The New York Times published an article on ‘The Armenian Genocide, in History and Politics’, referring to US President Joe Biden’s annual address in which he used the term ‘genocide’.
The newspaper writes that after years of avoiding the topic, the U.S. government now officially views the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire a century ago as genocide.
At the risk of infuriating Turkey, President Biden formally announced on Saturday that the United States regards the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks more than a century ago to be a genocide - the most monstrous of crimes.
Mr. Biden was the first American president to make such an announcement, breaking with predecessors who did not wish to antagonize Turkey, a NATO ally and a strategically pivotal country straddling Europe and the Middle East.
The announcement carries enormous symbolic weight, equating the anti-Armenian violence with atrocities on the scale of those committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia and Rwanda.
Use of the term is a moral slap at President Tayyip Recep Erdogan of Turkey, a fervent denier of the genocide. He has fulminated at other leaders, including Pope Francis, for describing the Armenian killings that way.
The New York Times explains the origin and meaning of the term ‘genocide’. It is generally defined as the deliberate killing of people who belong to a particular racial, political or cultural group, with the intent to destroy that group.
The term did not exist until 1944, when a Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, combined the Greek word for race or tribe, “geno,” with “-cide,” from the Latin word for killing. Mr. Lemkin said the killings of the Armenians and the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis shaped his thinking. The term was incorporated into a 1948 United Nations treaty that made genocide a crime under international law.
Then the New York Times’ article explains what the Armenian Genocide was, presenting the whole truth. Violence against ethnic Armenians is rooted in history of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey, which now borders Armenia, a landlocked country that was once part of the Russian Empire.
Starting in 1915, the Ottomans, aligned with Germany in World War I, sought to prevent Armenians from collaborating with Russia and ordered mass deportations. As many as 1.5 million ethnic Armenians died from starvation, killings by Ottoman Turk soldiers and the police, and forced exoduses south into what is now Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The Armenian deaths were once considered the first genocide of the 20-th century. Turkey’s government has acknowledged that atrocities were committed during that period but has argued that a large number of Turks were also killed and that the Armenian casualty figures are wildly exaggerated.
Why had U.S. presidents refrained from calling the Armenian killings a genocide? Some have come close. President Ronald Reagan tangentially referred to the “genocide of the Armenians” in an April 22, 1981, statement commemorating the liberation of the Nazi death camps. But American presidents have generally avoided describing the killings this way to avoid any backlash from Turkey that would endanger its cooperation in regional conflicts or diplomacy.
