(AFP) – US President Donald Trump on Thursday steered clear of describing the Ottoman Empire’s World War I-era mass killings of Armenians as “genocide,” a reversal from his predecessor Joe Biden. Turkey, whose leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has forged close ties with Trump, has long denied genocide and angrily sought to block any international use of the term.
In an annual message issued by presidents on the tragedy’s anniversary, Trump said that the American people “honor the memories of those wonderful souls who suffered in one of the worst disasters of the 20th century.” Biden, in 2021, became the first president to recognize the genocide, writing: “The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today.” Biden, who throughout his political career had a tight relationship with Armenian Americans, used similar formulations throughout his presidency and directly told Erdogan that he would use the term genocide.
Armenian American activists voiced outrage at Trump’s language and noted that he had promised to support Armenians, who are overwhelmingly Christian, after Turkish-aligned Azerbaijan seized the Nagorno-Karabakh breakaway enclave dominated by the community in 2023. “President Trump’s retreat from US recognition of the Armenian genocide represents a disgraceful surrender to Turkish threats,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America. “President Trump’s omission is not a diplomatic oversight — but rather a deliberate retreat from truth and a dangerous signal of US tolerance for ongoing anti-Armenian violence,” he said in a statement. “It mirrors his first administration’s shameful record of silence and complicity.”
Asked why Trump did not use the term genocide, National Security Council spokesman James Hewitt said: “These horrific events were one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.” He added: “That is why the US government acknowledges that 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were deported, massacred or marched to their deaths in the final days of the Ottoman Empire.”
According to Armenia and most mainstream Western historians, up to 1.5 million people died between 1915 and 1916 when the Ottoman authorities, struggling on the battlefield, repressed the Armenian minority which it saw as traitors in league with Russia. They were either killed or sent on deadly marches into the Syrian desert, deprived of food and water. Turkey denies that the killings were systematic or genocide. It estimates Armenian deaths at 300,000 to 500,000 and claims that as many Turks died in civil strife after many Armenians sided with invading Russian forces.
Both houses of the US Congress in 2019 nearly unanimously declared that the United States recognizes an Armenian genocide, leading Trump’s State Department to issue a statement that the administration’s stance “has not changed” against using the term. Other major countries that recognize an Armenian genocide include France and Russia, which both have close ties with Armenia, and Germany, which has long been sensitive to the issue due to its Nazi past.
Trump administration officials have often accused Biden of jeopardizing US interests by focusing on human rights, instead suggesting to only raise the issue as a cudgel against US adversaries. At the end of Trump’s first term, the State Department declared that China was committing genocide against its mostly Muslim Uyghur minority due to mass incarceration camps, charges strongly denied by Beijing.
– Shaun TANDON
© 2024 AFP
