US President Joe Biden is getting set to recognise the massacre of Armenians by Ottomans at the start of the 20th century as a 'genocide'.
The announcement is expected to be made later this week when Armenians, both in Armenia and across the globe, hold an international day of remembrance.
The advisors who spoke to CNN say they are fairly sure that Biden will recognise the genocide but said they couldn't be 100% sure.
During the Armenian geocide of 1915 – 1922, over 1 million ethnic Armenians, mostly Christians, were murdered by Islamic Ottoman forces from what is now modern day Turkey. Millions more were forced to flee their homes. The genocide is widely regarded as one of the worst of the 20th century, alongside the Nazi holocaust of Jews and the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
To this day, the Turkish state refuses to accept that the genocide took place and says that 300,000 Armenians died during World War One, but that they were simply war casualties and not the result of organised ethnic cleansing.
Neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump took the step towards recognising the massacre as genocide out of fear of upsetting a key strategic ally in Turkey.
While still a candidate, Biden did say:
"I pledge to support a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide and will make universal human rights a top priority for my administration."
It should be remembered though that Obama also said before his election that he promised:
"With Armenian Americans -- so many of whom are descended from genocide survivor -- a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide."
In recent years, despite NATO membership, Turkey has become a more unpredictable and unreliable ally to the west, going as far as to purchase weapons from Russia. The nation has taken a right-wing ultra-nationalist turn under autocratic president Recep Erdogan who has rolled backed Turkey's secular state and cracked down on opposition parties and journalists. Turkey now has more journalists imprisoned than any other country in the world.
[[h/t: CNN]
COMMENTS