(Transcript from SBS World News Radio)
Is it an outright snub or a carefully manoeuvred diplomatic balancing act?
The Australian government says it won't be officially represented in Yerevan next month at the centenary commemorations of the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.
That's widely referred to as the Armenian genocide - terminology rejected by Turkey.
The Yerevan events will coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Anzac landing in Gallipoli, to which Prime Minister Tony Abbott is expected to lead a high-level delegation.
Kristina Kukolja has the details.
(Click on the audio tab above to hear the full report)
While there is no international consensus on the matter, over 20 countries have officially recognised the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish soldiers as genocide.
The leaders of some of those nations will be in Armenia next month at the invitation of the Armenian president to attend the 100-year commemoration.
Australia isn't among the countries to officially adopt the term "Armenian genocide" at a national level, although two state parliaments have done so.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade won't confirm whether Australia was invited to attend commemorative events in Yerevan.
But the Department has told SBS the Australian government will not be sending a representative.
When asked about the reason for the decision, and whether an official invitation was received, the Department declined to comment further.
Vache Kahramanian, from a group known as the Armenian National Committee of Australia, says he's seen the Armenian government's list of official invitees.
He says it includes Prime Minister Tony Abbott and a number of other federal MPs.
Vache Kahramanian says he'll be very disappointed if all of the Australian MPs invited decline to go to Yerevan.
"The events that are occurring in Yerevan on the 22nd and 23rd of April, which a large number of Australian members of parliament have been invited to, is to take part in a forum titled "No to genocide". This is not only dedicated to the centenary of the Armenian genocide, but a global forum which is going to attract more than 1,000 international attendees, including the president of France, the president of Uruguay and many other distinguished world leaders who will take part. And for Australia not to take part in a forum dedicated to the eradication of the crime of genocide is very saddening."
Armenia puts the number of its people killed by the Turks between 1915 and 1922 at around 1.5 million.
It says many more were forcibly deported from territories held by Ottoman Turk forces.
Historians tell of other minorities -- the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs and Greeks -- as being targeted.
These groups want the modern Turkish state to recognise its predecessor's actions as genocide.
Turkey does not dispute that many deaths and what it calls 'relocations' did occur, but it does dispute the Armenians' estimated death toll, and rejects outright the use of the word "genocide".
Diplomatic cables between Canberra and Ankara, obtained under Freedom of Information laws, show that last year the matter arose in a letter from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to her then Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu.
An extract from the letter reads:
"Recognising the important interests at stake for both countries, I assure you that there has been no decision to change the long-standing position of successive Australian Governments on this issue... The Australian government is sympathetic to the Armenian people and other communities that suffered such terrible losses during the tragic events at the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Australian Government does not, however, recognise these events as genocide."
Vache Kahramanian, from the Armenian National Committee, sees it as Australia caving in to Turkish pressure.
"I interpret that particular passage as Ankara's ongoing gag order on Australia on the issue of the Armenian genocide. For a very long time we've heard from many members of parliament throughout the country that Turkey continues to use Gallipoli and the centenary of Anzac Day as a bargaining chip to ensure that Australia does not formally recognise the Armenian genocide. And what Julie Bishop in her statement as Foreign Minister makes to her then counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu is that Australia will not change its position to safeguard all interests and is happy to allow this important issue of human rights to be used as a political bargaining chip."
A Holocaust and genocide expert from the University of Technology in Sydney, Dr Panayiotis Diamadis, also sees Turkey using Anzac Day sensitivities to apply pressure on Australia over the issue.
"If the federal government makes any more statements or moves that look like recognition of the three genocides of the native peoples of Anatolia, it will seriously disrupt the centenary commemorations of ANZAC in the Turkish republic this year. That is essentially what has been said to us by parliamentarians and that's how I interpret the particular passage, and that's how I interpret the whole letter. It's a letter from the Foreign Minister only a few days after the commemorations last year in which a very senior ranking member of the federal government essentially called on the parliament to recognise the genocide. And it's reassuring, a very bureaucratic response. Personally, I think it's rather sycophantic to do with reassuring them, smoothing the waters, making sure nothing affects the ANZAC centenary and the so-called year of Australia in Turkey."
The diplomatic cables acknowledge Turkey's threat to ban New South Wales MPs from attending this year's Gallipoli commemoration, after the state parliament passed a motion recognising the First World War massacre of Armenians and other group as genocide.
