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Australia Won't Attend Armenian Mass Killings Centenary Commemoratio

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  • Australia Won't Attend Armenian Mass Killings Centenary Commemoratio

    AUSTRALIA WON'T ATTEND ARMENIAN MASS KILLINGS CENTENARY COMMEMORATIONS

    SBS Radio, Australia
    March 31 2015

    Is Australia's decision not to send representatives to Yerevan for
    events marking the centenary of what's known as the Armenian genocide
    an outright snub of Armenia or a carefully manoeuvred diplomatic
    balancing act?

    By Kristina Kukolja

    (Transcript from SBS World News Radio)

    Is it an outright snub or a carefully manoeuvred diplomatic balancing
    act?

    The Australian government says it won't be officially represented
    in Yerevan next month at the centenary commemorations of the mass
    killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.

    That's widely referred to as the Armenian genocide - terminology
    rejected by Turkey.

    The Yerevan events will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the
    Anzac landing in Gallipoli, to which Prime Minister Tony Abbott is
    expected to lead a high-level delegation.

    Kristina Kukolja has the details.

    (Click on the audio tab above to hear the full report)

    While there is no international consensus on the matter, over 20
    countries have officially recognised the massacre of Armenians by
    Ottoman Turkish soldiers as genocide.

    The leaders of some of those nations will be in Armenia next month
    at the invitation of the Armenian president to attend the 100-year
    commemoration.

    Australia isn't among the countries to officially adopt the term
    "Armenian genocide" at a national level, although two state parliaments
    have done so.

    The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade won't confirm whether
    Australia was invited to attend commemorative events in Yerevan.

    But the Department has told SBS the Australian government will not
    be sending a representative.

    When asked about the reason for the decision, and whether an official
    invitation was received, the Department declined to comment further.

    Vache Kahramanian, from a group known as the Armenian National
    Committee of Australia, says he's seen the Armenian government's list
    of official invitees.

    He says it includes Prime Minister Tony Abbott and a number of other
    federal MPs.

    Vache Kahramanian says he'll be very disappointed if all of the
    Australian MPs invited decline to go to Yerevan.

    "The events that are occurring in Yerevan on the 22nd and 23rd of
    April, which a large number of Australian members of parliament have
    been invited to, is to take part in a forum titled "No to genocide".

    This is not only dedicated to the centenary of the Armenian
    genocide, but a global forum which is going to attract more than
    1,000 international attendees, including the president of France, the
    president of Uruguay and many other distinguished world leaders who
    will take part. And for Australia not to take part in a forum dedicated
    to the eradication of the crime of genocide is very saddening."

    Armenia puts the number of its people killed by the Turks between
    1915 and 1922 at around 1.5 million.

    It says many more were forcibly deported from territories held by
    Ottoman Turk forces.

    Historians tell of other minorities -- the Assyrians, Chaldeans,
    Syriacs and Greeks -- as being targeted.

    These groups want the modern Turkish state to recognise its
    predecessor's actions as genocide.

    Turkey does not dispute that many deaths and what it calls
    'relocations' did occur, but it does dispute the Armenians' estimated
    death toll, and rejects outright the use of the word "genocide".

    Diplomatic cables between Canberra and Ankara, obtained under Freedom
    of Information laws, show that last year the matter arose in a letter
    from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to her then Turkish counterpart,
    Ahmet Davutoglu.

    An extract from the letter reads:

    "Recognising the important interests at stake for both countries, I
    assure you that there has been no decision to change the long-standing
    position of successive Australian Governments on this issue... The
    Australian government is sympathetic to the Armenian people and other
    communities that suffered such terrible losses during the tragic events
    at the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Australian Government does not,
    however, recognise these events as genocide."

    Vache Kahramanian, from the Armenian National Committee, sees it as
    Australia caving in to Turkish pressure.

    "I interpret that particular passage as Ankara's ongoing gag order on
    Australia on the issue of the Armenian genocide. For a very long time
    we've heard from many members of parliament throughout the country
    that Turkey continues to use Gallipoli and the centenary of Anzac
    Day as a bargaining chip to ensure that Australia does not formally
    recognise the Armenian genocide. And what Julie Bishop in her statement
    as Foreign Minister makes to her then counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu is
    that Australia will not change its position to safeguard all interests
    and is happy to allow this important issue of human rights to be used
    as a political bargaining chip."

    A Holocaust and genocide expert from the University of Technology
    in Sydney, Dr Panayiotis Diamadis, also sees Turkey using Anzac Day
    sensitivities to apply pressure on Australia over the issue.

    "If the federal government makes any more statements or moves that
    look like recognition of the three genocides of the native peoples
    of Anatolia, it will seriously disrupt the centenary commemorations
    of ANZAC in the Turkish republic this year. That is essentially what
    has been said to us by parliamentarians and that's how I interpret the
    particular passage, and that's how I interpret the whole letter. It's
    a letter from the Foreign Minister only a few days after the
    commemorations last year in which a very senior ranking member of the
    federal government essentially called on the parliament to recognise
    the genocide. And it's reassuring, a very bureaucratic response.

