Biden right to recognize the Armenian Genocide and deny Turkey’s long-held untruths

Nothing will ever take away the pain and sadness caused by the Armenian Genocide and the loss of 1.5 million lives during that World War I-era nightmare.

But Saturday’s formal recognition by President Biden that Ottoman Turkey had committed a genocide was the first acknowledgment by the White House in 40 years that such a state-sponsored crime did in fact occur. That recognition had been long hoped for by Fresno’s Armenian American community, as well as Armenians living around the world.

In 1981, then-President Reagan referred to the genocide in a speech about the Jewish Holocaust. Then, in 2019, both the U.S. House and Senate passed resolutions recognizing the genocide. But then-President Donald Trump did not go that far in any of the years he was the chief executive, nor did presidents before him.

Biden promised last October while a presidential candidate that, if elected, he would recognize the genocide. He made good on that promise, putting Turkey on notice that human rights have importance in U.S. diplomacy.

Turkey’s denial strategy

Turkey has long denied that it committed genocide. Rather, it promulgated untruths that Armenians died as a result of wartime fighting against Ottoman forces.

But news accounts from 1915 to 1923 chronicled the systematic killings and deprivation of Armenian people living in that part of the Caucasus. Besides outright killings, the Ottoman military forced Armenians from their homes and into long treks on foot to surrounding countries in what became death marches.

The American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, was blunt in his observations of what Ottoman Turks were doing to the Armenian population. In one cable, he said that “a campaign of race extermination is in progress.”

April 24, 1915 is the date when Ottoman forces began rounding up Armenian leaders in what is now Instanbul, and so it is marked as the annual day of remembrance for the start of the genocide.

Genocide impact

Sevag Tateosian of Fresno remembers how his grandparents had been wealthy landowners whose property was confiscated by Ottoman Turks. They had to flee for their lives.

“The truth is that for Armenians in America and around the world, there is this heaviness that we feel when it comes to the Genocide, and this idea that so much was taken from us,” Tateosian wrote in an op-ed published in The Bee last year.

In that same essay, however, Tateosian refers to the resilience of the Armenian people by quoting Fresno author William Saroyan, himself an Armenian:

“Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.”

President Biden’s formal acknowledgment Saturday did not create a new nation, but did put America on the right side of history. That is a proper and long-overdue step.