The fellow who mostly had it in for the Turks
was Great Britain's Lloyd George. (A convinced pro Hellene who could have used
anything as propaganda against the Turks in support of Venizelos and the Greek
invasion of Turkey... just as Gladstone inflated the Bulgarian "massacres"
out of all contact with reality for domestic political reasons. Curiously, Lloyd
George, at the expense of his political career, ultimately did not.) Maybe it was
the chance for the British to get even for being humiliatingly held off at Gallipoli.
Regardless, memories of those awful massacres
being reported in the British press couldn't go unanswered. Especially now that the
British were occupying what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Every governmental
document to prove evil wrongdoing was at their fingertips.
Consider: the British were no friends of
the Turks at this time. (They planned to figuratively wipe the Turks off the face of
the earth.) Any evidence of a genocide that existed was at their full disposal, as
an occupying force. To make sure the research efforts would be as zealously
thorough as possible, they enlisted the services of a crack team of Armenian
scholars, led by Haigazn K. Khazarian.
The British locked up close to a hundred and
fifty Ottoman officials... fifty-six in the island of Malta... while they attempted
to dig up the incriminating evidence.
They dig... and dig.... and dig. The process
takes nearly two-and-one-half years, and even their Armenians weren't coming up
with the necessary goods. (All the propaganda from the war years were dismissed as
the malarkey they were.) In their frustration, they actually appealed to the shores of America for
proof. What did they come up with?
ZILCH!
To the immense credit of the British and their
respect for the rule of Law, they released every single one of the Ottoman
officials. It would have been enormously easy to make up the evidence, in an attempt
to save face.
This was the precursor to the Nuremberg Trials.
The Ottoman Turks were found INNOCENT.
The case was closed beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Isn't it mysterious that this rare example of a
human tragedy actually winding up in court and getting cleared continues to
still get tried... when countless other human tragedies that have occurred since
have long been forgotten?