Saturday, April 24, 2021

UPDATED
Biden makes history by declaring killings of Armenians a 'genocide'

President Joe Biden formally recognized the Ottoman Empire's killing and deportation of Armenians over a century ago as a genocide, breaking from his predecessors and risking inflaming tensions with Turkey.

Biden is expected to become 1st US president to officially recognize Armenian genocide



Biden had pledged as a presidential candidate to recognize the Armenians' treatment, which took place in modern-day Turkey, as genocide. Armenian-Americans have long called on U.S. presidents to do so, but Turkey, a key NATO ally, has warned the U.S. against it, long maintaining that the violence was part of bloody clashes during World War I.

The Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said "we reject and denounce in the strongest terms" Biden's designation, adding it "will open a deep wound that undermines our mutual trust and friendship."

© Turkish Presidency via AP, FILE In this March 24, 2021, file photo, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gestures as he delivers a speech during his ruling party's congress inside a packed sports hall in Ankara, Turkey.

Ties between the two allies have been increasingly strained in recent years, although Biden finally spoke to Erdogan Friday -- their first call during Biden's tenure -- and conveyed "his interest in a constructive bilateral relationship with expanded areas of cooperation and effective management of disagreements."

Biden used the word "genocide" in a statement to mark "Armenian Remembrance Day" on Saturday -- 106 years after the events that the Armenian diaspora considers the start of the genocide. Previous presidents had avoided using the label even as they made the traditional, annual proclamation honoring the anniversary.

"Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring," Biden said in the statement. "The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today," he added.

The statement was expected, especially after then-candidate Biden marked last year's remembrance day by saying, "Silence is complicity."

© Universal Images Group via Getty Images An encampment of Armenian refugees on the deck of a French cruiser that rescued them, 1915.

"If we do not fully acknowledge, commemorate, and teach our children about genocide, the words 'never again' lose their meaning," he wrote, pledging to back a congressional resolution that recognized the Ottoman Empire's actions as genocide. Resolutions to recognize the genocide passed the House and Senate in 2019, but former President Donald Trump, like his predecessors, never joined them.

On Wednesday, over 100 bipartisan members of Congress sent a letter to Biden calling on him to use his proclamation to officially label what happened a "genocide."

The Ottoman Turks deported around 2 million Armenians starting in 1915. Around 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have been killed.

The Turkish government agrees that fighting during the war killed many, but it has long denied that the treatment of the Christian Armenians by the Muslim Ottomans amounted to genocide and says that the death toll was lower.

Over two-dozen countries have recognized the atrocities as genocide, according to the Armenian National Institute, a Washington-based group that advocates for the genocide designation.

Biden's statement carries no legal implication, and even if the State Department were to follow up with a formal declaration, there are no automatic sanctions or other penalties that kick in. On its final day with former President Donald Trump in office, the Trump administration declared the Chinese government's treatment of Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities as genocide, without implementing sanctions.
© Karen Minasyan/AFP via Getty Images, FILE People visit the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, Armenian, on Oct. 30, 2019.

But the comments will rattle U.S.-Turkish relations, already on ice over a litany of disagreements, and could damage relations between Biden and Erdogan, who had a warm relationship with Trump. Trump often touted his "friendship" with the strongman president and repeatedly pulled punches against his government until his hand was forced by political pressure, including from congressional Republicans.

His administration sanctioned Turkish government officials and its defense procurement agency in December for the purchase of a Russian missile system -- years after those sanctions were obligated and only after Congress voted to push him a week prior. After seeming to give Erdogan a green light, he also sanctioned senior Turkish officials for their incursion into northern Syria against Kurdish forces that fought alongside U.S. troops against ISIS.

© Karen Minasyan/AFP via Getty ImagesMORE: Biden's foreign policy moves raise bipartisan eyebrows: The Note

For its part, Turkey's government has long urged the U.S. to hand over Fetullah Gulen, a cleric who has lawful permanent residency in Pennsylvania and whom Erdogan has accused of fomenting a 2016 coup d'état against him. Turkey also views those Syrian Kurdish forces as an existential threat because of their ties to Turkish Kurds that Turkey and the U.S. have designated a terrorist group -- condemning U.S. support as a betrayal.

