The Armenian Youth Federation of Australia expressed its outrage at the recent unveiling of a monument at Sydney’s Hyde Park in honour of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
It claims Kemal Ataturk was responsible for the mass-murder and forced death marches of ethnic minorities living in Turkey, as well as those Turkish citizens who opposed his dictatorship during the early 20th century.
The federation says that on April 17th 1997, the New South Wales government passed a resolution acknowledging the crimes against the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian minorities that occurred between 1915-1923 as genocide.
“The fact that a monument to a genocide perpetrator has been erected next to the holy shrine of a war memorial dedicated to the heroism of our Anzac soldiers is extremely unfitting and unacceptable,” it states.