ALEDONIA — More than 100 years ago, the government of what is now Turkey caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Armenian people.
But on Saturday, President Joe Biden officially acknowledged that the killings were “genocide.” Several presidential candidates had promised they would acknowledge it but did not keep the promise.
Armenian Americans locally and nationwide are wondering if anything will come of Biden’s move, if any difference will actually be made. If the U.S. acknowledges the atrocities, will Turkey finally do the same, allowing for common ground between Armenians and Turks?
“In the end, we want Turkey to acknowledge it, to make peace with Armenians,” said Rev. Avedis Kalayjian, pastor at St. Mesrob Armenian Church, 4605 Erie St. “We’re neighbors. We want Turks and Armenians to get along.”
The statement from President Joe Biden, part of his administration’s promise to make human rights internationally a priority, acknowledging the genocide was cheered. His acknowledgement, in part, reads: “Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination.”
American leaders have more or less refused to call the mass deaths a “genocide” for fear of angering the Turks, a major U.S. ally in southwest Asia.
But, unlike the Germans, who have taken responsibility for the murder of millions during the Holocaust, Turkey has always denied it. Turkey claims the deaths of Armenians were the result of World War I directly, and not mass killings and death marches, despite there being photographs and other records of such atrocities as Turkey attempted to purge the Christian Armenian minority.
Even if there may be no one left alive who actually remembers the genocide, it doesn’t feel like ancient history to many. A large proportion of Armenian Americans learned about the horrors from their parents or grandparents.
“We’d heard these stories over and over from our grandparents, those who are willing to talk about it,” Kalayjian said.
That’s why, for the Armenian American community, official acknowledgment “is a matter of seeking justice and a sense of healing and kind of closing a chapter and possibly opening up a new one,” Kalayjian said. “I think most Armenians would like to see some kind of reconciliation with Turkey, but it’s hard to see what that would look like because the emotions run so high even a century later.”
In September 2020, Turks from the Republic of Azerbaijan began military attacks against a small mountainous region — which the Turks call “Nagorno-Karabakh,” while Armenians know it as “Artsakh” — that is almost entirely populated by ethnic Armenians.
The violence against Artsakh, which lasted for more than a month and left thousands dead, soured relations between the two peoples even further. That’s on top of a century of Turks officially denying any role in the deaths of about 2 million Armenians, along with other hostilities, expulsions and violence over the past century.
One of the reasons Kalayjian thinks that past American presidents feared admitting there was a genocide is America’s decades-long reliance on Turkey as an ally in the Middle East. That relationship was not only because of Turkey’s role in the trade of oil but also the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the ongoing War on Terror. But then earlier this month, Biden said he plans to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, signaling another step toward a possible end of active U.S. deployments in the Middle East, which would be another distancing between the U.S. and Turkey.
The U.S. has been ostensibly on the side of the Armenians for a long time. In 1920, President Woodrow Wilson called for the establishment of an Armenian homeland that never came to fruition; the arguments for such a country were made successfully on behalf of Israel after World War II.
Ronald Reagan said “the genocide of the Armenians” in a speech once in 1981, but then four years later asked Congress to not pass a resolution recognizing the “genocidal massacre.” Reagan claimed doing so would “reward terrorism,” as a small faction of Armenians who had been demanding a homeland had carried out attacks against Turks.
That was among the first times (but not the first time) a president appeared he would give Armenians the recognition they deserved, but then got cold feet over fear of irking the Turks.
Gerald Ford, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all acknowledged the genocide before becoming president, but then stood in in the way of acknowledgements after entering the White House and having to deal with Turkey directly.
That prevaricating has irked many Armenian Americans, leaving them felt uncared-for by their own government even if both houses of Congress had at long last stated the truth.
“It gives you a window into how government works and how special interests can manipulate,” said Kalayjian, who grew up near Washington, D.C., after his parents came to the U.S. from Syria, where many Armenians fled amid fear of death under Turkish rule.
Both houses of Congress had already issued resolutions acknowledging the atrocities, despite objections from both the Turkish government and from the administration of former President Donald Trump. That 2019 declaration from Congress, “for the (Armenian American) community, was very psychologically satisfying,” Kalayjian said. “At least for some people, it is a part of healing … to have their adoptive country, as Armenian Americans, recognize this.”
Wisconsin — with a significant Armenian American population, particularly in and around Racine — has long been ahead of the curve in acknowledging the genocide. Two governors — Patrick Lucey in 1973 and Tommy Thompson in 1990 — issued proclamations regarding the genocide; then, seven times between 1990 and 2015, either the Senate or the Assembly acknowledged it through resolutions, according to the Armenian National Committee of America.