Vache Kahramanian says federal Treasurer Joe Hockey was invited in April last year to attend an Armenian community commemoration in Sydney.
Mr Hockey, who is of Armenian-Palestinian descent, did not attend.
SBS has seen a letter the organisers say was instead sent by the Treasurer, part of which reads:
"Back in 1915 the word "genocide" did not exist, as the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was only adopted in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But there is simply no other word for what happened to the Armenian people of Ottoman Turkey."
It goes on to say:
"Many countries have officially recognised the Armenian genocide, and as next year Australia will celebrate the Centenary of ANZAC I live in hope that the government of Turkey will recognise that it has the opportunity to reconcile its past in a way that allows us all to move forward in peace and understanding."
Ertunc Ozen, from the Australian-Turkish Advocacy Alliance, says he's aware of the correspondence.
"It is inappropriate for an Australian or any other government or minister in that government to be making declarations or affirmations about foreign historical events. That parliaments are not the appropriate place to determine the legal characterisation of historical events, we feel, is self-evident. What we've seen occurring in New South Wales, in particular, and in some countries around the world is the continuation of this megaphone diplomacy, very strong lobbying to try and get governments to recognise an event as genocide, or otherwise as though the recognition somehow makes the event more likely to be genocide or not."
One of the diplomatic cables reveals that Mr Hockey's statement received a lot of press coverage in Turkey.
Others detail a flurry of diplomatic activity between Australian and Turkish officials in both countries in the weeks after the letter emerged.
The documents show Turkey being assured there would be "no change to the Australian government's long-standing position" not to intervene in the debate, and "not to recognise tragic events at end of Ottoman empire as genocide."
Turkey was also assured that Australia's states and territories had no constitutional role in the formulation of foreign policy.
Several pages of the Turkish response have been completely redacted.
But months after the exchanges began, Australian diplomatic staff in Ankara were describing senior officials' talks with Turkey as constructive.
Ertunc Ozen, of the Australian-Turkish Advocacy Alliance, thinks Turkish government concerns may be justified.
"If there is going to be this international concerted lobbying effort to have foreign governments recognise another country's historical events as one thing or another, I think, any government or, certainly, the Turkish government is well within its rights to want some assurance about the position Australia does or does not take about this. The Turkish government and Turkish community groups are forced to respond to the very well organised and strident lobbying and campaign efforts of the Armenian lobby groups around the world."
The diplomatic documents also show the Turkish government's apparent concern about Armenia's plans for its centenary commemorations this year.
They quote President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying Turkey needed to be prepared to ensure those events were marked in what it calls "an objective, scholarly and realistic way."
According to one cable, Mr Erdogan accuses the Armenian diaspora of desiring to reflect what he calls the '1915 events' in a "particular and one-sided way, to take them out of their historical reality, and to turn them into a political campaign".
In the same account, Mr Erdogan promises that Turkey would use "history, scholarship and scholarly data" in response to what he calls "black propaganda."
The Armenian National Committee's Vache Kahramanian says, for all the declassified cables do reveal, they still don't come close to telling the full story.
"It troubles me, as an Australian citizen, to wonder why and what Australia has to hide in coming to rightfully recognise a genocide that occurred a century ago. It is troubling that DFAT and the government must redact documents which, I'm sure, contain incriminating arguments against the government and which has put them in a dilemma in recognising the Armenian genocide."
The mass killings of Armenians last century were widely recorded in the Australian media at the time.
City and regional newspapers wrote of the slaughter and starvation of Armenian men, women and children.
They described deportations of civilians in the hundreds of thousands, desert death marches and forced religious conversions.
Dr Panayiotis Diamadis says these events have important historical connections to Australia, and should be part of any First World War remembrance.
"There were Australians, particularly in the Middle East, ironically in many ways in Syria and Iraq, picking up genocide survivors and protecting them from further attack, particularly in what is now Iraq. In the northern summer of 1918 a group called the Dunster force, we have the Australian Prisoner of War memoirs, which are now in the war memorial in Canberra which have been collecting dust for decades until they started coming out a decade ago, and one of the links is that a lot of the prison camps they were held in across the Ottoman empire were churches, monasteries, schools and homes of the deportees of the genocide victims and survivors. The two anniversaries not only can coexist, they are so intertwined that we cannot separate them."
