A Turkish-Australian Friendship Memorial Sculpture near the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance was unveiled on April 13, 2015. It includes an alleged ‘Ode to Australian mothers’ attributed to Mustafa Kemal (later known as ‘Ataturk’) in 1934. While the sculpture may be viewed as an initiative of reconciliation, we, the undersigned, strongly believe that the inclusion of ‘Ataturk’s quote’ is antithetical to core Australian values.

The alleged quote on the memorial is:

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

Our main objection is that using this supposed quote promotes false history. A recent study by prominent Australian military historians revealed that there is no strong evidence that Ataturk ever made this statement. Extensive research by an award winning Australian journalist also concluded that "there is no credible definitive evidence that Ataturk wrote or spoke them". The quote does not mention Australians, Anzacs or Australian mothers.

The National Library of Australia’s database of Australian newspapers reveals not one report on this ‘famous quote’ between 1934 and the 1980s. Only during a time of warming ties between the Australian and Turkish governments did the alleged quote begin to appear.

During World War One, Australia fought with the Allies against authoritarian governments, regimes which remain antithetical to Australian values. One of these was the Young Turk regime of the Ottoman Empire. In the post-war period, Ataturk led a movement which aimed at homogenising Anatolia (current day Turkey), by eliminating its remaining indigenous Christian Greek, Armenian and Assyrian populations. Many officials responsible for the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Genocides during the War were given leadership roles in Ataturk's movement. In October 1922, Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes threatened war against the Kemalists, the “Chanak Affair”.

The Genocides perpetrated by the wartime and Kemalist Turkish regimes were widely reported in the Australian press and spurred unprecedented humanitarian activity by Australians, particularly through the Save the Children Fund. Prominent Victorians such as Cecilia John, Professor Alexander Leeper, William Edgar MLC and Professor Merideth Atkinson were part of the relief movement to save the survivors. Victorians Joice and Sydney Loch (Gallipoli veteran) volunteered to conduct relief work around the teeming refugee camps of northern Greece, full of Greek, Armenian and Assyrian Genocide survivors. Many survivors and their descendants later made Melbourne their home.

Ataturk’s ‘New Turkey’ continued a policy of discrimination against the few remaining non-Muslims. Its population administration system profiled its citizens with secret ‘race codes’, which would impact their ability to access certain jobs, especially within the military or diplomatic service. This sustained the policy of forced migration of non-Muslims from their native lands.

Ataturk’s totalitarianism was, and is, antithetical to Australian values. In Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination, Stefan Ihrig (Harvard University Press, 2014) observed that the Nazis practiced something of a minor cult around Ataturk. He became Adolf Hitler’s ‘shining star’ in inspiring him to re-make Germany along totalitarian and ethnically exclusive lines. Hitler even commissioned an artist to create a bust of Ataturk, which he regarded as his ‘cherished possession’.

In 1934, when Ataturk was supposedly making platitudes to Australian mothers, his authoritarian government conducted a series of pogroms against the country’s Jewish community.

We, the undersigned, believe that including the Ataturk ‘quote’ on a Friendship Sculpture goes against the very essence of Australian values. It goes against what Australians fought for during the First World War, and it goes against Australia’s much cherished values of multiculturalism and indigenous rights today. It should not be included on any monument in Australia.