Little of that tension was expected to improve under Biden, who spoke to Erdogan Friday after what some analysts considered a cold shoulder. The two leaders agreed to meet on the sidelines of a NATO summit in June "to discuss the full range of bilateral and regional issues," the White House said, although it's unclear whether they discussed Biden's genocide comment in advance.


Armenians commemorate WWI-era massacres the US is set to designate as genocide

AFP 4/24/2021

Thousands of Armenians flocked Saturday to a memorial of the World War I-era mass killings of their kin by Ottoman Turks, the bloodletting which US President Joe Biden is reportedly set to recognise as genocide.

© Karen MINASYAN Armenians joined a torchlight procession to mark the 106th anniversary of the mass killings

© Karen MINASYAN Armenians call the massacres Meds Yeghern -- the Great Crime

Biden's landmark move risks further inflaming Washington's tensions with NATO ally Turkey.

Armenians have long sought to have the killings of up to 1.5 million of their kin during the Ottoman Empire's collapse internationally recognised as genocide.

The claim is supported by many other countries, but fiercely rejected by Turkey.

Yerevan has also demanded financial compensation from Ankara and the restoration of property rights for the descendants of those killed in the 1915-1918 massacres.

Turkey denies the killings' genocidal nature, arguing that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.

Biden, who during his decades as a senator forged close relations with the Armenian-American and Greek-American communities, promised during his presidential campaign to recognize the Armenian genocide.

© Karen MINASYAN Armenians set fire to a Turkish flag in Yerevan

- 'Great Crime' -


So far, at least 29 countries -- including Russia and France -- have recognised the atrocities as genocide.

On the "anniversary of the Armenian genocide, my whole thoughts are with Armenia ravaged by history... We will never forget," French President Emmanuel Macron wrote to his Armenian counterpart Armen Sarkisian on Thursday.
© STAFF Map of the Ottoman Empire detailing the deportation and mass killings of Armenians in 1915-1917

On Saturday, the procession marking the massacres' 106th anniversary stretched from central Yerevan to a hilltop Tsitsernakaberd memorial where the head of Armenia's Apostolic Church, Catholicos Garegin, celebrated a requiem mass.

Armenians commemorate the massacres of their people on April 24 -- the day in 1915 when thousands of Armenian intellectuals suspected of harboring nationalist sentiment and being hostile to Ottoman rule were rounded up.

Anger against Turkey simmered among Armenians as crowds of people carrying candles and flowers joined the annual procession to remember the victims of the massacres, which Armenians call Meds Yeghern -- the Great Crime.

Armenia is traumatised by last year's defeat in a war with Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, in which Ankara backed its ally Baku.

- 'Old wound bleeds' -

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called the war -- that erupted in September and ended six weeks later with a Russian brokered ceasefire -- "the Azeri-Turkish aggression which sought to annihilate the Armenian trace" in Karabakh.

"Turkey's expansionist foreign policy, and the territorial aspirations towards Armenia are the evidence of the revival of their genocidal ideology," he said in a statement.

"Armenophobia is in the essence of Pan-Turkism, and today we can see its most disgusting manifestations in Azerbaijan as fostered by the authorities of that country."

Arms supplies from Turkey helped the Azerbaijan army win a decisive victory in the war.

Under a truce agreement -- which was seen in Armenia as a national humiliation -- Yerevan ceded to Baku swathes of territory it had controlled for decades.

"The old wound opened up and bleeds," 72-year-old Sonik Petrosyan told AFP, speaking of the war that has claimed the lives of some 6,000 people.

"Armenians must stand united so that our country re-emerges strong from these hardships," the pensioner said as she laid flowers at the eternal flame at the centre of the monument commemorating the mass killings.

On Friday evening, about 10,000 people staged an annual torch-lit march in central Yerevan to mark the anniversary, with activists of the nationalist Dashnaktsutyun party -– who led the procession -- burning Turkish and Azerbaijani flags.

mkh-im/tgb

Armenia: What to know about the mass killings a century ago
By Laura Smith-Spark, CNN 
4/24/2021

The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War I -- and the question of whether it should be called a genocide -- remains highly contentious a century after the event.
© Karen Minasyan/AFP/Getty Images People visit the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan on October 30, 2019. - Armenians on October 30, 2019 rejoiced over the historic vote in the US House of Representatives that recognised as "genocide" mass killings of ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire a century ago. (Photo by KAREN MINASYAN / AFP) (Photo by KAREN MINASYAN/AFP via Getty Images)

The issue is an emotional one, both for Armenians, many of whose forebears were killed, and for Turks, the heirs to the Ottomans. For both groups, the question touches as much on national identity as on historical facts.

