A victory at Gallipoli would have:
• brought World War 1 to an earlier conclusion; and
• Allowed for earlier arrests of the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide that started 99 years and one day ago.
On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers jointly issued a statement explicitly charging for the first time ever another government of committing `a crime against humanity’.
The Allied Governments announce publicly that they will hold personally responsible all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in the Armenian massacres.
Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire’s own allies recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres of Armenians. The United States had several consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire until it joined the Allies in 1917. There were also numerous missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions.
Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including the Pope.
The Wiki entry on the contemporary reporting of the genocide is instructive with a scan of a 16 July 1915 U.S. diplomatic cable on this campaign of race extermination.
Australian and New Zealand participation in the invasion of the Ottoman Empire as a by-product set the legal and moral infrastructure for the Nuremberg trials: governments would hold others to account for crimes against humanity and genocide.
Article 230 of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres required the defeated Ottoman Empire to hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914
Various Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were transferred to Malta where they were held for some three years while searches were made of archives in Constantinople, London, Paris and Washington to investigate the Armenian genocide.
The Inter-Allied tribunal never solidified and the detainees were eventually returned to Turkey in exchange for British citizens held hostage by Kemalist Turkey.
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