Abstract
When in 2013 the New South Wales (NSW) State Parliament unanimously passed a motion recognizing the ‘Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocides’,1 many were perplexed over the political potency of events that transpired nearly a century ago in a far and distant land. The polarized conversation that ensued managed to stir those nascent nuances often hidden in Australia’s multicultural mosaic. This was not the first time that ‘denialists’ and ‘perpetuators’ of the Ottoman discourse had caught Australia’s public attention. Every so often, they kept reminding Australians that somewhere in the Gallipoli narrative, these Ottoman diasporas — their memories, stories, and anxieties — have been overlooked.
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Notes
ABS (2006) ‘Census of Population and Housing’, Cat. No. 20680, c23, c25c, Cİ03; and Department of Immigration and Border Protection (2014a) The People of Australia: Statistics from the 2011 Census (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia), iv.
George Crowder (2008) ‘Multiculturalism: A Value-pluralist Approach’, in Geoffrey Brahm Levey (ed.), Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism (New York: Berghahn Books), 45.
Jerzy Smolicz and Margaret Secombe (2005) ‘Globalisation, Cultural Diversity and Multiculturalism: Australia’, in Joseph Zajda (ed.), International Handbook on Globalisation, Education and Policy Research: Global Pedagogies and Policies (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer), 207–20.
Andrew Markus (2010) Mapping Social Cohesion 2010: The Scanlon Foundation Surveys Summary Report (Melbourne: Monash Institute for the Study of Global Movements).
Michális S. Michael (2009) ‘Australia’s Handling of Tensions between Islam and the West under the Howard Government’, Asian Journal of Political Science, 17 (1), 45–70.
Such as the University of Melbourne’s initiative on ‘Conflict, Violence and Diasporal Populations’; until 2007, the work of the International Conflict Resolution Centre, and Macquarie University’s Centre for Research on Social Inclusion. See Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham (eds) (2009) Everyday Multiculturalism (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan).
Benedict Anderson (2006 — original 1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso), first expounded in his 1982 Wertheim Lecture Long-distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics (Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam).
Here ethno-history, memories, and communal renditions of the past constitute the bedrock galvanizing force for politicization. By ethno-history, Smith means the memories and understanding of ethnic communal past, rather than any objective historical account. Such a discourse is multi-stranded and contested, always subject to change, and is globally uneven. Anthony D. Smith (1999), Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 16.
Gregory Scott Brown (2004) ‘Coping with Long-distance Nationalism: Inter-ethnic Conflict in a Diaspora Context’, PhD Thesis, The University of Texas, 36.
Donald L. Horowitz (2001) The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: Californian University Press), 478.
While 1.2 million resettled in Greece as part of the 1923 population exchange, many Ottoman Greeks fled to other destinations such as to the United States, Egypt, Cyprus, and Russia. We also need to add to this figure those Greeks killed during this period, estimated to be between 500,000 and 1 million: Adam Jones (2011) Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxon: Routledge), 150–1.
According to Greece’s 1928 census the core of the 1.2 million Asia Minor refugees settled in Macedonia (52%) and Attica/Central Greece (25%), Thrace (8.8%), Aegean Islands (4.6%), Thessaly (2.8%), Crete (2.8%), and Peloponnese (2.3%). Projected into a population of just under six million, by the late 1920s, the Asia Minor Greek refugees constituted one-fifth of Greece’s population. In Thessaloniki (48%) and Athens (40%) they comprised nearly half the population while they constituted a quarter in Pireaus (25%): Elaine Thomopoulos (2011) The History of Greece (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO), 104–6. For a thorough analysis of the impact of the 1923 exchange on both Greece and Turkey, see
Renée Hirschon (ed.) (2008) Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books).
See James R. Kirkland (1984) ‘Modernization of Family Values and Norms among Armenians in Sydney’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 15 (3), 356; The Armenian National Committee of Australia, http://anc.org.au/community, accessed 5 March 2015.
