Report: Biden Tells Turkish President Erdogan He Will Recognize Armenian Genocide

In a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Friday, President Joe Biden told the Turkish leader that he plans to recognize the mass killing and displacement of more than 1.5 million Armenians that occurred over a hundred years ago as genocide, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The White House did not discuss the topic of Biden’s potential declaration in a statement regarding Biden’s first call of his term with Erdoğan. The White House said that Biden told the Turkish president that he is interested in a “constructive bilateral relationship with expanded areas of cooperation and effective management of disagreements.”

The New York Times reported that Biden is set to make the official declaration on Saturday, likely upsetting Turkish leaders like Erdoğan who have pushed back on using the term “genocide” to describe what happened to the Armenians. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that officials said Biden is expected to describe the deportation, starvation, and massacres of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks beginning in 1915 as genocide.

In early 2019, Erdoğan reportedly said in a Twitter post that “the relocation of the Armenian gangs and their supporters, who massacred the Muslim people, including women and children, in eastern Anatolia, was the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period.”

Erdoğan said in a statement Thursday that Turkey “will continue to defend truths against the so-called Armenian genocide lie and those who support this slander with political motivations,” NPR reported.

The Armenian Assembly of America states that April 24th is the day that the Armenian Genocide is commemorated around the globe. The group includes the importance of acknowledging the massacre as genocide on their website, writing, “Unequivocally affirming the Armenian Genocide would honor the more than 1.5 million Armenians who were massacred. It would also serve to remember this proud chapter in America’s history of helping to save the survivors. We must remember atrocities to prevent them from occurring again.”

According to the online Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Armenian Genocide refers to the efforts to deport and kill massive numbers of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire by the Young Turk government during World War I (between 1914 and 1918). Armenians claim that the campaign was a deliberate venture to destroy the Armenian people and, therefore, was an act of genocide. However, the Turkish government has pushed back on calls to recognize the events in those terms. It has conceded that atrocities occurred, but there was no official extermination policy that was carried out against the Armenians as a unit.

President Reagan was the only president to speak of the devastating events as genocide in a declaration remembering the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan stated, “Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it — and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples — the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.” Many of Reagan’s successors have made claims that they would recognize the Armenian genocide when they are elected, but none have officially done so. On April 24, presidents have released statements commemorating the day of remembrance, but none since have referred to it as “genocide.”

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, at the end of his presidential campaign, Biden’s campaign said that he would “recognize the Armenian genocide and make universal human rights a top priority for his administration so that such a tragedy can never again occur.”

On Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day last year, Biden put out a statement regarding the commemoration of the tragedy.

Biden stated, “Today we remember the atrocities faced by the Armenian people in the Metz Yeghern — the Armenian Genocide…We must never forget or remain silent about this horrific and systematic campaign of extermination. And we will forever respect the perseverance of the Armenian people in the wake of such tragedy.”

His statement continued, “It is particularly important to speak these words and commemorate this history at a moment when we are reminded daily of the power of truth, and of our shared responsibility to stand against hate — because silence is complicity. If we do not fully acknowledge, commemorate, and teach our children about genocide, the words ‘never again’ lose their meaning. The facts must be as clear and as powerful for future generations as for those whose memories are seared by tragedy. Failing to remember or acknowledge the fact of a genocide only paves the way for future mass atrocities.”

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