Joe Biden acknowledged the Armenian genocide, a gesture so far never made by any American president. In a note released by the White House on the day of the 106th anniversary of the beginning of the massacres carried out by the Ottoman Empire, we read: “Every year, this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman era and we we pledge again to prevent such atrocities from happening again ”. “We honor the victims of Meds Yeghern (Great Evil), so that the horrors of what happened are never lost in history,” Biden writes.
“Starting on April 24, 1915 with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by the Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred or marched to their death in extermination camps”, Biden recalled in his message. The American president phoned his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyp Erdogan yesterday expressing his interest in “constructive relations”. According to the media, Biden also anticipated Erdogan’s intention to explicitly refer to the “genocide” of Armenians, which Turkey has always officially denied.
The replica
The harsh Turkish reaction was not long in coming. on Twitter, the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, wrote: «Words cannot change or rewrite history. We cannot take lessons from anyone about our history. Political opportunism is the greatest betrayal of peace and justice. We totally reject this explanation, whose only basis is populism ».
History
The Armenians trace the beginning of the genocide to the night between 23 and 24 April 1915, when the Ottoman government ordered the arrest and execution of 50 intellectuals and leaders of the Armenian community, on the pretext that they were “a fifth column “of the Russians. After that first episode, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported and killed at the end of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917. According to historians’ estimates, the victims of those massacres were at least 1.5 million. Ankara acknowledges that large numbers of Armenians were killed by the Turks during that period, but disputes the idea that there was a plan to exterminate them, thus rejecting the term “genocide”.