Louis Nowra
On April 24, 1915, the day before the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli, the
Turkish government in Constantinople rounded up hundreds of Armenian
artists, intellectuals, academics, priests and community leaders and
killed most of them.
At the time there were 15 million Turkish Muslims and about two
million Christian Armenians in Turkey (or Anatolia as it was then). The
Armenians were better educated and wealthier than most Turks and because
of that were envied and hated, so much so that the government
instituted a program of ethnic cleansing. The Turks had had practice
runs before. Between 1894 and 1896, 200,000 Armenians were massacred by
soldiers and armed mobs.
