that the myth of Johnny Turk is benign. It is
a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But
I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide
continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.
* There is another puzzle about the coincidence in time and place of
Gallipoli and the Armenian tragedy. In the scores of books written
about Australia and Gallipoli, why has no Australian historian ever
asked the question that should have occurred most naturally to a
member of the profession: namely, did the Anglo-French Dardanelles
campaign play any role in the Ottoman regime's decision for genocide?
Until relatively recently, the historical argument over the
Armenian Genocide has been dominated by the interpretative conflict
between nationalist scholars representing the victims and the
perpetrators. Armenian historians, such as Vahakn Dadrian and
Richard Hovannisian, have argued that the determination to destroy
the Armenians was rooted in pan-Islamic and pan-Turkish ideology,
and that the decision to unleash the genocidal attack was long
premeditated. For their part, Turkish nationalist historians have
denied that any genocide took place, with an attitude that has been
neatly summarised by Ronald Suny:
For deniers of genocide there is simply no need to explain an event
that did not occur as stipulated by those who claim it did. What did
occur, in their view, was a reasonable and understandable response
of a government to a rebellious and seditious population in a time
of war ... The denialist viewpoint might be summarized as: There was
no Genocide, and the Armenians are to blame for it!
Given the attitude on both sides, it is not surprising that the highly
political pitched battles between the Armenian and Turkish nationalist
historians have been both astonishingly bitter and rather sterile.
The work of recent non-nationalist historians has been more
fruitful. They have emphasised the role of war and imperial
disintegration in the origin of the genocide. In addition to ideology
and premeditation, they have suggested a more dynamic historical
process, which one of these new scholars, Donald Bloxham, borrowing
from a parallel debate about the origins of the Holocaust, has labelled
"cumulative radicalisation". The ideas associated with these new
scholars, that the decision to embark upon the total destruction
of the Ottoman Armenians emerged gradually and as part of a wartime
process of imperial crisis, helps us understand the kind of relation
that exists between the Armenian Genocide and the Gallipoli campaign.
Stripped to its essentials, the new story goes like this. Throughout
the nineteenth century, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was "the
sick man of Europe", gradually losing more and more of its European
territories. This process of decline culminated in the great losses
of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the acceptance by the Ottomans in
1914 of a so-called Reform which allowed Russia the right to offer
formal protection to the most important remaining Christian minority
population in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians of Anatolia. This kind
of "humanitarian intervention" from Christian Europe represented an
increasingly unbearable humiliation for the Ottomans, to which the
Armenians were extremely vulnerable. Before the war of 1914, in part
because of earlier similar interventions, they had already suffered
grievous losses: at least 100,000 of their people were killed in the
1890s during the rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. A further 20,000 died
in 1909 at Adana.
Tsarist Russia was the most serious long-term enemy of the Ottoman
Empire. When war broke out between the Germans and the Russians in
August 1914, the Ottoman government, now dominated by the revolutionary
Young Turks, seized the opportunity to repudiate the hated Reform and
to form a military alliance with Germany. The tsarist government, in
response, promised that if the Armenians of Turkey rose in support,
a brighter independent future beckoned. In September, Russia suffered
a crushing defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg. In November, the
Turks attacked the Russian Black Sea fleet. Turkey was now at war
with the Entente. At Sarikamis, in January 1915, the Ottoman Third
Army was almost entirely destroyed by the Russians. To support the
Russians and to bring about the surrender of the Ottomans, in March
1915 the British and the French mounted a naval action in the hope
of breaking through at the Dardanelles and reaching Istanbul. When
the naval action failed, they landed tro!
ops at Gallipoli on 25 April with the same strategic end in mind.
Although the best contemporary non-nationalist historians of the
Armenian Genocide - the Turk Taner Akcam and the Briton Donald Bloxham
- differ on the question of when the decision for genocide was arrived
at, and even over whether there was one particular decision or many,
both accept that it was this constellation of events - the advance
of the Russian Army in the Caucasus; the Anglo-French attack at the
Dardanelles; the growing fears concerning the loyalty of the Ottoman
Empire's most important remaining Christian minority, the Armenians
of Anatolia - that acted as the trigger for, if not the cause of,
the Armenian Genocide.