    Personally, I think it's rather sycophantic to do with reassuring them,
    smoothing the waters, making sure nothing affects the ANZAC centenary
    and the so-called year of Australia in Turkey."

    The diplomatic cables acknowledge Turkey's threat to ban New South
    Wales MPs from attending this year's Gallipoli commemoration, after
    the state parliament passed a motion recognising the First World War
    massacre of Armenians and other group as genocide.

    Vache Kahramanian says federal Treasurer Joe Hockey was invited
    in April last year to attend an Armenian community commemoration
    in Sydney.

    Mr Hockey, who is of Armenian-Palestinian descent, did not attend.

    SBS has seen a letter the organisers say was instead sent by the
    Treasurer, part of which reads:

    "Back in 1915 the word "genocide" did not exist, as the UN Convention
    on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was only
    adopted in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But there is
    simply no other word for what happened to the Armenian people of
    Ottoman Turkey."

    It goes on to say:

    "Many countries have officially recognised the Armenian genocide,
    and as next year Australia will celebrate the Centenary of ANZAC I
    live in hope that the government of Turkey will recognise that it has
    the opportunity to reconcile its past in a way that allows us all to
    move forward in peace and understanding."

    Ertunc Ozen, from the Australian-Turkish Advocacy Alliance, says he's
    aware of the correspondence.

    "It is inappropriate for an Australian or any other government
    or minister in that government to be making declarations or
    affirmations about foreign historical events. That parliaments are
    not the appropriate place to determine the legal characterisation of
    historical events, we feel, is self-evident. What we've seen occurring
    in New South Wales, in particular, and in some countries around the
    world is the continuation of this megaphone diplomacy, very strong
    lobbying to try and get governments to recognise an event as genocide,
    or otherwise as though the recognition somehow makes the event more
    likely to be genocide or not."

    One of the diplomatic cables reveals that Mr Hockey's statement
    received a lot of press coverage in Turkey.

    Others detail a flurry of diplomatic activity between Australian and
    Turkish officials in both countries in the weeks after the letter
    emerged.

    The documents show Turkey being assured there would be "no change to
    the Australian government's long-standing position" not to intervene
    in the debate, and "not to recognise tragic events at end of Ottoman
    empire as genocide."

    Turkey was also assured that Australia's states and territories had
    no constitutional role in the formulation of foreign policy.

    Several pages of the Turkish response have been completely redacted.

    But months after the exchanges began, Australian diplomatic staff
    in Ankara were describing senior officials' talks with Turkey as
    constructive.

    Ertunc Ozen, of the Australian-Turkish Advocacy Alliance, thinks
    Turkish government concerns may be justified.

    "If there is going to be this international concerted lobbying effort
    to have foreign governments recognise another country's historical
    events as one thing or another, I think, any government or, certainly,
    the Turkish government is well within its rights to want some assurance
    about the position Australia does or does not take about this. The
    Turkish government and Turkish community groups are forced to respond
    to the very well organised and strident lobbying and campaign efforts
    of the Armenian lobby groups around the world."

    The diplomatic documents also show the Turkish government's apparent
    concern about Armenia's plans for its centenary commemorations
    this year.

    They quote President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying Turkey needed
    to be prepared to ensure those events were marked in what it calls
    "an objective, scholarly and realistic way."

    According to one cable, Mr Erdogan accuses the Armenian diaspora of
    desiring to reflect what he calls the '1915 events' in a "particular
    and one-sided way, to take them out of their historical reality,
    and to turn them into a political campaign".

    In the same account, Mr Erdogan promises that Turkey would use
    "history, scholarship and scholarly data" in response to what he calls
    "black propaganda."

    The Armenian National Committee's Vache Kahramanian says, for all
    the declassified cables do reveal, they still don't come close to
    telling the full story.

    "It troubles me, as an Australian citizen, to wonder why and what
    Australia has to hide in coming to rightfully recognise a genocide
    that occurred a century ago. It is troubling that DFAT and the
    government must redact documents which, I'm sure, contain incriminating
    arguments against the government and which has put them in a dilemma
    in recognising the Armenian genocide."

    The mass killings of Armenians last century were widely recorded in
    the Australian media at the time.

    City and regional newspapers wrote of the slaughter and starvation
    of Armenian men, women and children.

    They described deportations of civilians in the hundreds of thousands,
    desert death marches and forced religious conversions.

    Dr Panayiotis Diamadis says these events have important historical
    connections to Australia, and should be part of any First World
    War remembrance.

    "There were Australians, particularly in the Middle East, ironically
    in many ways in Syria and Iraq, picking up genocide survivors and
    protecting them from further attack, particularly in what is now Iraq.

    In the northern summer of 1918 a group called the Dunster force,
    we have the Australian Prisoner of War memoirs, which are now in the
    war memorial in Canberra which have been collecting dust for decades
    until they started coming out a decade ago, and one of the links is
    that a lot of the prison camps they were held in across the Ottoman
    empire were churches, monasteries, schools and homes of the deportees
    of the genocide victims and survivors. The two anniversaries not only
    can coexist, they are so intertwined that we cannot separate them."

    http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/03/31/australia-wont-attend-armenian-mass-killings-centenary-commemorations

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