Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

Next month, on 24 April, there will be an extra layer of sadness for Armenian Australians as they gather to remember the shocking events of nearly a century ago, events that continue to leave an indelible scar. Among those remembered at services across Sydney and elsewhere will be Mr Arshag Badelian, who died just a few weeks ago aged 100. Mr Badelian’s recent funeral service in Chatswood attracted condolences from Armenians around the world. He was one of the Australian Armenian community’s oldest survivors of the massacres carried out under the collapsing Ottoman Empire from 1915 right through until the 1920s.

During World War I, the Allied powers of Britain, France and Russia jointly issued a statement whereby they held the Turkish and Kurdish populations of Armenia to be responsible. The Allies said that what was done was done with the connivance and assistance of the then Ottoman authorities. Nearly 90 years later, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution unanimously recognising the mass killings as the Armenian genocide. Today some 20 countries, including Greece, France, Germany, Poland and Canada, are among those who consider what took place in the years following 1915 to be an act of genocide.

That too is my view. Turkey, for its part, has always maintained there was no will to exterminate a whole population, that what happened was the consequence of war and invasion. For its part, the Australian government has encouraged both Turkey and Armenia to continue progress on the normalisation of relations and on the establishment of a commission to investigate the events of 1915. Free and open discussion on this issue is important. The Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was a unifying figure for many Armenians and for those Turks who advocated free speech. His funeral attracted as many as 200,000 mourners. As Dink always said, ‘I will speak for the majority’, and as we start a new century the majority of people want good relations between Turkey and Armenia.

That is why I rose in this place last year and welcomed the protocols that have been signed between Turkey and Armenia. I know there are misgivings about these protocols among the Armenian diaspora, many of whom live in my electorate, but the protocols represent a start. I also recognise this is a difficult issue for Turkey. Nonetheless, to face the future we must accept what has happened in the past. So on 24 April we will honour and remember the Armenians killed from 1915 on and also, in particular, the extraordinary survival and life of Arshag Badelain.

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