The Biden administration has put an end to Turkey’s bluff over the recognition of the Armenian genocide, which asserted that Ankara would move to close U.S. bases and quickly begin cooperation with Russia, Iran and China, Jerusalem Post columnist Seth Frantzman wrote on Sunday.

Pointing out that Turkey’s attempt to hold countries hostage regarding the Armenian genocide has been effective for many years, Frantzman said that Ankara must now consider whether Washington’s proclamation will lead it to work with authoritarian regimes or opt for “reconciliation” with countries it has attacked over the last few years.

On Saturday, Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to formally recognise the killings of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Empire during WWI as genocide, in a move that threatens to further complicate relations with NATO ally Turkey, who has long vehemently denied the claim.

Those who opposed the genocide recognition argued that Turkey would drift away from NATO and work with Russia and China – all steps that Ankara has already taken, according to the analyst.

Under the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ankara has been accused of increasingly drifting out of the transatlantic alliance and severing ties with the West.

In recent years, Turkey has increased cooperation with Russia and China, purchasing S-400 missile systems from the former despite objections from NATO and the United States, and deepening economic ties with the latter.

“Turkey’s policy was to pretend it was above history, above ever being held to account or even critiqued. Many US diplomats went along with this; for years they appeared almost more pro-Turkey than Turkey’s own diplomats,’’ Frantzman wrote. 

Moreover, “There is no evidence that denying the genocide helped keep Ankara more liberal, tolerant, democratic and open minded and more close to the West,’’ the analyst said.

Turkey with 700 Billion dollars economy versus US 25 Trillion dollars Economy, Turkey no much to US mighty power…

Dominic Evans Orhan Coskun,

U.S. President Joe Biden’s declaration that massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide is “simply outrageous” and Turkey will respond over coming months, Turkey’s presidential spokesman said on Sunday.

Biden broke on Saturday with decades of carefully calibrated White House comments over the 1915 killings, delighting Armenia and its diaspora but further straining ties between Washington and Ankara, both members of the NATO military alliance.

“There will be a reaction of different forms and kinds and degrees in coming days and months,” Ibrahim Kalin, President Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman and adviser, told Reuters in an interview.

Kalin did not specify whether Ankara would restrict U.S. access to the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, which has been used to support the international coalition fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, among measures it may take.

After other Turkish officials swiftly condemned Biden’s statement on Saturday, Erdogan would address the issue after a cabinet meeting on Monday, Kalin said. “At a time and place that we consider to be appropriate, we will continue to respond to this very unfortunate, unfair statement,” he said.

Turkey accepts that many Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces in World War One, but denies the killings were systematically orchestrated and constitute genocide.

For decades, measures recognising the Armenian genocide stalled in the U.S. Congress and most U.S. presidents have refrained from calling it that, held back by concerns about straining relations with Turkey.

But those relations are already troubled. Washington imposed sanctions on Turkey over its purchase of Russian air defences, while Ankara has been angered that the United States has armed Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria and not extradited a U.S.-based cleric Turkey accuses of orchestrating a 2016 coup attempt.

Navigating those disputes will now be even harder, Kalin said. “Everything that we conduct with the United States will be under the spell of this very unfortunate statement,” he said.

Kalin said Turkey’s parliament is expected to make a statement this week. Analysts say lawmakers may hit back rhetorically against Biden by classifying the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers as genocide.

As well as limiting access to Incirlik, Turkey also has options to reduce military coordination with the United States in northern Syria and Iraq or scale down diplomatic efforts to support Afghan peace talks, said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund research group in Ankara.

In reality, though, Erdogan’s options are limited as he is already battling one of the highest rates of daily COVID-19 cases globally and has seen the lira currency fall close to all-time lows against the dollar last week.

“This is a difficult period for Turkey and it’s not a time when Turkey wants to pick a fight with anyone, let alone the United States,” Unluhisarcikli said.

Kalin said U.S. officials had told Turkey the declaration would not provide any legal basis for potential reparation claims.

by Paul Antonopoulos,

YouTube has deleted a propagandistic video made in Turkey that denies the Armenian Genocide.

