Today the National Library sent me a press release promoting their Anzac Day events: “On Anzac Day this week, we commemorate all New Zealanders and Australians who have served in a military campaign. ” I’m not going to accuse Anzac Day of being pro-war: it is always tinged with sadness, and focuses upon the tragedy of loss. However, the way Anzac Day is described above – and celebrated by most every New Zealander – does present a censored and self-congratulatory view of our military. Because we focus only upon our own fallen, and not upon those they felled.
Certainly, New Zealand soldiers have suffered unfairly because of the actions of others, and Anzac’s heart, Gallipoli, is an important reminder of this, because so many of our lads died in a needless military blunder. However, while we are always forced to remember Gallipoli, we have publicly forgotten every war crime committed by New Zealand troops. But we have committed war crimes, and we cannot truly commemorate our participation in war unless we acknowledge this. So I’m going to tell you about one of our worst crime: the Surafend massacre.
Over the last two years of the First World War, the NZ Mounted Rifle Brigade helped to defeat the Ottoman Empire in Palestine and the Sinai. After the war’s conclusion they were resting near the Jewish settlement Richon le Zion. Sometime after midnight on the tenth of December, 21-year-old Kiwi Trooper Leslie Lowry’s kit-bag/pillow was snatched from the tent in which he slept. Lowry ran out of the ten to confront the thief, who shot him in the chest.
When the soldiers woke up, they saw tracks leading away from their dead mate, towards the local Arab village, Surafend. They went and confronted the villagers, demanding that they give up the thief. At the same time, they watched a group of villagers leave. Depending on which source you trust, the village elder either said the killer had left the village, or became angry and spat. The New Zealanders returned to their camp, but when the military police refused to retaliate, they rounded up a few Aussies and some Brits and went and raided the village. The soldiers are reported to have forsaken using guns in the raid for fear that they’d shoot one another in the tussle, so they went in with bayonets, pick handles and iron wrapped in sacking, moved all the women and children out of the village, and beat around forty men to death before burning their houses. They then allowed the women and children to returned to their ruined home and dead loved ones.
General Allenby confined the Anzacs to their tent lines and banned the Arabs from their camps, then two days later moved camp to Rafah. No one was charged over this incident. The British Army eventually rebuilt the village, and charged the New Zealand government £858 and the Australian government £515.
This incident doesn’t mean that our soldiers were all bloodthirsty war-criminals, but it was itself a war crime, committed against civilians for whom they had nominally been fighting the last two years. The Mounted Riflemen had been, in many ways, brave soldiers, trying to do their best in a confusing and pointless situation. We should mourn our own soldiers, but what the Surafend massacre reminds us is that we should never forget those we have killed in return, for they did not deserve it. Let us remember instead the victims of all wars, whatever piece of land they come from.
References:
Terry Kinloch, Devil’s On Horses: In the Words of the Anzacs in
the Middle East 1916-19.
Simon Wilson, Surafend 10 December 1918 (Hocken Library,
Dunedin).