Government officials say President Joe Biden is preparing to keep a campaign promise and formally acknowledge that the deaths on 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in modern-day Turkey beginning in 1915 was genocide, The Associated Press is reporting.
The move could create further tensions between the United States and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
“My late mother, Serpouhi, was a survivor, my grandparents, my aunt and uncle,” said local attorney and former Pasadena Mayor Bill Paparian. “I’m in tears.”
The Great Crime, as the genocide has come to be called, began in 1915 and, by the time it ended eight years later 1.5 million Armenians had been hanged, beheaded, poisoned, drowned or marched into the desert to die at the hands of soldiers from the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
The Turkish government continues to deny the event ever happened.
But many Armenians still live with pain from the atrocity.
“Among my earliest childhood memories is this one,” Paparian recalled. “I was 5 years old and I was awakened by the sounds of my mother Serpouhi weeping. She was sitting on the couch in our living room in the dark. Tears were cascading down her cheeks. I tried to comfort her. She said ‘Billy Boy, you will never understand what the Turks did to us.’ I will always remember my mother’s tears.”
According to The AP, administration officials had not informed Turkey as of Wednesday, and Biden could still change his mind, according to one official.
The Pasadena-based Gaidz Youth Organization is scheduled to hold a silent prayer vigil at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Pasadena’s Armenian Genocide Memorial located in Memorial Park, near the southeast corner of Walnut Street and Noth Raymond Avenue.
Lawmakers and Armenian-American activists are lobbying Biden to make the announcement on or before Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which will be marked on Saturday.
Past presidents, including Barack Obama, promised to acknowledge the event, but failed to do so after taking office.
Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes later regretted not acknowledging the genocide, according to Politico, and said presidents should acknowledge the event during their first year in office because it gets harder in some ways every year going forward.
Biden could include the acknowledgement of genocide in the annual Remembrance Day proclamation issued by presidents.
Biden’s predecessors have avoided using the word “genocide” in the proclamation commemorating this dark moment in history.
Earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Pasadena) called on Schiff to acknowledge the genocide.
“You know these facts well and you have spoken about them directly, including as a candidate for president,” the letter reads. “As President, it is now in your power to right decades of wrongs and in so doing give meaning to your statement last year, when you acknowledged the genocide and said ‘silence is complicity.’
“As a candidate and now as president, you have spoken of your commitment to human rights. You have spoken of an America who leads, ‘not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.’ If that principle is to have meaning, we cannot waiver from it just because it may be inconvenient,” Schiff wrote.
Locally, there is no denying the genocide took place.
“Armenians are devastated because the Genocide is not only continuously denied, attempts at genocide are continuously occurring against Armenians. As they say, ‘A genocide denied, is a genocide repeated,’” said Alison Ghafari, co-chair of the Gaidz Youth Organization.
“Our hope is that our silent vigil and protest will amplify this message loud and clear, and that our commmunity members regardless if they are Armenian or not, will come together and pray, as well as pay their respects to the martyrs of the 1915 Genocide and the recent Artsakh War,” Ghfari said.
“We are also silently protesting for the Armenian prisoners of war, who are currently being held in violation of the signed ceasefire agreement with Azerbaijan,” she said.
The Pasadena memorial was erected in 2015 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Genocide. At Monday’s City Council meeting, Mayor Victor Gordo read a proclamation acknowledging the Great Crime.
“Since memories fade with time,” Gordo read from the document, “it is important to remind ourselves about human tragedies that have taken place; and whereas those who survived the Armenian genocide and their successors have had to work hard to make these tragic events known to the world, battling cover-ups, misinformation and denial; and whereas as a community, it is appropriate for us to stand together and join our Armenian brothers and sisters in an effort to memorialize their fallen ancestors and to ensure that this horrible act is not repeated.”