Australians, New Zealanders, Turks gather for Gallipoli centenary

GALLIPOLI PENINSULA - Reuters

Bruce Scates (R), grandson of Private Thomas Charles Scates, and Halil Koç, grandson of Turkish veteran Halil Koç, visit the Turkish cemetery ahead of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli, in Gallipoli April 22, 2015.

Thousands of Australians, New Zealanders and Turks gathered on Turkey's Gallipoli peninsula on April 23 ahead of the 100th anniversary of one of the bloodiest battles of World War I.
   
Security was especially tight as the former adversaries now face a common threat from Islamist militant violence.
   
A century ago, thousands of soldiers from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) struggled ashore on a narrow beach at Gallipoli at the start of an ill-fated campaign that would claim more than 130,000 lives.

The area has become a site of pilgrimage for visitors who honour their nations' fallen in graveyards halfway around the world on ANZAC Day every April 25.
   
The centenary is expected to see the largest ever commemoration, with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and Britain's Prince Charles leading the ceremonies.
   
"The 100th anniversary is a very important moment because we're at a time now where this campaign ceases to be about memory and slides into history," said Bruce Scates, chair of history and Australian studies at Melbourne's Monash University.

"All of the veterans have died, those with any living memory of the Great War have gone," said Scates, the grandson of a Gallipoli veteran who has been advising the Australian government on how to mark the centenary.

Although the Allied forces also included British, Irish, French, Indians, Gurkhas and Canadians, Gallipoli has become particularly associated with the Australians and New Zealanders, marking a point where they came of age as nations less beholden to Britain.
   
Turkey and Australia now find themselves allies in a modern-day struggle.
   
Australian police on April 25 foiled what they said was an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)-inspired attack planned at an event to mark the centenary, a holiday in Australia and New Zealand.

Australia, which backs the United States and its action against ISIL militants in Syria and Iraq, has been on heightened alert for attacks by homegrown Islamist radicals since last year.
   
Turkey, which borders Syria and Iraq and has been a major transit route for foreign fighters headed there, is also on alert.
   
"It's good that we're now exchanging information at a very deep level between our various agencies because the threat posed by violent extremism, particularly by the Daesh (ISIL) death cult, is real and it is global," Abbott told a joint news conference with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on April 22.
   
Reconciliation

Turks mark what they call the Çanakkale war on March 18, when Ottoman forces repelled an Allied assault on the Dardanelles Straits. The victory stopped the Allies from taking Istanbul but resulted in an eight-month standoff.
   
Some 130,000 soldiers perished, 87,000 of them from the Ottoman side, before the Turks, under German command, repulsed an Allied campaign hampered by poor planning.
   
But it would prove to be one of the Turks' few successes in the war. In November 1918, the Allied fleet sailed through the Dardanelles and took Istanbul without a single casualty.
   
For the thousands gathering at Gallipoli, the overriding message was one of reconciliation. Scates was visiting graveyards with Halil Koç, the descendant of a Turkish soldier who fought the ANZAC forces.
   
"I was accompanying my grandfather in 1990 and we couldn't convince him to hold an Australian veteran's hand...But today, I can visit Turkish and Australian graveyards with the grandson of an Australian veteran as we walk arm in arm," Koç said.
   
"This is a great message to the world."