Author: Maral Takmazian

Erdogan urges Biden to reverse 'wrong step' on Armenian declaration

Reuters
Tuvan Gumrukcu & Ezgi Erkoyun

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan urged U.S. President Joe Biden to swiftly reverse his declaration that 1915 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide, an action he said was upsetting and diminished bilateral ties.

Biden's historic declaration on Saturday infuriated its NATO ally Turkey, which has said the announcement had opened a "deep wound" in relations already strained over a host of issues. read more

In his first comments since Biden's statement, Erdogan said "the wrong step" would hinder ties, advised the United States to "look in the mirror", and added Turkey still sought to establish "good neigbourly" ties with Armenia.

"The U.S. president has made baseless, unjust and untrue remarks about the sad events that took place in our geography over a century ago," Erdogan said after a cabinet meeting. He again called for Turkish and Armenian historians to form a joint commission to investigate the events.

"I hope the U.S. president will turn back from this wrong step as soon as possible."

He slammed the United States for having failed to find a solution to the decades-old conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh – where the United States, Russia and France were mediators – and said Washington had stood by as massacres unfolded.

"If you say genocide, then you need to look at yourselves in the mirror and make an evaluation. The Native Americans, I don't even need to mention them, what happened is clear," he said, in reference to the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers. "While all these truths are out there, you cannot pin the genocide accusation on the Turkish people."

Turkey supported Baku in the conflict last year, in which Azeri forces seized swathes of lands in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Baku has criticised Biden's statement, while Yerevan has praised it. read more

Erdogan also contested the death toll from the 1915 killings and said some 150,000 people had been killed, as opposed to the roughly 1.5 million people Armenia says were killed, adding the toll was "exaggerated by adding a zero to the end."

Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War One, but it contests the figures and denies that the killings were systematically orchestrated or constitute a genocide. read more

COMPARTMENTALISING ISSUES

Ankara and Washington have been struggling to repair ties, strained in recent years over several issues, including Turkey's purchase of Russian defence systems which resulted in U.S. sanctions, policy differences in Syria, and legal matters.

On Sunday, Erdogan's spokesman and national security adviser Ibrahim Kalin told Reuters the statement was "simply outrageous" and Turkey will respond over the coming months. read more

Speaking to reporters in Ankara, Turkey's parliament speaker Mustafa Sentop said lawmakers would respond to Biden's remarks on Wednesday.

Turkey's government and most of the opposition have shown a rare unity in their rejection of Biden's statement.

Erdogan said he expected to "open the door for a new period" in ties and to discuss all disputes with Biden at a NATO summit in June, but warned that ties would deteriorate further unless the allies can compartmentalise issues.

"We now need to put aside our disagreements and look at what steps we can take from now on, otherwise we will have no choice but to do what is required by the level our ties have fallen to on April 24," he said.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/erdogan-calls-biden-reverse-wrong-step-armenian-declaration-2021-04-26/

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The events of a century ago still make many in Turkey bristle

REPRESENTATIVES OF AMERICA’S government have not always minced their words about the fate that befell Armenians in 1915. At the time, Henry Morgenthau Sr, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, called it “a campaign of race extermination”. Joe Biden is set to describe the killing and mass deportation of Armenians as “genocide”. That is not unprecedented—the last sitting president to use the term was Ronald Reagan in 1981—but it is rare enough to be noteworthy. Mr Biden is sure to anger Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Why are events from over a century ago still so bitterly contested?

When the Ottoman Empire (out of which modern-day Turkey emerged) entered the first world war in 1914, there were approximately 2m Armenians, a traditionally Christian ethnic group, living within its borders. Many fought for the Muslim empire, but some also enrolled in the Russian army, which bloodied the Ottomans in the east. High-ranking members of the ruling party blamed Armenians for the loss of an important battle the following year against Russia at Sarikamis, now in north-eastern Turkey. Armenian intellectuals, artists and politicians, including deputies in the Ottoman parliament, were arrested and many were later killed. The Ottoman authorities ordered the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians to Syria, claiming that Armenian revolutionaries had been helping the Russians. The conditions of their forced march were so harsh that few could have survived, and raids by Kurdish and Turkish armed bands further lessened their chances. Many historians believe that secret orders were given to ensure that they perished. Of the few who made it across Syria’s desert, many were put in concentration camps along the Euphrates or simply massacred.

Turkey claims that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died of hunger and disease as they were being deported, and that their deaths were the result of wartime conditions that many other Ottoman subjects had to endure. The descendants of those who died insist that they numbered as many as 1.5m, and were the victims of a deliberate campaign of murder that ought properly be called a genocide.

Most historians of mass killing, including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, agree. The UN convention on genocide gives a broad definition of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” whether through killing or “inflicting…conditions of life” designed to bring about their destruction. It is easy to see how this would describe the treatment of the Armenians.

Turkey maintains that although the deaths may have been a tragedy, they did not amount to genocide. (Its government does however refer to other similar events, such as the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak Muslims in Srebrenica, as genocide.) When America’s House of Representatives voted to call it such in 2019, Mr Erdogan was indignant that a country “stained by genocide, slavery and exploitation” should lecture Turkey. Mr Erdogan once claimed that “there have been no massacres and no slaughters in our history.” Turks who contradict the official version of events have in the past suffered terrible consequences. The penal code criminalises “insulting” the Turkish state, a provision that has been used to prosecute those who suggest that Turkish actions constitute genocide. And in 2007 a newspaper editor was shot dead by a nationalist teenager for publishing articles decrying the Ottoman’s actions as genocide, including one suggesting that the adopted daughter of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was an Armenian whose father was killed in 1915. An Istanbul court this year ruled that members of the security forces had been involved.

Turkey’s refusal to condemn or take any responsibility for the horror creates difficulties for foreign governments. Turkey is a NATO member, and a partner to the West in both strategic matters and on issues such as refugees. Some Western governments argue disingenuously that there is insufficient evidence of mens rea, the intention to commit a crime, to meet the definition.