“Doğan Kasadolu, a Jewish-Turkish businessman living in Constantinople and known for his anti-coup speeches, made a statement on a television channel the day Biden made a statement,” Super Haber reported.

YouTube deleted a video of Kasadolu describing the Armenian Genocide, and in effect the Greek and Assyrian Genocides too, as the “slander of the century.”

It was deleted because of the obvious hate speech in the video.

In speaking to Super Haber, the businessman said “this is acceptable.”

“YouTube does not want to face the facts,” he claimed, before saying what legal avenues he can pursue.

Garo Paylan, an Armenian lawmaker from the pro-Kurdish left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), has proposed a law to officially recognise the Armenian Genocide, news website Bianet reported on Saturday.

Paylan called the events of 1915 the “Great Calamity” in his speech in Turkish parliament on Saturday, arguing for the mass deportation and death of some 1.5 million Armenians under the World War I-afflicted Ottoman Empire to be recognised as genocide.

The Armenian lawmaker has family members personally affected by the mass deportations.

“Orphans like my grandmother passed from this world without seeing justice delivered,” Paylan said. “As did the second-generation (of survivors), my father. As a third-generation Armenian from Turkey, I seek justice in Turkey, in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.”

“The Armenian Genocide happened on these lands, and justice for the Armenian Genocide can only be achieved on these lands, in Turkey,” Paylan said.

Turkey confronting the genocide would “remove the significance of what any other parliament says”, he added. “The matter continues to be a topic in other parliaments, for other presidents, because for 106 years the Armenian Genocide has been denied.”

Turkey maintains that the Ottoman-era deaths occurred under wartime conditions without planning or forethought, and were at a much lower scale than the academic near-consensus of 1.5 million Christians.

“No one has benefited from the discussions which in fact must be made by historians but have been politicized by third parties and turned into a tool of intervention against our country,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in a statement addressing the Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul, Sahak Mashalian, on Saturday. “I believe that building our identity solely upon the pains left by the past to our souls is also a grave injustice to new generations.”

On the same day, following a phone call with Erdoğan, U.S. President Joe Biden officially recognisedthe events as genocide, sparking condemnation from Ankara

Saturday’s announcement by President Biden is both a welcome change from past administrations—and a sign of how obstinate the United States has been on this issue until now.

Stephen Smith

On Saturday, President Biden took the long overdue step of recognizing the Armenian genocide. Between 1915 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians were systematically murdered by the Ottoman government in modern-day Turkey. That the President of the United States finally used the word ‘genocide’ is a critical and historic step.

It is also cold comfort. America has been on the wrong side of history for over a century. Imagine if the British government denied the Holocaust for 106 years in order to normalize relations with Germany? It would mean Jews would still have to wait to 2051 to hear a British Prime Minister find the courage to say the word ‘The Holocaust.’

Saturday’s announcement by President Biden is thus both a welcome change from past administrations—and a sign of how obstinate the United States has been on this issue until now.

Does the word genocide matter? Yes. In 2004, I attended the Stockholm Forum on the Prevention of Genocide as an advisor to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson. Attended by 1,000 delegates from forty-five national governments, the forum was in many ways a success. Among other concrete measures, the conference prompted then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Anan to announce a new permanent position of Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide.

But as I left, I found a young woman in tears. She told me through her sobs that she was deeply upset that every single delegate had studiously avoided applying the word “genocide” to what her Armenian ancestors had suffered. It was ninety years after the genocide at that point. She looked at me and said, ‘What about me?’

Many in the Armenian community are relieved and encouraged by the Biden administration’s declaration. But I am not celebrating. I am calling to account multiple administrations for the pain they caused, for political integrity traded for political expediency, for collaborating with the deniers of history, for allowing American Armenians who survived the genocide to go to their deaths with no justice, no recognition.

There may be no justice for a single Armenian child, and it is unlikely there will be restitution of a single home, but recognition does rehumanize those who were dehumanized.

