Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Werriwa for that endorsement. In 1939, Adolf Hitler addressed his battle commanders at Obersalzberg with these chilling words:

I put ready my Death’s Head Units the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only thus will we gain the living space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?

On the basis of the worldwide apathy to the plight of an entire generation of Armenians who were rounded up and systematically slaughtered, Hitler embarked on his own diabolical plan of extermination. Some 70 years after Hitler’s words, the Armenian community is still struggling to achieve recognition for their own genocide at the hands of the Ottoman military during World War I. In the dead of night on 24 April 1915, 250 Armenian political, religious, educational and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested, deported to the interior of the country and murdered. On that same day, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians in the city were rounded up and slaughtered on the streets and in their homes. This is now recognised as the beginning of an official attempt by the Turkish government to exterminate its Armenian population.

Over the next three years, the Turkish government ordered the deportation of the remaining Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire to concentration camps in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor. They were marched through the country on foot in a hard and cruel journey. Women and children were forced to walk over mountains and through deserts. These people were frequently stripped naked and abused. They were given insufficient food and water, and hundreds of thousands of Armenian people died along the way. Around 1½ million Armenians were murdered during the Armenian genocide out of an estimated total Armenian population of just 2½ million people.

The intention of the Ottomans was the complete obliteration of not only the Armenian nation but any memory of the Armenian people as well. During the operation, reporting and photography were forbidden by the Turkish government .The mere existence of Armenians in Turkey was officially denied. Maps and history were rewritten. Churches and schools were desecrated. Children who were taken from their parents were renamed and raised as Turks. Back in 1915, the word ‘genocide’ did not exist, as the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was only adopted in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But there is simply no other word for what happened to the Armenian people of Turkey. They were indeed the victims of an act designed to destroy an entire race.

A few starving surviving Armenian refugees returned to their former homeland only to see their country subsequently conquered by the Bolshevik Red Army and incorporated into the Soviet Union for seven decades, until 1990. These survivors were able to tell the world what had happened to their people. There was outrage across Europe as news of the atrocity spread. Today the government of Turkey steadfastly refuses to recognise the genocide of its Armenian citizens. They campaign actively, claiming a lack of evidence. Indeed in Turkey, under article 301 of the Turkish penal code, individuals, intellectuals, journalists and publishers can be prosecuted for insulting Turkey. Therefore, whenever referring to the genocide in that country, people refer to it as the ‘alleged genocide’ to avoid prosecution.

In spite of this, many countries have officially recognised the Armenian genocide. As yet Australia has not done the same. This weighs heavily on me, particularly as my own grandfather was himself a survivor of the genocide. He never knew the fate of his siblings and his friends as they were presumably led to their deaths. Similarly, this lack of recognition weighed heavily on the hearts of Armenian-Australians, especially when on 28 August our ABC aired the Family Footsteps program on an Armenian-Australian who had travelled back to the homeland of her ancestors. Throughout the program, the narrator repeatedly refers to the ‘alleged’ genocide. The doubt that is cast over what happened to the Armenian people by this offensive word has no place in an Australian television program. It is divisive and offensive.

Australian people deplore this sort of racism and barbarity. This country has prospered though the immigration of people from countless nations, including Armenia. I urge this parliament to recognise the Armenian genocide for what it was—not alleged, not supposed and not so-called. It was the intentional attempted obliteration of an entire people. To refuse to acknowledge this genocide is to ensure that future Hitlers can capitalise on the world’s reticence in taking a stand.

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