1915 - 2015.

In 1914 both the Russian Empire and the German Empire were looking to expand so largely invented a reason to go to war with each other. The German's plan was to quickly over-power France in order to defend their western flank so attacked through Belgium. Due to a mutual defence pact this brought the British Empire into the war on the side of the Russians. This was more then a little embarrassing because the British Royal Family are German and were forced to change their name to the much more English sounding "Windsor."

The Ottoman Empire - the last Islamic Caliphate - which at the time stretched across the middle-east to Egypt joined the war on the side of the German Empire. This did not go well for them. After just 3 months of war up to 90% of the Ottoman 3rd Army had been destroyed by the Russians at the Battle of Sarikamish which was fought in the Caucus region around what is now considered modern Armenia.

The Ottoman defeat at Sarikamish prompted Britain's young First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill - you may have heard of him - to devise an ambitious amphibious landing at Gallipoli on the Dardanelles strait. Once they landed the combined force made up of British, French, Canadian and Indian (including Nepalese) troops alongside the Australia and New Zealand Army Corp (ANZAC) intended to take control of the strait to allow allied British and Russian ships to pass between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea while at the same time marching on the Ottoman capital Constantinople (modern Istanbul) forcing the Empire to surrender.

Soon after it began on April 25th 1915 the Gallipoli became one of the greatest military failures in history. Although the invading force were quickly able to take control of the beaches and the cliffs overlooking them they then stopped and decided to play cricket. This gave the Ottoman troops time to re-group and launch a counter-offensive prompting both sides to dig in for the stalemate of trench warfare. After nearly 9 months and some 114,000 deaths the invasion force finally withdrew. Such was the arrogance of the British generals that this huge loss off life got people in India but mainly Australia and New Zealand starting to question whether they wanted to be part of an Empire where the English upper classes would blithely send so many of their young men to be slaughtered in such vast numbers.

Despite their victory at Gallipoli many ethnically Turk Ottoman generals including a one Mustafa Kemal Ataturk realised that they could not survive let alone win the war so set about abandoning the Empire and instead tried consolidate a much smaller nation state just for ethnic Turks. This nation became modern Turkey. To achieve this the Turks rapidly set about re-drawing the borders cutting cities like Kobane and Serekanyie in half and expelling all the other groups such as the Kurds and the Assyrians from the new country.

The group that suffered the most were the Armenians who starting from April 24th 1915 with the rounding up of Armenians in Constantinople saw around 1.5 million people killed until the ultimate fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Millions more had their homes destroyed, possessions stolen and were forcibly deported to what is now northern Syria and Iraq in the death marches.

By any modern definition what happened to the Armenians during the fall of the Ottoman Empire is considered genocide and ethnic cleansing. However by the time we started defining things like genocide at the end of the second world war the alliance between Russia and the west had broken down so everyone was suddenly concerned with keeping Russian ships out of the Mediterranean. So in return for Turkey keeping the Dardanelles strait closed the Armenian genocide was all politely brushed under the carpet.

So no, it;s not a coincidence that Armenian Genocide day and ANZAC day occur that the same time. In fact on the 100th anniversary of both Turkey seemed to move the Gallipoli anniversary forward a day to distract from the Armenian memorial.

18:15 on 25/4/15 (UK date).