Joe Biden has broken with his predecessors and called the mass murder of Armenians a century ago in what is now Turkey a genocide, in an announcement likely to cause further friction between Washington and Ankara.
Discussing the announcement, which was released by the White House to mark Armenian Remembrance Day, a senior administration official said the recognition was intended to “honour the victims” and not “assign blame”.
Turkey lashed out at what is largely a symbolic measure, with the foreign ministry warning that it “will open a deep wound that undermines our mutual trust and friendship” and called on the US president to “correct this grave mistake.”
Ibrahim Kalin, a senior adviser to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said on Twitter that Biden’s statement “repeats the slanders of circles whose only agenda is hostile to our country. We recommend that the US president look at his own history and present.”
Biden’s recognition follows a markedly cooler period for relations between Washington and Ankara following disputes over Turkey’s purchase of an advanced Russian anti-aircraft system designed to shoot down Nato jets, and over US federal prosecutors’ indictment of the Turkish state lender Halkbank for allegedly violating sanctions against Iran.
Biden called Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday to inform him of the impending announcement, an administration official said. A White House readout of the call, which was their first official contact, did not mention that portion of the conversation, but said the two leaders would hold a bilateral meeting on the margins of the Nato summit in June.
A Biden administration official said the call between the two leaders was “very professional”.
“The two leaders have a long track record, they worked together very closely during the Obama-Biden administration,” the official said, adding that there was “a very large number of issues” that Washington and Ankara could work closely on, along with “a number of well-known differences . . . that need to be addressed”.
Erdogan has said he wanted to “turn a new page” with the US and Europe, two of Turkey’s biggest trade partners, as the country seeks to attract investment in its $717bn economy and rein in soaring inflation and unemployment.
Most historians and some 30 countries judge the killing of as many as 1.5m Christian Armenians beginning in 1915 as a state-orchestrated genocide. Turkey’s claims that Muslims and Christians alike died during the chaos of the first world war and the ensuing collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Fearful they would side with arch enemy Russia, Armenian Christians were rounded up and either killed or marched from their ancient homeland in parts of present-day Turkey to the Syrian desert where they starved to death. The campaign, as well as those against ethnic Greeks and Syriac Christians, helped to forge a more homogenous nation when the Turkish republic was established in 1923 out of the ashes of the multicultural Ottoman Empire.
Previous US presidents have shied away from the genocide label, cognisant of the risks it would pose to the strategic relationship with Turkey, where the US operates an air base.
The US Embassy said in an email that consular services at its missions in four Turkish cities would be halted on Monday and Tuesday “as a precautionary measure” in the event of anti-US demonstrations and urged Americans in Turkey to “exercise heightened caution.”
A Biden official said the US still recognised Turkey as “a critical Nato ally”. Yet Biden has said he would pursue a values-based foreign policy and promised during his presidential campaign to recognise the genocide as part of a commitment to upholding “universal rights”. Both chambers of Congress passed resolutions in 2019 categorising the killings as genocide, and last month almost 40 senators from both parties called on Biden to do the same.
For the majority of Turks, acknowledging the genocide would impugn their nation’s founding myths and leaders and is tantamount to admitting a historical lie. While Erdogan has in recent years expressed his condolences to Armenians over the loss of life, he has also hit out at foreign governments that call the massacre genocide, recalling ambassadors and cancelling trade agreements.
Before Biden’s statement, Erdogan on Saturday expressed his condolences for the “Ottoman Armenians who lost their lives during the difficult conditions of World War One” in a message to Istanbul’s Armenian Patriarchate. “No one benefits when the debates that belong to historians are used by third parties as a tool of intervention against our country,” he
said.
Today fewer than 60,000 ethnic Armenians remain in Turkey, mainly in Istanbul, and are sporadically the targets of hate crimes, such as vandalism of churches. In 2007 Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish newspaper editor, was gunned down outside of his office after he called for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.
Nikol Pashinyan, prime minister of Armenia, said on Twitter that US recognition of the genocide marked “an important day for all Armenians” and that the US had demonstrated “its unwavering commitment to protecting human rights and universal values.”
Turkey’s robust support for Azerbaijan in last year’s war with Armenia underscored how historical divisions continue to shape Ankara’s policy in the region. Ankara supplied weapons and, according to the UN, Syrian mercenaries to help its close ally Azerbaijan recapture much of the disputed territory Armenia had won in a war in the 1990s.