Akcam, whose analysis of the mechanics of the genocide is the
most convincing I have read, believes the fundamental decision to
unleash the deportations and the massacres of the Armenians was taken
during meetings of the central committee of the Young Turks' party,
the Committee of Union and Progress, in March 1915, at the time of
the beginning of the Dardanelles naval campaign. The main engineer
of the genocide was Dr Bahaettin Shakir, who had convinced the CUP
leadership that at this time of crisis for the Empire, the "internal"
enemy, the Armenian, was as dangerous as the "external" - the Russian,
the British and the French.
In his Empire to Republic (2004), Akcam expresses his views about
the link between the external and the internal threats to the Ottoman
Empire by the time of World War I in general, and between the Armenian
Genocide and Gallipoli in particular, in the following way.
[As Norbert Elias argued]: "The stronger the downward tendency
toward decline, the greater the coarseness of means used to stop
this progression ... Having their backs against the wall turns the
fierce defenders of civilization into its greatest destroyers. They
quickly become barbarians." I believe this was the Ottoman mindset
before and during the First World War. For that reason it seems to
me no coincidence that the decision behind the Armenian Genocide was
made during the fierce battles of the Gallipoli campaign, when the
Ottoman Empire's very existence seemed to balance between life and
death. The hopeless situation into which Ottomans had fallen produced
a willingness to rely on extraordinary acts of cruelty.
Akcam's most recent work, A Shameful Act (2006), makes the link
between Gallipoli and the initiation of the Armenian Genocide even
more explicit: Almost everyone believed that the capture of Istanbul
was only a question of time ... It was not a coincidence that the
Armenian genocide took place soon after the Sarikamis disaster
and was contemporaneous with the empire's struggle at Gallipoli
... A nation that feels itself on the verge of destruction will
not hesitate to destroy another group it holds responsible for its
situation ... A prediction made by the German ambassador Wangenheim
is worth mentioning. With the outbreak of the war in August 1914,
Henry Morgenthau [the US ambassador] warned him that the Turks would
massacre the Armenians in Anatolia, to which Wangenheim replied,
"So long as England does not attack Canakkale [the Turkish fortress
at the Dardanelles] ... there is nothing to fear. Otherwise, nothing
can be guaranteed." However, this is precisely what happened.
Donald Bloxham, in The Great Game of Genocide (2005), thinks the
final decision(s) for the genocide came later than March 1915, Akcam's
view. Nonetheless, he too links the process with key moments in the
Dardanelles campaign. Like Akcam, Bloxham thinks the critical meetings
of the CUP central committee with Dr Behaettin Shakir, in mid-March
1915, were associated with the Anglo-French attacks of 5-17 March on
the Dardanelles' outer forts. Bloxham believes that the arrests of
the Armenian intelligentsia on 24 April were triggered by the news
that the British and the French were about to land their troops at
Gallipoli. One month into the Gallipoli land campaign, the leaders
of Britain, France and Russia issued the following solemn warning:
In light of these crimes [against the Armenians], which Turkey has
perpetrated against humanity and civilisation, the Entente powers
openly inform the Sublime Porte that they will hold members of the
Ottoman Empire and their subordinates who are involved in the massacre
personally responsible for this crime.
This was the first time in international relations that the potent
phrase "crimes against humanity" had been used. In Bloxham's
narrative of cumulative radicalisation, these words play a crucial
role. Following this threat, with nothing more to lose, the Turkish
regime abandoned all restraint. "From the very next day", he argues,
"eyewitnesses suggest that the atrocities intensified yet further."
In his essay 'Explaining Genocide? The Fate of the Armenians in the
Late Ottoman Empire', Ronald Suny provides even more direct evidence
linking the Gallipoli campaign with the Armenian Genocide. For Suny,
the most telling witness to the thinking of the Ottoman political
leadership, at the time of the Armenian catastrophe, was the ambassador
of the then neutral US, to whom two leading members of the ruling
Young Turk triumvirate, Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha, spoke with a
quite extraordinary frankness.
