What if Turkey had invaded NZ?
One day last century, Cetin Atlas stood and watched a man strip his clothes off, wrap himself in toilet paper, and then light it on fire.He was atop a building overlooking the water, clearly both very excited and very drunk. Before anyone could do anything, the man jumped into the waves, dousing the flame and completing his ritualistic tribute.
Atlas was a travel agent at the time, taking Anzac tourists on day trips around the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, and this man was visiting. He’s telling this story as something of a joke, but he sounds a little bewildered too. Fellow expat Semih Dikmenli breaks any tension immediately: ‘‘Aussies, mate.’’
New Zealanders pour a lot into Anzac Day. Our whole bloodstained history is loaded upon it, a sort of alibi to get out of talking about war for the other 364 days.
If you take a step back from our narrative – from the poppies, the camaraderie, the abject terror – if you retreat into facts and numbers, it makes much less sense. More Kiwis died in France during WWI than at Gallipoli. More Kiwis died from the flu three years later. We invaded the sovereign soil of another nation and we failed. Nations and their narratives are not built on facts and numbers. But there is another party in the Anzac story that we barely ever hear from. The ones the Anzacs were over there killing – the Turks. What’s our hallowed day of commemoration like for them? Most of the 75 million people who live in Turkey have never heard of Anzac Day. Those who live around the Gallipoli Peninsula hear about it a lot, as do those who move here.
Cetin Atlas emigrated in 2004 when he married a Kiwi. ‘‘I was the first Turkish man to marry a New Zealander,’’ he claims. ‘‘The newspapers called us peacemakers.’’ Atlas was born in C¸anakkale, where almost everyone he knew had a relative who had died in the campaign. Dikmenli moved here from Turkey in 2005, starting a security business after a period working for the Turkish Consulate. Both ask for three spoons of sugar in their thick, milky coffee.The first thing to understand, they explain, is that the Turks split the Gallipoli campaign into two major parts, and commemorate a completely different day. First there is the ‘naval war’ – an attempt by Britain and France to take the Dardanelles purely with battleships. On the 18th of March, about a month before the Anzacs landed on their shores, the Ottomans sunk three battleships and ended the Dardanelles offensive – winning the naval war. Turkey, which emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, took this day for its own commemoration ceremonies. ‘‘It’s about remembering the war, the lost – and the victory,’’ says Dikmenli.
‘‘New Zealand is a small nation, more Turks lost their lives.’’
They remember a victory. As we don’t have one, we remember the landing. Does it seem strange that we commemorate an invasion so forcefully?
‘‘I’ve never felt like that, I never thought about revenge you know,’’ says Atlas.
‘‘If they hadn’t missed their mark, if they hadn’t landed in Anzac Cove, that would have be a different story.’’ Quite. Imagine, for a second, if our places were reversed. Imagine hundreds of Turkish soldiers swarming onto the south coast of Wellington, climbing through the thick bush, killing thousands of Kiwis as they claimed high ground in Miramar and Seatoun, all because we were allies with the wrong people and kind of ‘in the way’. Would we let them build their memorials here? Would we rename a beach for them? Would we embrace them every year? Atlas, Dikmenli and other Turkish expats have their own Anzac Day tradition. Every year, they visit the Ataturk memorial on Wellington’s south coast, placed there in exchange for all the memorials we have built over there, at a point in the bay which looks and feels a lot like Anzac Cove. ‘‘I feel actually really proud, when I go up there,’’ says Dikmenli. ‘‘To be standing with a Turkish flag on one side and a New Zealand flag on the other. That’s pretty good actually.’’ For Turkey, the memory of Gallipoli is entwined with the legend of General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Ataturk was shot at Chunuk Bair, the high point in Gallipoli that New Zealand held for two days. Supposedly, the shot Ataturk absorbed would have pierced his heart, but for a pocket watch in his breast pocket.
He went on to found modern Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
‘‘You hear about him, you know, as soon as you know yourself,’’ says Dikmenli.
‘‘He was one of the greatest leaders in history actually, in all of world history.’’
Atlas emphasises the secular route that Ataturk took. He made Turkey a secular republic, not a caliphate, despite the precedent set
by the theocratic Ottomans. ‘‘We follow what he build as a foundation, the rules and regulations.’’
Today, this secularism sets Turkey apart from much of the volatile Middle East. But every narrative is a project of omission – as they were defending their shores in Gallipoli, the Turks were also systematically slaughtering more than a million Armenians. Their government still refuses to call the act genocide.
After the war and the nation’s rebirth, Ataturk embraced the Anzacs he had once fought against. As a travel agent, Atlas heard the stories of countless Kiwis who had come to visit.
He sees the break with empire as the root of the friendship between our nations.
‘‘The question you need to ask yourself is why come to Turkey? Why invade a country so far away?
‘‘I think both sides are victims, of the British. I don’t want to talk about politics too much, but we’re both victims.’’