The change in date of this year’s commemorations has been widely perceived as a crude attempt to distract attention from Armenian commemorations of the 1915 massacres and forced deportations which decimated the Ottoman Armenian population, which Armenians — who consider the events of 1915 to constitute genocide — commemorate on April 24. “The game TR gov’t is playing with Gallipoli – politicising it to compete with Armenian Genocide commemorations – is utterly disgusting, IMO [in my opinion],” Alex Christie-Miller, an İstanbul-based journalist working for The Times, Newsweek Europe and the Christian Science Monitor, posted on his Twitter account on March 19.
Joost Lagendijk, a former Green Party deputy in the European Parliament who also served as the co-chairman of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, also criticized Turkey’s move to commemorate the Gallipoli Campaign on the same day as the Armenian commemorations, calling it a “shameless and all-too-transparent effort” to try and distract attention from the Armenian “Genocide” in his Today’s Zaman column on March 17. Lagendijk said that shifting the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli Campaign to the same day “won’t work and it will unnecessarily discredit Turkey.”
Turkey’s move also offended Turkish citizens of Armenian descent. Speaking to Agos – a Turkish-Armenian weekly formerly edited by murder victim Hrant Dink — after Erdoğan’s invitation, many Turkish citizens of Armenian descent reacted strongly to Erdoğan’s invitation to Sarksyan, calling it a “joke” and an “ill-mannered” act, and further criticizing it as a “political maneuver.”
The game TR gov’t is playing with Gallipoli – politicising it to compete with Armenian Genocide commemorations – is utterly disgusting, IMO.
— Alex Christie-Miller (@AChristieMiller) March 19, 2015