A Genocide Observed
A genocide denied
When We Dead Awaken by James Robins
We think about the past wrongly because we were not there. This is elementary common sense. It’s hard, impossible, to know what people really thought when they lived — just as it is difficult, although not theoretically impossible, to know what it was they really did. Always, some much-desired evidence is lacking. Always, this or that set of vital papers were burnt by overzealous inheritors. Always, there’s just one or two more things you would like to know before launching forth on a definitive statement of something about the past. For some, for many, that great gap prompts silence and introspection.
Whereof one does not know, one must remain silent.
One might assume that it’s true of foreign countries, too. A foreign country is as foreign as the past. Of course, many people love to pontificate about things going on abroad, things they cannot know about. But sometimes massacres happen and no one is there to report on it. Things get over and done with, and the bloody consequences become manifest, faster than world opinion can become aware. It’s done and beyond even stark acknowledgement before the rest of the planet has got its boots on.
And yet, on occasion, the opposite is true. We look back into the past and we realise that, contrary to our own ignorance, those who lived then knew very well something we would not expect. Something that in our own day is officially denied by governments, by mobs on Twitter, by academics looking for notoriety or a buck. But it was known as it was happening, and on the other side of the world.
James Robins’s book is about the Armenian genocide, and it is about the unexpected connections between it and the Anzac countries of Australia and New Zealand. Organised to fight as part of Commonwealth and empire formations, Australian and New Zealander soldiers were mostly sent to combat the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli and in the broader Middle East. I shan’t reiterate those stories for you. But suffice to say that while the driving out of the Armenians was happening, while Armenians and Assyrians and other groups were being uprooted from their homes by men in Ottoman government service — while some were being shot and stabbed and burnt to death, others starved, as many survivors as possible deported — there were Australian and New Zealander soldiers in that region at the same time.
Some of them were prisoners of war, captive but able to hear these stories. A few Anzac prisoners were being taken themselves through the Ottoman interior. They heard rumours; they saw evidence of what was being done.
And at the same time, some Anzacs present in the same lands were under arms themselves.
One narrative peak of the book is the story of the men of Dunsterforce, a small detachment sent into the wilds of Asia, an advance-guard of which found themselves unexpectedly defending an immense column of refugees from attack by Ottoman forces. Facing overwhelming opposition, and under-equipped and out-manned, this group suffered exhaustion and casualties, including the loss of Robert Nicol, a veteran of Gallipoli who had been decorated by the king not long earlier. Nichol died protecting people he did not know, from a place he was in for reasons of war, not philanthropy. He could not speak their languages. They could not thank him.
And it was not just the Anzac prisoners who knew of what was going on in places quite distant from Paris and Washington and London and the western front. We forget now how easily and truly news could spread. Robins records the small New Zealand papers, serving minor towns a world away, who carried reports — largely accurate — of the Armenian genocide. In the House of Lords in London, in 1915 Viscount Bryce stood and condemned the atrocities. Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1917 that when Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary alone, he was forfeiting a chance to punish the Ottoman Turks for their barbarism.
These were not unknown crimes. People knew all about them.
Robins reminds readers that, not long after the war, an Australasian benevolent fund was established for the benefit of the Armenians, whose lands and homes had been as thoroughly wrecked as their lives had been by the war and the genocide. Even after a world war, people threw in their spare change for a cause half a world away.
And yet, as Robins writes, over the past century, just enough doubt has been introduced into the machines of memorial — enough deceit and deniability — for some to pretend that these well documented events did not happen, or that if they did happen, they do not matter, everyone was doing similar things, and in any case, history is complicated and there are no heroes.
Robins may disagree. In his book, he has identified a good few.