It is estimated 1.5 million people died in the Armenian Genocide during World War I - among them, 300,000 Assyrians.
On November 25, New Zealand’s Assyrian community unveiled a memorial at Makara Cemetery in Wellington dedicated to the Kiwis who fought and died trying to rescue them, Newshub media outlet of the country reported.
Robert Nichol was a house painter from Lower Hutt, and one of New Zealand’s most respected and decorated soldiers of World War I.
His memory was honored on November 25, by the descendants of those he died trying to save.
A captain aged just 23, Nichol volunteered for a specialist air brigade known as Dunsterforce - a forerunner to today’s New Zealand Special Air Service.
Dunsterforce was sent to modern day Iran to seize vital oil fields for the British in 1918 - but ended up trying to stop the 20th Century’s first great crime against humanity.
“The Assyrian Genocide was a very specific part of a general process in the Ottoman Empire to ‘Turkify’ the Empire,” historian James Robins explained. “In other words, to get rid of its non-Turkish Christian minorities - so that included the Armenians, it included the Assyrians, and it included ethnic Greeks as well.”
Robins is writing a book on New Zealand’s many links to the Genocide, and is dedicating a chapter to Nichol.
“He was fighting alongside another New Zealander called Alexander Nimmo, who was from Mosgiel in Otago, and he was fighting to defend the rear guard of this refugee column of around 60,000 Armenians and Assyrians who were fleeing annihilation,” said Robins.
Outnumbered 100 to one, the Kiwis fought bravely; Nimmo survived, but Nichol was shot and killed - his body never recovered.
The Ne Zealand Government has never officially acknowledged the Armenian genocide - over genuine fears Turkey would ban Kiwis from visiting Gallipoli if it did.
So 100 years on, those crimes against humanity are ignored by the New Zealand Government - but the sacrifice Robert Nichol made trying to stop them is remembered by the people he was trying to save.
