Author Description

This book is about the 'forgotten genocide' of the Armenians. It looks at the factors behind the loss from memory of an event that saw 1.5 million Armenians perish after the Young Turk takeover of the Ottoman Empire. Together with the deaths of a similar number of Greeks and Assyrians, the Young Turk campaign of Armenian genocide carried out during the years of the First World War made for a total of about 3 million, easily comparable to the Jewish Holocaust of WW2 when 6 million died under the Nazi regime. Many, if not most, Australians are today unaware of this event which took place at the same time as Gallipoli. Fortunately, several Allied Prisoners of War in Turkey during WW1 were acquainted with the attempts at Armenian extermination. These POWs witnessed the aftermath of the deportations, or death marches, on which the Armenians were placed: such as burnt-out or empty villages and churches, the begging survivors and the starving orphans that escaped deportation. Their testimony is very significant as it documents the historical proximity of Anzac involvement in Turkey during the Armenian Genocide.The book also looks at the role Ataturk played in the post-war continuation of the campaign to exterminate the Christian minorities in Turkey. Ataturk was important in the events that eventuated in establishing the Turkish Republic after the end of the War and blocking Allied plans for retribution and compensation for the genocide of the Armenians. In doing so he was arguably as ruthless as the Young Turks in his approach to the Armenians.The subject of denial, which was at the core of Ataturk's diplomacy and the Turkish Republic's attempt to rehabilitate the image of the 'Terrible Turk' and deflect blame for past Armenian suffering, is put under the microscope as the author employs both sourced material and his own research to explain and expose the propaganda, censorship and revisionism that has been used by Turkish authorities to cripple awareness of, and bury the