Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on April 26 condemned US President Joe Biden’s recognition of the Armenian genocide, saying the move would have a “devastating effect” on relations between the two countries.
Speaking on television after the cabinet meeting, Erdogan pointed to the deaths of millions of Native Americans and told Biden to “look in the mirror” before accusing the Turkish nation of genocide.
“You cannot stand up and label the Turkish nation as genocide,” Erdogan said in his first keynote address.
On April 24, Biden became the first US president to use the word genocide in his official statement to describe the massacre and deportation of Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. This date marks the anniversary of the gathering in Istanbul on April 24, 1915, of thousands of Armenian intellectuals suspected of hostility to the Ottoman government.
Previous US administrations have refrained from using the term genocide for decades to avoid provoking Turkey, a NATO ally and important regional power.
However, Biden felt an opportunity to “historically acknowledge what happened in 1915” on the basis of “deep respect for the importance of universal human rights,” US Ambassador to Armenia Lynn Tracy told RFE / RL’s Armenian Service. April 26.
Describing Biden’s position as “baseless and contradictory,” Erdogan reiterated Turkey’s position that the issue should be left to historians, not politicians. For years, Turkey has said it will open its archives to a joint history commission to address the problem.
“We believe that these comments were included in the declaration after pressure from radical Armenian groups and anti-Turkish circles. However, this situation does not reduce the destructive impact of these comments,” Erdogan said.
He added that he would meet with Biden during the NATO summit in June to discuss “opening a new door” in relations.
“Now we need to look at what steps we can take towards the future. Otherwise, we will have no choice but to implement the policy required by the new low level, which has sunk our relations. “
Tense US-Turkish relations
Biden’s statement comes at a time when relations between Turkey and the United States are already strained over Ankara’s purchase of the S-400 missile system from Russia, US relations with Kurdish forces in Syria, which Turkey considers to be linked to Kurdish militants, and more. .
Erdogan also criticized the United States for failing to resolve the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, mediated by the United States, Russia and France, and said Washington was on the side of the massacres.
“Unfortunately, more than 1 million Azerbaijani brothers have been expelled from Karabakh. All of Karabakh has been burned and destroyed, ”he said, referring to the displacement that took place about 30 years ago.
Turkey last year backed Azerbaijan in the conflict in which it reclaimed part of its territory in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan lost to ethnic Armenian forces in the early 1990s.
Combining Turkey’s view of history, Erdogan later described numerous “Armenian lies” and criticized the West for “double standards.”
During and immediately after World War I, Armenians and many historians say that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed in what Armenians called the “Great Crime.” Armenians have documented massacres, robberies, rapes of women, looting of property and other atrocities.
As the successor to the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, as a state, protested against the use of the word genocide, saying that hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Anatolia at that time died of war, famine, cold and disease.
Turkey’s official position is that the Armenian revolutionaries formed the fifth column allied with Russia during the First World War, and that the mass deportations and accompanying deaths of Armenians were not premeditated or deliberate. Turkey estimates that several hundred thousand Armenians died.
“Mass graves of Turks killed in our country can be found, but Armenian mass graves can not be found anywhere,” Erdogan said.
“One million Turks and Kurds are said to have been killed by Armenian gangs. April 24 is the day of the arrest of the leaders of the Armenian gangs [in Istanbul]. In fact, nothing has happened today in terms of human tragedy, “Erdogan said.
Erdogan also said that in the last decades and years of the Ottoman Empire, about 10 million ethnic Turks and Muslims were killed or expelled from the Balkans and the Caucasus due to Western-backed ethnic nationalism and Russian expansion.
“Half of our nation comes from exile,” he said. “As Turkey, we never try to use our pain.”