I don’t have much against the Germans of the Kaiser. Good Lutherans and Catholics, a little dour. But they pushed a bit too far in Belgium, and the war became bloody.
The Turk, however, needed to be taken down. For they were deliberately killing the Armenians.
While the Anzacs were fighting for every foothold at Gallipoli, a distinct plan was being enacted by the Ottoman government. The usual pattern went something like this: Turkish troops would enter an Armenian village and order the able-bodied men and boys to the outskirts where they would be shot, hacked, burned or beaten to death. Young women were raped en masse. The rest were deported from their homes, marched from across the Ottoman Empire, funnelling down into the arid deserts of Syria. Some were carried on disease-ridden railways, others were forced to walk.
This was not anarchy, but deliberate, finely-tuned policy. The Press in Christchurch carried a report from its London correspondent in November 1915 which made the reality clear: “It is accepted as beyond doubt that crimes recently committed were engineered [by the government].”
The liberation of Palestine and Armenia from the Ottomans, as they collapsed, was a humanitarian act. It saved many. From starvation, from death, and from worse.
Our soldiers did what they could. From the same article:
On August 5, 1918 (almost three years to the day since the assault on Chunuk Bair) the rearguard were set upon by Kurdish militia troops near a small village called Chalkainan.
Outnumbered 10 to one, the small unit managed to force the Kurds back, but their Lewis machine guns were fast running out of ammunition.
Captain Robert Kenneth Nicol, a painter from Lower Hutt, sent out Sergeant Alexander Nimmo, a farmer from Mosgiel, to collect ammo from the village but they were attacked from the rear sides. Nicol did his best to give covering fire, but was shot and killed. The last person he ever spoke to was Nimmo.
Nicol’s body was never recovered. His name appears on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s memorial in Tehran.
If any more evidence was needed of the Dunsterforce’s bravery, a Royal Army Film Unit accompanied them. Incredibly, their reels captured the streams of the destitute and dispossessed, Anzac soldiers alongside providing what safety they could. These soldiers weren’t obliged to protect the refugees, but they did anyway. It was a selfless mission, an example that would be followed when the war ended.
What happened to the Armenians was widely reported during the war, even in modest New Zealand newspapers like the Feilding Star and Oamaru Mail. But the suffering of the Armenians didn’t cease after the Armistice.
With the Allied Powers reluctant to establish an Armenian Mandate, the duty to protect fell to humanitarians, internationalists, and churches. Their task was immense, the plight of those Armenians left behind becoming more desperate by the day: Only 150,000 Armenians had survived the deportations down to Syria. Half of them tried to venture back to their homeland. Disease and hunger were chipping away at the rest. The anguish of places like Aleppo, Raqqa, Diyarbakir, and Deir ez-Zor were repeated across Turkey, the Middle East, and Mediterranean.
New Zealanders were collecting donations to aid the victims as early as 1915. But the aid efforts began in earnest with the US-based Near East Relief fund. Between 1915 and 1929, Near East Relief would raise more than US$116 million in cash and goods (about US$1 billion in today’s money).
Immediately after the war, Near East Relief sent out entire flotillas of ships with repurposed military equipment and platoons of doctors aboard to deliver aid to the Armenians. They established hospitals and refugee centres in place of the killing fields.
If you do not have rough men who will protect, you leave yourself open to be predated upon. And do not ever consider that Islam is a friend of Christianity. They never have left us in peace. Not then, and not now.
Twelve Christians have been brutally executed by the Islamic State, including the 12-year-old son of a Syrian ministry team leader who had planted nine churches, because they refused to renounce the name of Jesus Christ and embrace Islam. The martyrs were faithful to the very end; right before one woman was beheaded by the terror group, she appeared to be smiling slightly as she said, “Jesus!”
According to Christian Aid Mission, a humanitarian group which assists indigenous Christian workers in their native countries, the horrific murders took place on August 28 in an unnamed village outside Aleppo, Syria.
Not all refugees are equal. Neither are all empires. It may be that the British were raised up and Australia and New Zealand made so we could rescue people at the end of that bloody great war.
And let no one say that we were not justified. Stopping genocide is always a righteous act.
Thanks for this, sir. Enlightening for many of us in the US. I was never really taught in high school about ANZAC day or the Armenian Genocide. That came later.