“We commemorate the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and are committed to preventing the recurrence of such crimes,” Baiden said in a statement.
As early as December 2019, the US Congress declared the Armenian massacre a genocide in a symbolic vote, but recently more than 100 members of the House of Representatives, chaired by Adam Chiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called on the campaign to honor the Armenian massacre.
Biden’s actions are expected to further exacerbate US relations with NATO’s ally Turkey, which is reacting sharply to decisions already taken by a number of countries, including France and Russia.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlit Chavushoglu, warned earlier this week that “statements that are not legally binding will be of no use, but will harm relations. If the United States wants to worsen relations, it is up to them.”
On April 24, 1915, the authorities of the then Ottoman Empire arrested hundreds of members of the Armenian intelligentsia, many of whom were killed immediately. This was followed by Armenian riots and massacres throughout the empire, as well as an order to move Armenians en masse from Asia Minor through the desert to Mesopotamia and Syria. Thousands of deported Armenians lost their lives due to illness, famine, bandit attacks and the brutal treatment of accompanying soldiers.
According to Armenian historians, about one and a half million Armenians were killed in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. In historic Armenia, in northeastern Turkey, the Armenian community was completely destroyed by genocide and deportations.
Armenia is demanding that modern-day Turkey acknowledge the genocide, but Ankara categorically refuses to do so, and continues to hold the view that the number of Armenian casualties is around half a million, not one and a half million, according to Yerevan.
Turkey also claims that, in fact, during the First World War, the struggle between the Ottoman and Russian empires for control of eastern Anatolia killed as many Turks as hundreds of thousands.
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