Originally published 2021-04-22.
On 24 April 2021, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, Joe Biden became the first sitting US president to formally describe the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide. In a written statement he said the American people honoured all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years earlier. Turkey rejected the statement, but relations did not break down, and the move closed a decades-long debate inside Washington.
Below is the background to that decision, why earlier presidents avoided the word, and what the recognition did and did not change.
What happened to the Armenians, 1915 to 1923
During the First World War, the Ottoman government, led by the Committee of Union and Progress, organised the destruction of the empire's Armenian population. The campaign is usually dated from 24 April 1915, when hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were arrested in Constantinople (today's Istanbul). Most of them were later killed.
Across Anatolia, Armenian men were often shot outright. Women, children and the elderly were sent on deportation marches towards the Syrian desert with almost no food or water, and huge numbers died of hunger, exhaustion, disease and massacre along the way. Survivors were held in camps where many more perished. Historians estimate that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed, and that tens of thousands of women and children were forcibly converted and absorbed into Muslim households. Violence against survivors continued into the early 1920s.
Assyrians and Ottoman Greeks suffered parallel campaigns of mass killing and deportation in the same period. Genocide scholars broadly agree that what happened to the Armenians meets the legal definition of genocide, and the subject is a cornerstone of the field.
Why US presidents avoided the word
The United States had touched the subject before. Ronald Reagan used the word "genocide" in a 1981 speech, and in 2019 both houses of Congress passed resolutions recognising the Armenian Genocide: the House voted 405 to 11 on 29 October, and the Senate agreed unanimously on 12 December. Those votes were symbolic, though, and the White House at the time did not adopt the term.
For decades the obstacle was Turkey. It has been a NATO ally since 1952, it hosts the strategically important Incirlik air base, and it sits between Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Successive administrations worried that formal recognition would damage cooperation on security, refugees and regional conflicts. Barack Obama, who had promised as a candidate to recognise the genocide, used the Armenian phrase Meds Yeghern ("Great Crime") in his April statements instead, which disappointed many Armenian Americans.
Biden had made a clear campaign pledge to support recognition and to put human rights at the centre of his foreign policy. By 2021 the political cost of keeping that promise had also changed, as relations with Ankara were already strained.
How the announcement unfolded
In the days before 24 April, US officials briefed news outlets including CNN that the president was expected to use the word, while stressing that the decision was not final. On 23 April Biden phoned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, their first call since the inauguration, and told him what he planned to do.
The statement itself was released the following day. It honoured the victims, expressed respect for the survivors and their descendants, and said that the aim was to make sure such atrocities were never repeated, not to cast blame. Armenian communities in Yerevan, Los Angeles, Paris, Beirut and elsewhere marked the anniversary with marches and memorial services, and many described the US statement as long-awaited justice.
Turkey's position and reaction
The Turkish state accepts that many Armenians died during the war, but it rejects the term genocide. Its official line is that the deaths resulted from wartime conditions, disease, intercommunal fighting and relocations it describes as a legitimate security measure, and that Muslims also suffered heavily in the same years. Turkish official accounts put the Armenian death toll far below the figures used by most historians.
Ankara's foreign ministry said Biden's statement had no scholarly or legal basis, and Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu wrote that Turkey had "nothing to learn from anybody on our own past." The US ambassador was summoned. Despite fears voiced beforehand of a rupture in relations, the two governments continued to work together within NATO, and Biden and Erdoğan met in person at the NATO summit that June.
The wider context of US–Turkish tension
By 2021 the alliance was already under strain. Turkey had bought the Russian S-400 air-defence system, which led the US to remove it from the F-35 fighter programme and, in December 2020, to impose sanctions on its defence procurement agency. Washington and Ankara also disagreed over Syria, where the US worked with Kurdish-led forces that Turkey regards as terrorists.
Inside Turkey, rights groups criticised the government's treatment of opposition politicians and the press. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Turkey was holding 37 journalists in prison on 1 December 2020, second only to China, although the number had fallen from the peak that followed the failed coup of 2016.
What recognition does and does not do
A presidential statement is not a law and creates no legal claims for compensation or territory. Its weight is moral and historical: it aligns the official US position with the view of historians and of the Armenian diaspora, many of whom are descendants of survivors.
Uruguay was the first country to recognise the genocide, in 1965. Cyprus raised the issue at the United Nations and recognised it repeatedly from 1975, and Greece recognised it in 1996; both treat denial as an offence. Today more than thirty countries, along with the European Parliament, use the term. For many Armenians the US step mattered because denial is often described as the final stage of genocide: being heard by the world's most powerful country felt like a form of repair.
Biden repeated the recognition in his statements in the following years, so it became the standing US position rather than a one-off gesture.
Sources: Al Jazeera, Joe Biden officially recognises Armenian genocide (24 April 2021); CNN, original report on the expected recognition (21 April 2021); Armenian genocide (Wikipedia); Armenian genocide recognition (Wikipedia); Committee to Protect Journalists, 2020 prison census.
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