Talaat explained the situation to Morgenthau, in a conversation of
1915, like this: [The Armenians] have assisted the Russians in the
Caucasus and our failure there is largely explained by their actions
... It is no use for you to argue ... We have already disposed of
three-quarters of the Armenians ... The hatred between the Turks
and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish
with them. If we don't, they will plan their revenge ... I have
accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem than Abdul
Hamid did in thirty years.
As evidence of the extremity of the massacre accumulated, Morgenthau
requested a meeting with the war minister, Enver Pasha. This is what
he learned: The Armenians had a fair warning ... of what would happen
to them in case they joined our enemies ... You know what happened at
Van. They obtained control of the city, used bombs against government
buildings, and killed a large number of Moslems. We knew that they were
planning uprisings in other places. You must understand that we are now
fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles and that we are sacrificing
large numbers of men. While we are engaged in such a struggle as this,
we cannot permit people in our own country to attack us in the back. We
have got to prevent this no matter what means we have to resort to ...
The meaning of this evidence seems clear. In the drive towards the
Armenian Genocide, the crisis precipitated by the Entente bombardments
of the Dardanelles fortresses in March 1915 and the troop landings
at Gallipoli on 25 April - in association with the slow advance of
the Russian Army in the Caucasus - played a highly significant part.
In pointing this out, I hope not to be misunderstood. To argue that the
Dardanelles campaign was one of the crucial triggers for the Armenian
Genocide is not to argue that the Entente leaders bear even a partial
moral responsibility for the catastrophe that occurred. Once the
Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers and attacked the Russian
Black Sea fleet, the bombing of the Straits fortresses and the
troop landings at Gallipoli were entirely legitimate, if ill-judged,
acts of war. Indeed, not only do the Entente powers bear no moral
responsibility for the genocide: if the Dardanelles campaign had
succeeded and the Ottomans had surrendered, hundreds of thousands of
Armenian lives might have been saved. Nor, in outlining the wartime
circumstances surrounding the decision for genocide, am I seeking
to dilute in any way the gravity of the Turkish crime. No maxim is
more important for the historian than the one that tells us that to
explain is in no way to excuse.
* Why have Australian historians - from Bean to Carlyon - shown no
interest in the moral or historical relationship between Gallipoli and
the Armenian Genocide? The clue is to be found, I believe, in a passage
from a work by the American historian Peter Novick, The Holocaust in
American Life, where he distinguishes between the practice of "history"
and what he calls, borrowing from the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs,
"collective memory":
Collective memory ... is not just historical knowledge shared by a
group. Indeed, collective memory is in crucial senses ahistorical,
even anti-historical ... Collective memory simplifies; sees events from
a single committed perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any
kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes ... Typically a collective
memory, at least a significant collective memory, is understood to
express some eternal or essential truth about the group - usually
tragic. A memory, once established, comes to define that eternal
truth, and, along with it, an eternal identity, for the members of
the group. Serbs' central memory, the lost battle of Kosovo in 1389,
symbolizes the permanent Muslim intention to dominate them. The
partitions in Poland in the eighteenth century gave that country an
"essential" identity as "the Christ among nations", crucified and
re-crucified by foreign oppression ... Thinking about collective
memory in this way helps us to separate ephemera!
l and relatively inconsequential memories from those that endure and
shape consciousness.
Gallipoli has long been, and still is, Australia's overwhelmingly
most important collective memory. Why? There have been two main
explanations. The Left has emphasised the curious propensity of
Australians to mythologise only audacious or noble exploits that end in
tragedy: Burke and Wills, Ned Kelly, Phar Lap, Gallipoli. Conservatives
see Gallipoli as the place where the national character was discovered
and revealed to the world. Which view is more plausible?
