"Knowledge and information can be powerful tools in the struggle for human rights, especially when secrecy, silence, and denial of atrocities - whether historic or contemporary - continue to violate the rights of people living today" Clint Curle, Canadian Museum of Human Rights, April 2013.
The Armenian Genocide Education Website Australia (AGEWA) is a project of the Armenian Historical Society of Australia (AHSA).
AGEWA is designed to assist Australian history studies teachers and their students with the tools to respectively teach and learn about a major international human rights issue - the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Genocides.
Founded in 2008, the AHSA is a not for profit organisation established with the objective of gathering and recording the contributions of the Armenian-Australian community, researching the mutual history of the Armenian and Australian peoples and promoting and educating the Australian public about major episodes in the history of Armenia.
AHSA is a member of the History Council of New South Wales.
Website Content
The Genocide of the Armenians perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government between 1915 and 1923 is one of the greatest crimes against humanity and civilisation. The systematic campaign of mass deportations and killings adopted by the Ottoman authorities during this period resulted in the annihilation of up to 1,500,000 innocent Armenian men, women and children, and deprived survivors of their once historic homelands and possessions. Furthermore, this event transformed a multi-cultural Ottoman society into a largely mono-ethnic Turkish nation state. According to many Holocaust scholars, the Armenian Genocide provided a blueprint for the Jewish Holocaust and other genocides in the 20th and 21st centuries. Genocide is considered to be the ultimate form of intolerance.
Little known, however, is the strong Australian connection to this historic event. Many Anzacs serving in the region bore witness to the Armenian Genocide with some even helping to rescue survivors. Australian newspapers reported the massacres and deportations as they occurred which aroused deep sympathy from the Australian public. This led to a massive humanitarian campaign by Australians to provide aid, food and shelter to the victims and survivors of the Armenian Genocide as they escaped violence.
This website provides Australian middle and senior secondary students with Australian resources to learn about this historic event, its relevance to Australia and its present day implications, within the extent of the Australian Curriculum - History.
The Teachers Resources page catalogues those areas in the current NSW history syllabus, as well as the Australian Curriculum - History, where there is scope for teaching the Armenian Genocide.
Sourced primarily from Australian archives, background information regarding the Armenian Genocide and related topics such as the Greek Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide, Anzac Eyewitnesses, Australia’s Response to the Armenian Genocide, Genocide Denial and Recognition and Just Resolution can be found on this website.
This is supplemented with video, images, maps, reading lists, student exercises and research tools to assist Australian history teachers and students make an independent historical enquiry into one of the most well documented examples of extermination in modern history.
The United Nations General Assembly has recognised Genocide as a fundamental human rights issue. As the historical record has demonstrated, any society is capable of committing genocide given the right circumstances. It is therefore not the intention of this website to stereotype any particular ethnic group. The AHSA hopes that through education, these acts are never again repeated.
Acknowledgements
The AGEWA would like to thank Dr Panayiotis Diamadis, history lecturer at the University of Technology, and Vicken Babkenian, independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, for their assistance in providing research material for the contents of this website.