James R. Kirkland (1980) ‘Armenian Migration, Settlement and Adjustment in Australia with Special Reference to the Armenians of Sydney (Assimilation, Ethnicity, Social Change)’, PhD Thesis, Australian National University.
Khachih Tölölyan (2000) ‘Elites and Institutions in the Armenian Transnation’, Diaspora, 9 (1), 107.
See David Gaunt (2011) ‘The Ottoman Treatment of the Assyrians’, in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Gocek and Norman M. Naimark (eds), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press), 244–59.
Jacob Bercovich (2007) ‘A Neglected Relationship: Diasporas and Conflict Resolution’, in Hazel Smith and Paul States (eds), Diasporas in Conflict: Peacemakers or Peace-wreckers (Tokyo: UN University Press), 24.
Andrew C. Theophanous and Michalis S. Michael (1993) ‘The Greek Community and Australian Foreign Policy: With Particular Reference to the Cyprus Issue’, in Dimitri C. Constas and Athanassios G. Platias (eds), Diasporas in World Politics: The Greeks in Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 102–3.
Gérard Chaliand (1993) A People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (London: Zed Books), 46.
Israel Zangwill (1911) ‘Advice to Ottoman Jews’, Jewish Herald (Victoria), 17 February, 74, 87; ‘More Advice to Ottoman Jews’, The Hebrew Standard of Australasia (Sydney), 3 March 1911, 13–14.
Şuhnaz Yilmaz and İpek K. Yosmaoglu (2008) ‘Fighting the Spectres of the Past: Dilemmas of Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans and the Middle East’, Middle Eastern Studies, 44 (5), 677.
Christine Philliou (2008) ‘The Paradox of Perceptions: Interpreting the Ottoman Past through the National Present’, Middle Eastern Studies, 44 (50), 662–3.
F. Asli Ergul (2012) ‘The Ottoman Identity: Turkish, Muslim or Rum?’, Middle Eastern Studies, 48 (4), 629–30.
Kerem Öktem (2004) ‘Incorporating the Time and Space of the Ethnic “Other”: Nationalism and Space in Southeast Turkey in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Nations and Nationalism, 10 (4), 574.
Nicholas Doumanis (2013) Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and Its Destruction in Late Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1.
Louis De Bernières (2004) Birds without Wings (London: Secker & Warburg).
Colin Tatz (1995) Reflections on the Politics of Remembering and Forgetting: The First Abraham Wanjnryb Memorial Lecture, 1 December 1994 (Sydney: Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University), 22–5; reproduced in his (2003), With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso), 148.
Here ‘Ottoman conflicts’ are used to refer to internal conflicts involving non-Turkish and non-Muslim communities. These are not to be confused with the Ottoman wars involving a series of military conflicts with European and neighbouring powers from the late medieval period until the early 20th century. Virginia H. Aksan (2004) Ottomans and Europeans: Contacts and Conflicts (Istanbul: Isis Press).
İhsan Daği (2008) Turkey between Democracy and Militarism: Post Kemalist Perspectives (Ankara: Orion), 14, 22–3; Daği notes that the hegemonic propensity of the Turkish state to ‘control its own space and people, and impose a singular national identity’ accounts for the Republic’s difficulties in dealing with the plurality of ethnic and religious identity groups it inherited from the Ottoman Empire. ‘Instead of acknowledging this social and historical reality’ the Turkish state ‘chose to fight towards eliminating them’. Furthermore Daği argues that the Kemalist establishment used Turkey’s past historical events (such as the ‘disintegration of the Ottoman Empire’, the Cyprus issue, the ‘Armenian genocide claims’, Kurdish insurgency, even the ‘historical enmity towards the Arabs, the Persians, the Greeks or the Westerners’ to raise animosity as ‘a socially internalized notion of (in)security culture’.
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Michael, M.S. (2015). Ottoman Diasporas in Australia: Conflicting Discourses, Reconciling Divides, and Dialogical Engagement. In: Michael, M.S. (eds) Reconciling Cultural and Political Identities in a Globalized World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-49315-6_8
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