To try to discover whether Gallipoli was remembered as a triumph
or a defeat, I recently read through a book of sermons delivered
in Queensland on Anzac Day in 1921. Although there was a great deal
about the debt that was owed to those who had laid down their lives for
their Country and their Empire - almost unanimously thought of as one -
the emphasis was overwhelmingly on triumph. Here is a characteristic
passage: The first Anzac morning they conquered, they looked death in
the face and never flinched, and their glorious feat imprinted with
indelible fame the name of Australia upon the map of the world ... [It]
proved that we were in resource, in courage, endurance and every manly
and national quality, the equal of the older nations of the world
... Hitherto we had accepted ourselves, our country, and our world
position at the valuation of the outsider, and, to say the least of it,
that valuation was by no means a generous one. Henceforth and forever,
we know our worth; we have proved it in the face of mankind ...
The glorious April Anzac landings were linked in the sermons not to
the immediate defeat at the Dardanelles but instead to the eventual
defeat of Germany. The fact that Gallipoli was a strategic disaster was
almost entirely ignored. Even the brilliant success of the December
evacuation was barely mentioned. For Australians, Gallipoli was
neither Burke and Wills writ large nor a prefiguring of Dunkirk.
The myth of Gallipoli did not emerge gradually. It was imprinted on the
national imagination following the publication throughout Australia,
on 8 May 1915, of the first account of the landings by the British war
correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Here are some of the sentences
from that first report: There has been no finer feat in this war
than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights
... These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy
to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres and
Neuve Chapelle ... The Australians were determined to die to a man
rather than surrender the ground so dearly won ... These Colonials are
extraordinarily good under fire, often exposing themselves rather than
take the trouble to keep under the shelter of the cliff ... General
Birdwood told the writer that he couldn't sufficiently praise the
courage, endurance, and soldierly qualities of the Colonials ... The
courage displayed by these wounded Australians will never be forgotten
... Though many were shot almost to bits, without hope of recovery,
their cheers resounded ... They were happy because they knew they
had been tried for the first time and not found wanting.
By accident, Ashmead-Bartlett's electrifying account of the Gallipoli
landings arrived several days before the more prosaic version by
the Australian Charles Bean. It mattered that the mode of the first
account was unashamedly heroic. Even more importantly, it mattered
that this first account came from a British and not an Australian
correspondent. The moment of birth proved crucial.
In his Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2006), John Hirst best
explains the significance of all this. The Gallipoli landing was the
first time that an Australian unit not incorporated within an Imperial
formation had been involved in a major military operation. "The
history of the colonial psyche is the struggle to manage the disdain
of the metropolis": before 25 April 1915, niggling questions about
Australian manhood, character and the convict taint had not yet been
resolved. On 25 April, they largely were. Under the British gaze,
Australians "had been tried" and "not found wanting".
In the final pages of his first volume on Anzac and Gallipoli, in one
of the seminal passages in Australian literature, Charles Bean takes
us to the second reason why the story of the Gallipoli landings has
lodged at the centre of Australian collective memory. Bean asks the
simple question, "What motive sustained them?" It was not, he tells us
"love of a fight". It was not "hatred of the Turk". It was not "purely
patriotism, as it would have been had they fought on Australian soil",
"nor was it the desire for fame". What, then?
We arrive at the passage which best explains how Gallipoli has shaped
national consciousness and which takes us to the heart of national
self-belief: It lay in the mettle of the men themselves. To be the
sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his
firmness ... to have made it necessary for another unit to do his own
unit's work; to live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge
that he had set his hand to a soldier's task and lacked the grit to
carry it through - that was the prospect that these men could not
face. Life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they
could be true to their idea of Australian manhood.
The landings instantly convinced Australians that from the scattered
British-settler colonies, a new nation had been born. Perhaps even
more importantly, Australians believed that the landings demonstrated
to the world in general and to the British metropolis in particular
who they were. It was thought to reveal certain eternal truths
about Australians. They were courageous; they were manly; they were
practical; they were laconic; they were naturally egalitarian; they
were stoical; they were young; they were innocent. Most importantly,
in a time of trouble, they stood by each other, as mates.
