Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to support the comments of the member for Bennelong, the member for North Sydney and the member for Wentworth. The Armenian genocide and the related Assyrian and Greek genocides were the result of a deliberate and systematic campaign against the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923. The total number of deaths will never be known, but it is estimated to be somewhere between 500,000 and over three million. Aside from the deaths, Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire had their wealth and property confiscated without compensation. Businesses and farms were lost, and schools, churches, hospitals and monasteries became the property of the Ottoman Empire.

About 20 years ago, while I was on business in Canada, I was working with a family of Armenian descent and, despite having been a keen student of modern history at my school, to my embarrassment I had to admit to my hosts that I had never learned about either the Armenian or Assyrian genocides. Our Australian education system had simply failed to teach us about two of the greatest crimes against humanity in the last 100 years. As Winston Churchill once said, 'Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' But how can we start to learn from history if history is not taught in our schools? And how can we help making the same mistakes again if the facts of history are not even recognised?

The facts of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides are thoroughly documented. We know that Armenia and Assyria were Christian nations that came under Ottoman rule during the 15th and 16th centuries. We know that in the last days of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians and Assyrians and other Christian minorities were, in essence, treated as second-class citizens. And, against that background, we know that on 24 April 1915—a date that coincided with Allied troops landing at Gallipoli—Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.

We know that, on 29 May 1915, Ottoman authorities passed the temporary law of deportation, known as the Tehcir law, giving the Ottoman government and the military authorisation to deport anyone that it 'sensed' was a threat to the nation. We know that, thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians and Assyrians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, deprived of food and water, into the desert.

We know that, on 13 September 1915, the Ottoman parliament passed the temporary law of expropriation and confiscation, stating that all property, including land, livestock and homes belonging to the Christian minorities, was to be confiscated by the authorities. And we know that there are countless historical documents and thousands of pages of evidence documenting the atrocities which attest to the witnesses' horror at the killings and mass starvation of Armenians and Assyrians.

We know that in 1915 the New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the process as 'systematic', 'authorised' and 'organised by the government'. And we know that on 7 October 1915 the New York Times reported that 800,000 Armenians had been slain in cold blood in Asia Minor. By mid-December, the New York Times had spoken of a million Armenians killed or in exile.

Now, if we are to learn from history, firstly, we must recognise that these events occurred. Secondly, we must look at the facts and circumstances to ensure such genocides never happen again. What we must learn from the Armenian and Assyrian genocides is that an ideology that promotes one race as being superior to another, or an ideology that promotes one religious faith as being inferior to another, is evil and must be opposed. The words of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor of Hungarian-Jewish descent and the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1986, sum up what we should remember of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides. He said:

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

It is now time for our parliament to join other parliaments around the world and recognise these genocides for what they were.