• Biden acknowledges the Armenian genocide.

    Erdogan's Wrath

  • Turkey, Biden to Erdogan: "We want constructive relations to manage disagreements"

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April 24, 2021 - US President Joe Biden formally acknowledged the Ottoman Empire's atrocities against Armenians as genocide.



"Recognizing the Armenian genocide is not blaming Turkey"

Recognizing the Armenian genocide means "confirming history", and "not blaming" Turkey. "But we want this to never happen again": US President Joe Biden said in a statement released by the White House. In the note released by the White House on the 106th anniversary of the start 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 commit 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.



A recognition that arouses the ire of Turkey

Turkey's position has always been that the massacre of Armenians committed during the First World War cannot be configured as a genocide. And the issue has also always been a cause of friction between Ankara and the governments that have recognized the genocide. In April 2019 a shower of criticism came from Turkey to Italy after the approval in the Chamber of a bipartisan motion that commits the government to "officially recognize the Armenian genocide". The Italian ambassador to Ankara, Massimo Gaiani, was summoned to the Turkish foreign ministry, which expressed its disappointment at the motion when it was still under discussion. In November 2000, a resolution of the Chamber of Deputies had already recognized the Armenian genocide.



About twenty countries in the world, the Washington Post reported, recognize the massacre as a genocide, including France, Russia and Canada. In 2019 a resolution to that effect passed in Congress. For the Armenian National Institute website, 30 countries - including Italy and the USA - recognize the Armenian genocide. In 1965, the first state in the world to recognize it was Uruguay. In February 2019, the Ankara government "firmly" condemned the decision of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to declare April 24 a day of commemoration of the Armenian genocide. And today in a tweet, with a photo of the commemoration he attended in Paris, Macron reiterated: "We do not forget. We will fight together against denial, hatred, violence".



In 2015 Pope Francis called the killing of Armenians "the first genocide of the twentieth century", unleashing the wrath of Turkey, where the use of the term 'genocide' is punished with imprisonment under article 301 of the criminal code, which provides for the crime of "insulting Turkish identity". For this reason, the Nobel Literature writer, Orhan Pamuk, and the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, killed by an ultra-nationalist in January 2007. In 2014, the then Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with a gesture without earlier, he offered "condolences to the grandsons of the Armenians killed in 1915", hoping that "the Armenians who lost their lives in the circumstances of the early twentieth century rest in peace".


Two years later, very strong tensions were the corollary to the vote with which the Bundestag almost unanimously approved the resolution that defined the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide.  



The head of Turkish diplomacy Mevlut Cavusoglu attacked the US on Tuesday, warning of damage to bilateral relations. And two days ago in statements reported by the official agency Anadolu Erdogan insisted on Turkey's determination to "continue to defend the truth against the so-called 'Armenian genocide'".



Then yesterday there was a phone call between Biden and Erdogan with the American president who stressed the "interest in constructive bilateral relations with broader areas of cooperation and effective management of disagreements". And the news of the agreement between the two for "a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit in June".       



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, under 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".