The great political feat of Federation had barely touched the
popular imagination. Only with the glorious Gallipoli landings did
the Australian people feel, as an imaginative reality, that their
nation had been born.
The story of Gallipoli has been told somewhat differently from one
generation to the next. In the interwar years, it spoke of military
valour and Empire loyalty; after Vietnam, in the Peter Weir and David
Williamson version, about the betrayal of Australia by the British
and of the futility of fighting other people's wars. Yet for 90 years,
the central meaning has remained steady. From the moment of its birth
as foundation myth, Gallipoli has been about Australian identity, a
central pre-occupation, a gnawing problem. The story endured because
it captured, in essence and outside historical time, what Australians
have always believed to be the character and the core values of the
nation. For this reason, the popular appetite for new versions of the
Gallipoli story remains apparently insatiable. Hardly a year passes
without a new Gallipoli book or a film. Gallipoli is Australia's
only sacred soil. For Australians, the Gallipoli landing is still,
as it was in 1915, the most sig!
nificant event of their country's history.
In the mythic structure of the story, bitterness about the enemy
has no part. Johnny Turk is remembered with respect, or even fondly,
merely for being present when the Australian nation was born and when
Australians discovered who they were. Of even less significance in
the story of Gallipoli are the tribulations of the Ottoman Empire in
its death throes, or the astonishing tragedy that was overtaking the
Armenians at the same time and place, for which the bombardments and
the landings provided critical triggers.
In world history there is an intimate connection between the
Dardanelles campaign and the Armenian Genocide. In the Australian
collective memory of Gallipoli, the Armenian Genocide simply has no
role. I suspect it never will.
* There is one further delicate question I wish to raise. In the
comment quoted earlier in this essay, Bob Hawke pointed to the rather
remarkable fact that for both Australia and Turkey, Gallipoli played
a part in national birth. For Australia, I have already suggested
why. For Turkey, the reason is even more straightforward. Gallipoli
was the first of the military victories, under the leadership of
Mustapha Kemal, from which eventually, after the Wars of Independence,
the modern Turkish Republic would be born.
Yet, in the circumstances concerning their birth, Australia and Turkey
share another legacy. In the birth of both nations there was, for
another people, a dreadful price to pay. I do not believe that there is
a moral equivalence between the Dispossession of the Aborigines and the
Armenian Genocide. I do believe that the histories of both Australia
and Turkey have been burdened by the shadows cast by these events.
Ernest Renan once argued that an act of forgetting can be discovered in
the foundation of all nations. Sigmund Freud agreed: "It is universally
admitted that in the origin of the traditions and folklore of a people
care must be taken to remove from the memory such a motive as would
be painful to the national feeling." According to Renan and Freud,
all countries seem to feel the need for a noble myth of origin from
which dark deeds and moral ambiguities have been erased.
For the entire course of its history, the Turkish Republic has managed
this difficulty by a ferociously enforced state policy of denialism
in regard to the genocidal crime that coincided with, and stained,
its national birth. For almost 70 years following Federation,
Australia coped with this problem in a somewhat different way, by
what WE Stanner called "the Great Australian Silence" concerning the
Dispossession and its aftermath, and by what he described as "the cult
of forgetfulness on a national scale". For 30 years, it looked as if
the era of forgetfulness was over. Since the enthusiastic embrace of
Keith Windschuttle's denialist history, by the Howard Government and
the conservative mainstream, that is no longer clear.
The very future of Turkey - whether, both literally and metaphorically,
she will or will not enter Europe - will be partly determined
by whether or not the denialist legacy regarding the Armenian
Genocide can be transcended or will endure. In a less dramatic way,
both the future of Australia and the character of the nation will
be determined by whether or not we can learn, without flinching,
to hold the memories of the triumph of Gallipoli and the tragedy of
the Dispossession together in our minds.
Robert Manne first raised the issue of Gallipoli and the Armenian
Genocide at the History Council of Victoria's 2006 Annual Lecture.