notes for Anzac Day (remembering the Armenians)

Anzac Day, listening to the evening news after having a fairly normal Sunday, it is still my experience of Anzac Day. very difficult... In the Canberra Times a young mother takes her children to the War Memorial to find out what war really is like. "I'm to precious to be killed aren't I Mum?" 
But I remember Poppy T in Queanbeyan. Angry about what he had been forced to do in the Gallipoli trenches as they bayonetted the enemy. That is the agony of war; the offence; the unspeakable horror; what people do to one another. Is it any wonder that we who grew up in the shadow of war were not told? How do you tell your children that you had done such things?

reading Brian's blog I discover ekklesia. and this article

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/essay_ArmenianGenocide
 
what is needed is a link to The Monthly magazine article about the connections between the Armenian Genocide and Gallipoli. April 24th and 25th 1915

http://www.themonthly.com.au/february-2007-brief

"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 one million people were murdered during this catastrophe. 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."
In "A Turkish Tale", Robert Manne tackles the awful episode that, for Australia, hides in the shadow of Gallipoli: the genocide which bears directly on the major Australian involvement in World War I but which forms no part of the Anzac story.
"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?"
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My memory of the article is first, that the genocide started with the hanging of four Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul on the 24th April 1915. But that the main massacres occurred in the East of the country closer to Armenia itself. The problem was that the Armenians were christian. Some at least were possibly assisting the western powers (that is us). Then Turkey was invaded by Christians. and the terror was unleashed.


I first heard about the massacres on a beautiful winter's day in 1971 on the Mediterranean coast at Izmir. A young man told me that the beach here was a place where the Armenians had been pushed into the sea. Izmir is not a recognised site of a massacre, but the memory of what had been done there remains.