The confession of the Armenian genocide.. What does Biden’s historic decision mean?
US President Joe Biden on Saturday recognized the genocide of Armenians, becoming the first US president to describe the killing of 1,5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 as genocide.
“The Americans honor all Armenians who died in the genocide (which took place) 106 years ago today,” he wrote in a statement.
A US official, who declined to be named, said the announcement was “in honor of the victims, not to blame anyone”, while Turkey had warned against resorting to what it described as “slander”.
The United States would thus be No. 30, recognizing the massacres of Armenians by the Ottomans.
According to the website “Armenin Genoussaid” on this sad anniversary, the list of countries recognized includes: Lebanon, Syria, Greece, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, and others.
A month before the 2020 election, Biden’s presidential campaign had said he would recognize the Armenian genocide and make global human rights a top priority of his administration so that such a tragedy would not happen again.
“In 2019, Congress overwhelmingly passed non-binding resolutions in the House and Senate that described the 1915 measures as genocide, but the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump refused to recognize the order.”
For decades, successive US presidents at the White House have avoided describing what happened to the Armenians as genocide, and the official US position has been to characterize what happened as “atrocious acts,” to maintain relations with Turkey, a NATO member state.
But Biden has a personal case for recognizing the massacres of Armenians, having introduced a bill on the definition of genocide in 1987, when he was a senator.
“The expected declaration will be welcomed by Armenian communities, lawmakers, and human rights defenders who have pressed for it, but it will also harm already strained relations with Turkey.”
The symbolically-loaded ad, according to The New York Times, equates the Ottomans’ genocide in Rwanda in 1994 with that of the Nazis in World War II.
The newspaper argues that Turkey’s dire economic situation and its need for America make Erdoğan’s options limited.
Two novels
Armenians assert that 1.5 million of their ancestors were systematically killed shortly before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, while a number of historians with some 30 countries acknowledged the genocide.
About half a million Armenians survived and scattered throughout the world.
Turkey refuses to consider the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as “genocide.” It says that the Sultanate witnessed at the end of its era a civil war that coincided with a famine, which led to the death of between 300 thousand and 500 thousand Armenians and a similar number of Turks when the Ottoman forces and Russia were fighting for control of Anatolia.
In the city of Istanbul, a military museum dedicated a room to “Turkish-Armenian relations,” though full of historical images, none of them depicts a dead Armenian, but rather pictures documenting the bodies of Turkish soldiers who Turkey says were tortured and killed by “Armenian gangs.”
Some historians believe that this behavior reflects Turkey’s insistence, as heir to the Ottoman Empire, to deny what happened.
It has even gone as far as prosecuting those who use the term “genocide” in Turkey.
“Although some Turkish leaders have sometimes deplored the killings, Turkey denies that they constitute genocide and strongly opposes anyone using the term to describe the period.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said a few days ago in anticipation of Biden’s announcement that Turkey would “continue to defend the facts against the so-called Armenian genocide lie and those who support this politically motivated slander.”
Major Crime
Yet many historians agree that what the Ottoman Turkish forces did to the Armenians amounts to genocide, the first in the twentieth century.
According to Mareikh, the genocide continued between spring 1915 and autumn 1916, with Armenians calling what they suffered a “major crime” or “catastrophe”.
Ironically, the term “genocide” at the UN was coined by a Polish lawyer named Rafael Lemkin, influenced by news of the Ottoman crimes against Armenians, but so far the whole world has not recognized these atrocities, the Armenians say.
The majority of the killings of Armenians were committed by Ottoman government forces, who sought to inculcate Muslim Turks in the Anatolia region.
Genocide included mass executions, others had died during mass deportations as a result of famine and disease, and thousands of Armenian children had been robbed of their families.
“Thousands of Armenians were forcibly transferred to Syria, allegedly to help Russian forces fighting the Ottoman Empire, and placed in detention camps.”
