All political leaders manipulate history, but the decision by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to shift the 100th anniversary commemoration of the allied landings at Gallipoli forward 24 hours to April 24 — the same day as the anniversary of the Armenian genocide —was unusually crass.
Erdogan meant among other things to suggest that, although a tragic slaughter of Christian Armenians took place in 1915, it was part of the chaos of war — not a genocide. According to this narrative, the empire's Turkish Muslims suffered as much at the hands of the allied forces that attacked from Gallipoli, Russia and Syria.
It is, indeed, no coincidence the first act of the genocide — the arrests of 250 ethnic Armenian leaders in Istanbul on April 24 — took place just hours before a British-led force arrived in the Dardanelles strait to capture the city. The three "pashas" who ran the empire — Cemal, Enver and Talaat — in their paranoia saw all Christian Armenians as a potential fifth column.