By Robert Kaplan ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS A century ago, in a misconceived encounter on the history-soaked precipices of Asia Minor, the sons of Anzac received their battle initiation against the German-trained forces of the Ottoman Empire. Now, in an annual event that grows in mythology and status in proportion to the passing of the…
To the Australian government we say: it is time to stop outsourcing Armenian Genocide policy to Turkey, and – in the interest of regional stability and in defense of human rights – to support a truthful and just resolution of this crime. Futile efforts by others to appease Turkey have failed to end Ankara’s blockade…
Barçın YİNANÇ ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News The collapse of the Ottoman Empire might have ushered in the birth of the republic, but the disappearance of the former is nothing to be commemorated, according to historian Orhan Koroğlu. We need to accept that the Ottoman Empire had come to an end but there is nothing…
BARÇIN YİNANÇ Hurriyet Daily News The question in the title was put to me by a foreign reader of the Hürriyet Daily news. It was posed last month, right after the joint commemoration by France and Germany of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. As usual we in Turkey were again…
By fratermal OregonLive In late evening of August 10, 1914, a Turkish destroyer, acting on instructions from authorities in Constantinople, escorted into and through the Dardanelles Straits two German warships, the Goeben and the Breslau, bearing with them (as Churchill later wrote) “more slaughter, more misery, more ruin” than anyone could have foreseen. This action…
THE Australian War Memorial’s top historian hopes that the next four years will explode some ANZAC myths and educate Aussies about the truth of the Great War. According to Ashley Ekins the mythology began on day one of the ‘doomed’ campaign on April 25, 1915 when diggers landed at Gallipoli against relatively light resistance compared…
CANBERRA: The Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC Australia) has labelled a recent statement by Australia’s Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop on the Armenian Genocide “unacceptable”, and called on the Australian government to reverse this error in judgment. In a letter addressed to the Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance, Bishop extraordinarily denies the historical reality of the…
I believe that this was the Ottoman mindset before and during the First World War. For that reason, it appears to me no coincidence that the decision behind the Armenian Genocide was made during the fierce battles of the Gallipoli campaign, when the Ottoman Empire’s very existence seemed to balance between life and death. The…