to the perpetrators of any crimes "connected to political events" committed between 1914 and 1922. The treaty thus put an end to the effort to prosecute Ottoman war criminals for crimes such as the Armenian genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Greek genocide, and codified impunity for these crimes. Legacy The Treaty of Lausanne led to the international recognition of the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire. As result of the Treaty, the Ottoman public debt was divided between Turkey and the countries which emerged from the former Ottoman Empire. The convention on the Straits lasted for thirteen years and was replaced with the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits in 1936. The customs limitations in the treaty were shortly after reworked. For Greece, the treaty brought to an end the impetus behind the Megali Idea, the notion that modern Greece should encompass those territories in Asia Minor which had been populated with Greek speakers for up to 3000 years and which also formed the core of the Eastern Roman Empire. Hatay Province remained a part of the French Mandate of Syria according to the Treaty of Lausanne, but in 1938 gained its independence as the Hatay State, which later joined Turkey after a referendum in 1939. Political amnesty was given to opponents of the new Turkish regime but the government reserved the right to make 150 exceptions. The 150 personae non gratae of Turkey (mostly descendants of the Ottoman dynasty) slowly acquired citizenship – the last one in 1974. Lloyd George declared the treaty an "abject, cowardly and infamous surrender". Historian Norman Naimark states, "The Lausanne Treaty served as a pivotal international precedent for transferring populations against their will throughout the twentieth century." Historian Ronald Grigor Suny states that the treaty "essentially confirmed the effectiveness of deportations or even murderous ethnic cleansing as a potential solution to population problems". Historian Hans-Lukas Kieser states, "Lausanne tacitly endorsed comprehensive policies of expulsion and extermination of hetero-ethnic and hetero-religious groups, with fatal attraction for German revisionists and many other nationalists". There are conspiracy theories about the treaty. It has been claimed that the treaty was signed to be effective for a century and there are "secret articles" in the treaty regarding Turkey's mining of natural resources. According to the conspiracy theory, the treaty will expire in 2023 and Turkey will be allowed