Some Armenians feel their nationhood cannot be fully recognized unless the truth of what happened to their people, beginning in April 1915, is acknowledged. Some Turks still view the Armenians as having been a threat to the Ottoman Empire in a time of war, and say many people of various ethnicities -- including Turks -- were killed in the chaos of conflict.

© BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images People march with Armenian flags as they commemorate the 103rd anniversary of the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman forces on April 24, 2018, in Marseille, France.

In addition, some Turkish leaders fear that acknowledgment of a genocide could lead to demands for huge reparations.

The declaration by US President Joe Biden on Saturday that it was a "genocide" risks a potential fracture with Turkey -- but will fulfill a campaign pledge of his and signal a commitment to human rights.

© DENIS SINYAKOV/AFP/Getty Images Armenians living in Moscow view photographs of Armenian victims of mass killings by Ottoman Turks during a memorial on 23 April, 2005, at the building site of a new Armenian Cathedral in Moscow.

April 24, known as Red Sunday, is commemorated as Genocide Remembrance Day by Armenians around the world.


What was the backdrop to the mass killings?

The Ottoman Turks, having recently entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were worried that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire would offer wartime assistance to Russia. Russia had long coveted control of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which controlled access to the Black Sea -- and therefore access to Russia's only year-round seaports.

Many historians agree that about 2 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at the time the killings began. However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as they marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.
© ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/AFP/Getty Images Armenian clergy and activists react after German lawmakers vote to recognise the Armenian genocide after a debate in the Bundestag in Berlin on June 2, 2016.

By 1914, Ottoman authorities were already portraying Armenians as a threat to the empire's security.


Then, on the night of April 23-24, 1915, the authorities in Constantinople, the empire's capital, rounded up about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. Many of them ended up deported or assassinated.


How many Armenians were killed?


This is a major point of contention. Estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million deaths between 1914 and 1923, with not all of the victims in the Ottoman Empire. But most estimates -- including one of 800,000 between 1915 and 1918, made by Ottoman authorities themselves -- fall between 600,000 and 1.5 million.

The government in Turkey puts the number of dead Armenians at 300,000.

Whether due to killings or forced deportation, the number of Armenians living in Turkey fell from 2 million in 1914 to under 400,000 by 1922.

While the death toll is in dispute, there are a number of photographs from the era documenting mass killings. Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt.

Victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been loaded into boats, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. Rape, too, was frequently reported.

In addition, according to the website of the Armenian National Institute, "The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger."


Was genocide a crime at the time?


Although the mass killings of Armenians are said by some scholars and others to have been the first genocide of the 20th century, "genocide" was not even a word at the time, much less a legally defined crime.

The term was invented in 1944 by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazis' systematic attempt to eradicate Jews from Europe. He formed the word by combining the Greek word for race with the Latin word for killing.

Genocide became a crime in 1948, when the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The definition included acts meant "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."


Who regards the mass killings as genocide?


Armenia, the Vatican, the European Parliament, France, Germany, Russia, Canada, Argentina and the United States are among dozens of states and other bodies formally to have recognized what happened as genocide. Britain is among those that have not.

The government of Turkey often registers complaints when foreign governments describe the event using the word "genocide." They maintain that it was wartime and there were losses on both sides.

Ankara also insists there was no systematic attempt to destroy a people.


What is the US position?


Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump both avoided using the word genocide in order not to anger Ankara.

But Biden has apparently determined that relations with Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan -- which have deteriorated over the past several years anyway -- should not prevent the use of a term that would validate the plight of Armenians more than a century ago and signal a commitment to human rights today.

Biden told Erdoğan on Friday that he planned to recognize the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as a genocide, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

Readouts from the White House and Turkish presidency did not mention the issue. The call was Biden's first with his Turkish counterpart since taking office in January.

In 2019, both the US House of Representatives and the Senate passed a resolution formally recognizing the mass killings as genocide. Prior to the resolution's passage in the Senate, the Trump administration had asked Republican senators to block the move several times on the grounds that it could undercut negotiations with Turkey.


                                         
                                         

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