Americans of Armenian descent finally got something they’ve waited on for decades: The U.S. officially recognizing what they’ve known for generations.
That their forebears were victims of genocide — or if you prefer the laundered term, ethnic cleansing — at the hands of the Turks. From 1915 to 1922, they knew from kinsmen that at least 1.5 million Armenians were massacred, endured starvation, tortured and interned in labor camps. They were told over the years that another 2 million of their countrymen had their ancestral properties seized and forced into mass migration, walking miles with few possessions in order to save their lives.
All thanks to the tyrannical rule and oppression of the Ottoman Empire. At the time, much of the world ignored the humanitarian crisis which befell the Armenians.
President Joe Biden, making good on a campaign promise, said on Saturday, April 24, the day Armenians mark as the anniversary of their holocaust, that indeed what the Turks did more than a century ago was “genocide.”
“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said, according to The Associated Press. “We affirm the history … to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”
The U.S. acknowledging what the Turks did also is a categorical rejection of a century-long denial of persecution by the Turkish government, a member of NATO and a U.S. ally, at least for the time being. In 1915, the Ottoman Turks labeled Armenians terrorists in order to justify the genocide of a peaceful people.
It’s not like this was a secret. Through the years, 30 countries and 49 U.S. states have recognized what the Turks did in the name of nationalism.
One of those states is Illinois, home to more than 20,000 Armenian Americans, some whose relatives made it to Lake County since the Armenian diaspora. In April 1965, the Illinois House acknowledged the Armenian genocide.
Thousands of Armenians escaped Turkey, finding their way to America. Many first ended up in Waukegan in order to work at the Washburn and Moen Manufacturing Co. The company had moved from Massachusetts to Waukegan in 1891.
Washburn fabricated barbed wire at the mill on the city’s Lake Michigan shoreline. U.S. Steel, which took over the company, closed the wire mill in the early 1970s.
Those first Armenians in the county were centered in Waukegan, but their descendants have since moved about the county, from Gurnee to Lake Forest to Round Lake to Wadsworth and other locations. Every year, their families would mark April 24, Armenian Holocaust Remembrance Day, when Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople, now Istanbul, were rounded up in 1915 by Turkish authorities.
They always knew about the holocaust, one of the world’s first acts of genocide against a specific people. Of course, more would follow: Jews, Cambodians, Ugandans, Bosnian Serbs and the Tutsi of Rwanda, among others.
Biden isn’t the first American president to tackle the Armenian genocide, but it is now part of U.S. policy and a reckoning for Turkey. President Theodore Roosevelt said at the time the Turkish atrocities were “so hideous that it is difficult to name them.” That was before “genocide” was coined in 1944.
Roosevelt’s Turkish ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, reported in a July 1915 State Department cable that, “a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.” He appealed for humanitarian aid for the survivors and refugees, but none came.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan was the first U.S. leader to mention the “Armenian genocide.” Turkish officials were livid back then when Reagan broached the topic.
They got over it. They’ll get over Biden’s insistence that Ottoman Turks violated the basic human rights of a once-free people in 1915.
Just like they conveniently forget about the Armenian holocaust. Which is something we can’t forget in order to make sure there are no others.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.