US President Joe Biden has angered Turkey on Sunday, during Armenian Remembrance Day, describing the mass atrocities by Ottomans in Armenia as genocide after he ended decades of American equivocation a year ago by using the term for the first time to describe this event from the past.
Biden is the first sitting US president to describe the massacres as genocide.
After he used the same term earlier this month to describe Russia’s atrocities committed during its invasion of Ukraine, Biden has used the term ‘genocide’ again to describe the massacres of Armenians during the First World War.
Remembering in his statement the one-and-a-half million Armenians that were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination, and mourning the tragic loss of so many lives, Biden reiterated that the Armenian genocide, one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century, began on April 24, 1915, when the Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.
This comes after the US-Turkey strained relations gradually improved, prompting Erdogan to hail his meeting with Biden last June as a new era of constructive ties with Washington.
Ankara acknowledges that 300,000 Armenians may have died in the tragic events, but strongly rejects that it was genocide.
Denouncing the genocide recognition as groundless and destructive, the Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan had called Biden’s use of the term genocide for the Armenian killings during the First World War the greatest betrayal of peace and justice.
The mass atrocities perpetrated against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire were also officially recognized as genocide by the former GOP senator Jeff Flake before he became US ambassador to Turkey, reversing his earlier positions.
When the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez, asked Flake if he has changed his stance and is ready to reaffirm the Armenian genocide, Flake answered with a resounding yes.
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