By Jill Fraser
MELBOURNE
Researchers at an Australian university have released a report detailing what they claim to be the true cost on Turkey of its success in fighting off foreign invasion at the battle of Canakkale.
The Deakin University paper - released Wednesday, almost 100 years after ANZAC and Turkish soldiers met on the beaches of Gallipoli - claims to be the first of its kind.
“We felt that the story of Gallipoli was incomplete and one that needed to be told,” Dr. Cahit Guven said in a statement to accompany the paper's release.
"The Effects of the Gallipoli Campaign on Turkish Child Survivors in Anatolia" claims to reveal World War I's drastic consequences, not only on those who fought on the frontline, but also the children born just before and during the battle.
Internationally the Canakkale campaign is known as the Gallipoli Campaign.
In the statement, Guven and Dr. Mehmet Ulubasoglu -- researchers at the university's economics department -- said they had found that instead of going to school, many Turkish children were sent off to work in the country's dominant agriculture sector -- "sometimes aged as young as five."
Ulubasoglu said that after analyzing Turkish defense data and census figures, they had found the effects on children were worst in regions that were home to the highest rates of soldiers killed in the war.
The report stated that Turkey had lost up to 68,000 men during the battle, compared to the Allied Powers’ combined losses of 57,000.
“Overall, children from towns which had large numbers of soldiers who died at Gallipoli were less likely to go to school and more likely to be illiterate than their counterparts,” Ulubasoglu said.
“We found the literacy rate dropped according to the number of soldiers killed from the region."
“The deaths of thousands of individuals aged 20- 40 in a short space of time generated a large vacuum in the labor market in Anatolia [the geographic name for the motherland of contemporary Turkey].”
On scrutinizing military records available in Turkey, the researchers said they were able to track the children born in the five years up until 1915 that lived in towns that were home to soldiers killed in the campaign.
They then looked at Turkish census data from 1985, 1990 and 2000 to track the children’s socioeconomic outcomes into adulthood.
They said that they found that the largest percentage of the death toll was borne by western provinces in Anatolia, including the northwestern province of Bursa which they said had suffered the highest number of deaths - 3,737 soldiers killed.
This was compared to a median rate of 506 across the country.
Guven said the research found that for every additional 1,000 soldiers killed from a province, children born there in 1911, 1912, 1913 and 1914 were up to 2.5 percent more likely to be illiterate depending on the birth year, compared to children born in the same province between 1916 to 1920.
“This is a significant number considering the literacy rate was 34 percent across the 10 year period we investigated,” he added.
“Our figures suggest that the war was responsible for an important proportion of illiteracy for the cohort in question."
Guven said that for every additional 1,000 soldiers killed from a province, children from that province lost 0.12 to 0.17 years of schooling - "again a substantial amount given that the average years of schooling in the entire sample is 1.47.”
The researchers said that they had also found the negative impacts of the war were higher for older children, which was likely to be a result of a compulsion to work in child labor following the war.
“A large number of children were either left as orphans or malnourished due to absence of their household’s income-earning person. Also, the heavy consequences of the war resulted in mass psychological trauma in Anatolia for adults and children,” Guven said.
“All these factors meant that the socioeconomic achievements of the cohort who were aged under five in 1915 were likely to be restricted when they became adults."
Commemorations are taking place across the world this week to mark the 100th anniversary of the battle, predominantly in Australia and Turkey from where a majority of the dead came.
The ANZAC legend is central to the Australian identity. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.
Dr. Ulubasoglu is an Associate Professor in Economics in Deakin University's School of Accounting, Economics and Finance.
He has published extensively in reputed international journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, European Economic Review, and American Journal of Political Science.
Dr. Guven is a senior lecturer at the Department of Economics' faculty of Business & Law.
