On Divine Mercy Sunday earlier this month, a characteristically courageous Pope Francis referred to the extermination of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman authorities between 1915 and 1922 as an act of genocide.
Most historians describe what happened as genocide, though Turkey hotly denies this view and there are consequences for world leaders who express it. Turkey immediately recalled its ambassador to the Vatican after the Pope’s remarks.
Francis can ill afford to alienate an important ally in the resistance against radical Islam, and the same can be said for our prime minister.
It was unfortunate that circumstances were such that Tony Abbott had to have a face to face meeting with his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu on the eve of this week's centenary of the genocide. Unsurprisingly he didn’t mention the genocide.
Unfortunate for him is the irony in the fact that he’s visiting Turkey to commemorate the courage of Australians 100 years ago. But in his defence, other western governments have also been too timid to risk offending Turkey. In 2001 the UK’s Tony Blair ignored a petition to recognise the genocide and tried to exclude survivors from commemorating their dead. Then in 2008, US President Barack Obama declared during his presidential campaign that 'as president, [he would] recognise the Armenian genocide’. But, like his predecessors, he became reluctant to upset an important NATO ally once he was in office.
For Tony Abbott, it is no doubt a challenging and tricky quirk of fate that the centenary of the genocide takes place within a day of that of the Gallipoli landing. But it does Australia no credit if we are regarded as complicit in the wilful act of forgetting the crime against the Armenian people at a time when we are engaged in such a no holds barred recollection of what happened at Anzac Cove.
Remembering the fallen Australian troops whom the British commanders used as cannon fodder, the Australians returning to Gallipoli for the centenary of the landing are themselves open to being exploited in what London Independent columnist Robert Fisk describes as a 'shameful attempt to hide the Armenian Holocaust’.
Turkey is doing its best to cooperate with organisers of the Anzac commemoration on its soil because the Australian visitors are helping to 'smother memory of its own mass killing of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, the 20th century’s first semi-industrial holocaust’, as Fisk puts it.
It is notable that the NSW Coalition Government went against the grain of timidity, and suffered the displeasure of the Turkish Government and a not insignificant number of voters of Turkish background. In 2013 it passed a unanimous motion to officially recognise the Armenian genocide, following a visit to Armenia by a multi-party parliamentary delegation. A message came through the Turkish Consul General that NSW MPs would ‘not be welcome in Turkey’ for the 2015 Gallipoli remembrance.
It’s not clear what ensued, but the NSW Government’s Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian was in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Friday to attend at service marking the centenary of the genocide. Berejiklian is the granddaughter of Armenian genocide victims. Despite a significant Armenian population here, the Federal Government had said it would not send an official representative to the ceremony in Yerevan.
It’s hard to underestimate the importance of the small but difficult steps of these politicians in the NSW Parliament to go out on a limb to recognise the Armenian Genocide, and not to blur or conceal the truth, as the Federal Government has done. As Pope Francis reminded the faithful at St Peter’s Basilica, 'concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it’.
Michael Mullins is editor of Eureka Street.
Image from Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (Wikimedia Commons).