Great vision on junk heap
FOR Australians there is probably no more emotive place on Earth outside their own country.
It is even named after the men who fought there and the many buried in that part of the Gallipoli Peninsula known as Anzac.
For thousands of grieving families there was little likelihood they would ever be able to travel to the small, scattered cemeteries painstakingly recreated at war’s end on the advice of official historian Charles Bean.
The men had been buried where they fell in cemeteries identified by the defensive posts where they fought and many died.
It was a massive task to identify each of these cemeteries and the names of the men buried within.
How that occurred is a story in itself.
Rather than exhume the bodies for reburial in a central cemetery as the British and French authorities had done, Bean recommended the dead remain where they were so that Australians in perpetuity could visit Gallipoli and understand the battle from the cemeteries and the names of those buried there.
However it would be many decades and more wars before Australians could easily access Gallipoli and fulfil Bean’s vision.
Although the fallen were destined to lie for eternity in foreign soil far from their homes and families, one man understood the mutual sacrifice.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, their bitter foe who defeated them became a hero in his country, later the founder of a modern, progressive, secular Turkey. Ataturk’s visage, name and legacy are ubiquitous in modern Turkey.
A large statue at Chanuk Bair, the site of Ataturk’s most brilliant Anzac achievement, has long been a pilgrimage focus for Turks seeking to understand their own modern history.
In 1985 a monument inscribed with words in English attributed to Ataturk was constructed on a prominent point overlooking Anzac Cove.
It was a message to grieving Australian mothers that their lost sons were lying side by side with their Turkish foes in the soil of a friendly country, that Turkey now regarded them as its sons as well.
The same inscription features on Ataturk’s memorial close to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Ataturk is memorialised in other Australian cities, remarkably the only one of our nation’s foes to be so recognised.
Now these moving words have been deliberately crumbled into rubble just as Ataturk’s vision for his country is being junked by a resurgent, fundamentalist Islamic regime.
Although the Turkish government has advised Australia the memorial is being restored, there may be a more sinister motive.
It has been suggested the hardline Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is planning to replace the inscription with a more Islamist interpretation of Australia’s role at Gallipoli.
Veterans Affairs Minister Dan Tehan has declared that no Australian memorials or graves will be affected by current Turkish restoration works.
However given other political and religious developments in Turkey there is no guarantee there won’t be other changes to the Gallipoli landscape, nor that Bean’s vision could be lost.
No one would weep more tears at this desecration than Ataturk himself.