Australias' Turkish connection

Kemal Ataturk

Turkish connection
The Australian
GREG SHERIDAN
March 05, 2005

IT is a wonderful thing to visit His All Holiness, the Patriarch Bartholomew, in his ancient compound in Istanbul. His is the most senior patriarchate in all the Orthodox Christian churches.

The compound is in a part of Istanbul that is older even than the Ottoman Empire, a part of the city that was the heart of the old Christian empire of Byzantium. The Christians of Turkey are mostly Greek Orthodox, and their patriarchate has been located in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople for 1700 years.
The Patriarch is a charming and vigorous old man in a black cassock and a long white beard. He opens our conversation by telling me he has been on the phone to Australia this morning. What high matter of church politics could that be about, I wonder.
"I was talking to my brother in Melbourne," he says. "He is retired now. He used to run a fish and chip shop."
You meet that kind of Australian connection all over Turkey. One of the great joys of Australia's being an immigrant nation is that you run into such Australian stories everywhere.
There are more than 100,000 Turks and their descendants in Australia and they are a quiet and successful community. We should be doing more to leverage their presence as a connection back to Turkey, a booming economy and a geo-strategic lynchpin.
But by far the strangest and most potentially productive connection is Gallipoli. This year will be the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign. John Howard will lead a vast delegation of Australians to the annual commemoration. This is a good thing, and the Prime Minister is politically shrewd and undoubtedly completely sincere in his appreciation of the Anzac legend, which remains extraordinarily powerful among the Australian people.
But we should try to use the Gallipoli connection to forge a deeper strategic relationship with Turkey. Howard, for example, should hold high level talks with the Turkish Government while he is in Turkey for the Anzac ceremonies. It would be especially good if he were to meet Turkey's fascinating Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his visit.
Gallipoli is to the Australia-Turkey relationship something like cricket used to be to the Australia-India relationship. It is a wonderful foundation, a superb conversation starter, but it should not be the summation of the relationship. Nonetheless, it can be a fantastic beginning. For a start, almost every Turkish diplomat has been socialised into Anzac Day. This is because Australian and New Zealand embassies across the world hold Anzac Day ceremonies every year and they always invite the local Turkish ambassador to attend. Thus almost the entire Turkish diplomatic corp has had a long education about the Anzacs.
This week I visited the mausoleum of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, in Ankara. It is a magnificent columned building, a little reminiscent of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, atop a lofty hill overlooking the city below.
Underneath the mausoleum is the Ataturk Museum. Much of this impressive museum is dioramas depicting battle scenes, uncannily reminiscent of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
In one scene I saw the Australian flag on a beach being looked down at by a formation of Turkish soldiers defending a hill. I realised with a start that I was looking at a representation of the Gallipoli landings. But whereas every representation I'd ever seen as an Australian of this landing was of the beach looking up, here was the scene from the Turks' point of view.
A painting in the museum depicted a pause in the fighting between the Turks and the Anzacs, with soldiers of the two opposed armies playing a friendly game of soccer between the trenches, while some Anzac prisoners were being given a haircut by their Turkish captors. This undoubtedly romanticises what was a terrible battle. But it is surely a good thing that the Turks depict the Anzacs in so gallant a light.
It is not all that rare (though certainly not all that common either) that former enemies should become friends. It is surely almost unique that one ferocious battle should be the basis of that friendship.
Australia, though, needs to do more with the Turkey relationship. Two-way trade stands at a little more than $500 million, which is substantial but far below its potential. Turkey is a booming economy of 70 million people at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. It's an economic growth story we should be part of. We should also have a much deeper strategic dialogue with Turkey.
Australia has an immensely good image in Turkey, partly because Turkish immigrants to Australia become citizens rather than being marginalised as guest workers, as they are in Germany and some other European nations.
But we need a higher level of political engagement because of our continuing political and military involvement in the Middle East. Australia's foreign policy priorities naturally focus on the US and Asia. But, although a middle power, we genuinely have global interests.
The Middle East is the central geo-strategic arena of our day. The disposition of the global security order is of immense importance to Australia. This realisation is reflected in our recent increased troop commitment to Iraq.
We have a long and amazingly resilient history of deploying our soldiers and sailors to the Middle East. If we are to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Bush administration in Iraq, and in the broader effort to change the political culture of the Middle East, this must be supported by an active Australian Middle East diplomacy and public policy.
Turkey is our natural interlocutor in this endeavour. Soon enough it will also be a member of the European Union and god knows we need all the friends we can get in that particular court.
It all points to the need to make a bigger effort with Turkey. Gallipoli, tragic moment that it was, may yet yield still further unexpected benefits for Australia
Ataturk Museum
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
Australian War Memorial