Anzac Day is 100 years old

About a quarter million young men on each side were wounded and about 135 thousand died in the appallingly badly planned Gallipoli campaign that was launched by the intellectually retarded military leaders of the 'Allied' forces on April 25, 1915. It is recognized as one of the great military disasters of all time, a fiasco of massive proportions. The 100th anniversary of what henceforth was called Anzac Day, like the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide which is commemorated on April 24, is not an occasion for celebration. There is, however, something to celebrate: they fought on opposite sides, but Turks and Australians have been firm friends ever since. When Wendy and I were taken to the Gallipoli battlefields by our Turkish hosts in October 2004, we encountered several groups of young Australians, many of them high school students, and were struck by the obviously affectionate relationship between them and their Turkish hosts who also looked to be about high school age. Friendships forged between opposing sides in 1915 have become firmer in recent generations, reinforced by these visits of young Australians.

My memories of Anzac Day date from my very early childhood, probably 1931 when I was 5, soon after my mother took my brother Peter and me to live with her in a bungalow at Brighton, a seaside village separated in those days from Adelaide by several miles of orchards and vineyards.  One morning she woke me very early and dragged me unwillingly to a dawn commemoration service. Peter was too young to come with us and I resented the fact that he stayed home warm in bed, while I had to get up on this cold morning and listen to a series of men making speeches about matters I didn't comprehend. In the years that followed, I came to appreciate Anzac Day as a sacred remembrance ceremony at which we honoured those who died in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. They included my mother's brother, my Uncle Lidie, QMS Elias Judell, 9th Light Horse Regiment, who died like so many others in an artillery bombardment from the heights above that the ANZAC forces could never conquer. ANZAC is the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.  They were the backbone of the forces at Gallipoli, and were supported by British, Indian, French, and even a tiny company of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment - now proudly but falsely claimed as 'Canadian' by our current bellicose government, which seizes upon every imaginable excuse to proclaim that Canada has always been a warrior nation.  

Another of my mother's brothers, Cedric, also served at Gallipoli; so did Wendy's father who was wounded there, and two of my father's uncles. Most families in Australia and New Zealand had members who fought at Gallipoli, and many had family members who died or were maimed there.  All are scarred by the experience.  It is true to say that the two nations, Australia and New Zealand, were born on the battlefields of Gallipoli. 

My impressions of and emotional reaction to the battlefields at Gallipoli, and some photos, are in my post on this blog, on March 10, 2012.

An early 20th century genocide

In his CBC Radio program The Sunday Edition, Michael Enright reminded us that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide of 1915. The Turkish military authorities arrested, tortured, and executed the Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, and local authorities drove the populations out of Armenian villages and urban enclaves all over the nation. Men, women and children were herded on forced marches into arid regions lacking water, food, and shelter. Women and girls were subjected to mass rape, many who fell by the wayside on forced marches because they were too feeble or too ill to continue, were summarily executed - which, it could be argued, was a kinder fate than forcing them to keep walking until they died. An estimated one and a half million Armenians died in the genocide of 1915.  Abundant documentary and photographic records confirm that this genocide really happened. Among other more or less impartial observers, the German ambassador and American consular officials reported back to their leaders in Berlin and Washington quite detailed accounts of what was happening. In the protracted discussions in Paris in 1919 to draft a peace treaty after the carnage of the Great War of 1914-1918, the 'allies' who claimed victory were anxious to win over the charismatic Turkish army officer Mustafa Kemal (later to name himself Kemal Attaturk). They therefore refrained from drawing attention to the brutal slaughter, rapes, dispossession, destruction of churches - obliteration of all traces of Armenian culture - in order to get Kemal's signature and support for the peace treaty.

The mass killings, rapes, dispossession, destruction of cultural artifacts, obliteration of an ethnic and cultural minority in Turkey are now recognized almost everywhere as a genocide. The most recent leader to acknowledge publicly what happened is Pope Francis. Almost the only national leaders to deny what happened are in Turkey. American presidents, anxious to retain Turkish friendship, have equivocated and never stated in forthright language that there was a genocide. The US Congress voted a few years ago that there was a genocide.

Why did it happen? The Armenian population in Turkey was a distinct, readily recognizable group. The Armenians are Christian, the oldest or second oldest Christian community in the world. They are mostly well educated, relatively well-to-do, rather influential movers and shakers. These qualities are enough to arouse the envy and suspicion of the majority. A paranoid belief took root that Armenians were traitors, spies, supported the Russians, and sought to bring about the defeat of Turkey, Austria and Germany in the Great War.

