The " Genocide " Issue !

Anzac day will see marches and dawn services across Australia as we remember a first world war battle fought by troops from Australia and New Zealand on the other side of the world.   There will be a big Australian contingent at Gallipoli and we expect that this will be peaceful, despite insensitive remarks made earlier by Turkey's leader, Erdogan.

Amongst the people who have emigrated here and make up part of modern Australia are many Armenians who have cause to remember the events of the first world war.  It seems substantially  clear that they were mistrusted by the Ottoman empire because they did not practice the Muslim religion and Turkish efforts to displace them resulted in 1.5 million deaths.   The Armenian diaspora insist that this was genocide.

Turkey indignantly rejects that epithet. They admit that there were a great number of deaths when the Armenians were forced to leave the places from where they had lived for many years but dispute the numbers and give no reason these deaths occurred.  Most of the rest of the world accepts that genocide label.

The Armenians are a stateless tribe who are scattered across many middle eastern countries.  They recently took a very active part in fighting Islamic State when that terrorist group sought to force its extreme religion on the lands it conquered.  The Armenians who have settled in Australia are peaceful and respected, and in fact the premier of New South Wales has an Armenian background and can trace the loss of her grandparents to that first world war displacement.

Australia seems reluctant to voice its stance on this genocide issue for fear of antagonising the Turkish government.  We are sensitive to the use of that word " genocide " because of the interaction between our early white settlers and the indigenous people which some historians chose to label by that word.

In Tasmania, there was a government effort to drive the indigenous people into a small containment area from which they could be deported to an island in Bass Strait.  This failed, but there were incidents in other parts of Australia where food and water holes were poisoned and armed settlers fired on indigenous groups in what were clearly massacres.   Recording of this early history is unclear and we generally avoid reference to it in our history books.

It is a mistake to try and decide the actions of a past era with the morality that persists today.  When Australia received its first white immigrants slavery was endemic in many parts of the world and the punishments handed out to convicts was simply barbaric.   The punishment for many crimes involved the hanging of the perpetrator as a public spectacle.

Unfortunately, the world has learned little from the barbarity that was the way of life centuries ago in our past.   In the past few days someone's ill will resulted in the lives of about three hundred people being snuffed out in a series of bomb attacks in Colombo and hundreds more suffered disfiguring injuries.  More than likely, this bombing was justified in the perpetrators mind as required by the demands of some kind of religion.

It simply illustrates the imbecility of trying to right the wrongs of a past era !