One consequence of the genocide was the Armenian diaspora. Gifted writers, artists, actors, musicians, film makers of Armenian heritage have greatly enriched the intellectual life of many Western nations in the 100 years since the genocide. The first to cross my cultural horizon was William Saroyan. His parents had actually left Armenia earlier and he was born in an agricultural community in California in 1903; he and the Armenian community to which he belonged, became hosts to survivors of the genocide, some of whom considerably strengthened the nascent film industry. One consequence of my peripatetic life is that I've been obliged to discard many books as I've moved from one country to another. I acquired William Saroyan's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Human Comedy early in my medical student years and kept it, I recall, long enough for it to migrate from Adelaide, Australia to Edinburgh, Scotland. As best as I can recall, Saroyan's allusions to the Armenian genocide in that charming novel are oblique and low-key. His comments in some of his other writing, which I also had and have discarded, were angrier, more demanding from the Turkish authorities an acknowledgement that a genocide occurred in 1915, and suggesting that they should plead for forgiveness. That's all the Armenians want: they don't seek revenge, just recognition by the Turks that they wronged and harmed their Armenian minority, and should ask for forgiveness. Well educated modern Turks are aware of what happened. Some, including the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, have spoken out courageously. How much longer will the Armenians have to wait?

We can't be on both sides! It would be more sensible to be on neither.

The increasingly savage conflict in Yemen seems to be a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran; USA is supporting the Saudis with satellite intelligence and heavy weapons. The Salafist Wahabi faction in Saudi Arabia is the philosophical base of IS or ISIS, and Iran, a Shia Islamic republic, is fighting against ISIS, with covert US (and Canadian) support. Iran supports the Assad regime in Syria, and despite this regime's war crimes, USA (and Canada) are getting closer to overt support for Assad and Iran too. But USA (and Canada) regard Saudi Arabia as a staunch ally in the Middle East, along with Israel, which doesn't get along well with Saudi Arabia and is implacably hostile to Iran. USA (and Canada) seem to be on both sides at once. I'm bewildered. I'd prefer to be aloof, neutral in this melee.

Wrongly interpreted events

Canada's Harper government has seized on the horrible events in Iraq and Syria, exhorting all Canadians to close ranks against a perceived threat from a barbarous band of unprincipled evil-doers, with the Harper government of course, leading the nation bravely into war against these evil-doers. Meantime a few thousand Km south-east in Kenya, a handful of Al Shabaab fighters (4 or 5 altogether) from Somalia descended on a small undefended private university just across the border in Kenya, separated the Christian and Moslem students as they slept in their dormitories, and slaughtered 147 of the Christians. The Harper government hasn't proposed military action against Al Shabaab. However, its statements imply that a holy war is in progress between genocidal Islamists and the defenders of righteousness (of Judeo-Christian persuasion). A few troubling facts suggest this is at best only partly correct. It may be utterly wrong.  Some of it is based on the same fantasy that asserted the Iraqis would welcome as liberators the American forces who invaded their country in 2003. One fact is that aerial bombardment, even with terrible weapons like napalm and cluster bombs, can't defeat a grass roots movement. Another fact is that populations who have been targets for napalm or cluster bombs (or any other form of aerial attack) do not perceive those who bombed them as friends. The bombing campaign the Harper government has so eagerly embraced, which will cost over half a billion dollars in the next year, will not win friends for Canada in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State - an aspiration, a grass roots movement, not a real state - has committed some appalling atrocities. We have TV evidence from their own skilled propagandists as proof of this. But truth is the first casualty in all wars and I doubt if this is an exception. What reliable evidence is there of genocide? Another fact is that IS, or ISIS, or ISIL, is a Sunni Islamic movement; Shia Islam is its mortal enemy. That's the reason Iran, and the Assad regime in Syria, are aligned against IS - with Canada and USA. This is a Sunni-Shia war. On the basis of the old saying that 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' we have (the Harper government has) become an ally of Iran - where we recently closed our embassy - and of the reviled Assad regime. In the meantime, some 25,000 well educated youngsters from many western nations have made their way to the ruins of Syria and Iraq, eager to join IS. Why? What do they know that the rest of us don't know?  It's all very bewildering.

These events suggest to me that getting involved in a war against IS may be the most stupid mistake yet made by the Harper government - a government not noted for evidence-based decisions, noted by some of us at least for some spectacularly stupid policy decisions.

There is another interpretation of the dreadful wars and unconventional forms of conflict in progress in the Middle East and Africa. Rather than being based in disputes about faith and belief, the real underlying cause is a quest for what Hitler and the Nazis called lebensraum - living space and resoures. The most important fact of all may be that the world is overpopulated by at least an order of magnitude. The world would be a better place for all humans if instead of more than 7 billion of us, there were 700 million.