Historical memory of genocides matters, as the trauma and pain carry forward for generations.

In January 2015, I was in Yerevan, Armenia for the centennial of the genocide. I watched as ten-year-old descendants of genocide victims stood in their school dresses, read poems, and lit candles. As I was leaving, descendants of that genocide walked up the hill. They weren’t coming to lay wreaths. They were coming to ‘be’—to live with the memory of their ancestors who had been murdered for no reason except that they were Armenian.

President Obama did not attend the event, but there was much anticipation that he would at last call the Armenian genocide by its name. But like so many U.S. presidents before him, he declined to name the genocide. I sat listening to System of Down, the rock band that has told the story of the genocide though their music. Like the young woman I had met a decade earlier in Sweden, I began to cry.

Here’s what the word genocide means to the woman at the 2004 conference, to the Yerevan memorial visitors, to the Armenian diaspora: It means that the loss of lives, family, property, home, churches, identity, and dignity has finally been defined. What happened to the Armenians 106 years ago was genocide. There may be no justice for a single Armenian child, and it is unlikely there will be restitution of a single home, but recognition does rehumanize those who were dehumanized. It tells the world that they were the victims of senseless, systemic hatred, and that while their families perished in a hateful action, their descendants can live with purpose.

I believe the U.S. government owes the Armenian community a museum equal to the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

President Biden had the decency to do the right thing. But let us hope that his statement is a first step. Importantly, there has been remarkably muted media coverage of his words; at our institute, which houses 1,900 testimonies of Armenian genocide survivors, we have not had a single call from news outlets asking to use the testimony of those that lived through the Genocide.  To give the word a voice. That’s because, after a century of denial and ugly geopolitics, the Armenians who perished are all but forgotten. I believe the U.S. government owes the Armenian community a museum equal to the U.S. Holocaust Museum—and it owes a commitment to tell and retell the story of what happened, so that it may never happen again.

Stephen D. Smith is Finci-Viterbi executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation. The first episode of “The Memory Generation” was released on April 15, 2021, and can be found here: https://www.memorygenerationpodcast.com/episodes

On Saturday, US President Joe Biden announced that from now on, Washington recognises the actions of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century against the Armenians as a ‘genocide’.

The American ambassador to Turkey, David Satterfield, has been summoned by the Turkish foreign ministry on Saturday, over US President Joe Biden’s recognition of the actions of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 against the Armenians as a ‘genocide’.

The Turkish foreign ministry announced that its deputy foreign minister, Sedat Onal, told the US ambassador, David Satterfield, that Biden’s move had no legal basis and had caused a “wound in ties that will be hard to repair,” a source in the Turkish ministry told Sputnik.

“Our harsh reaction was expressed to the ambassador, he was informed that we consider this statement unacceptable, devoid of any historical and legal basis, therefore we completely reject and strongly condemn it,” a source said.

Amid tensions between Washington and Ankara, the US embassy in the country announced that the diplomatic mission would be closed for routine services from April 26-27, citing possible protests.

“Demonstrations or protests may occur following the April 24 White House statement remembering the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide. As a precautionary measure, the US Embassy in Ankara, the US Consulate General in Istanbul, the US Consulate in Adana, and the US Consular Agency in Izmir will be closed for routine American Citizen and visa services on Monday, April 26 and Tuesday, April 27,” the embassy said in a statement.

The recognition of the genocide by the US comes on the day Armenians commemorate the victims of the killings by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

A veteran diplomat lays out why previous administrations chose not to make the declaration — and why Biden’s choice is now the right one.

For Armenians around the world, April 24 is known as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, a day to recall and mourn the victims of the massacre — genocide in fact — perpetuated by the Ottoman Empire against its ethnic Armenian citizens, starting in 1915. For eight years, first in the Bush administration, then in the Obama administration, I helped draft the U.S. government’s annual statements on that remembrance, none of which used the word “genocide” to characterize what took place.

The facts have long been known. The Armenian Genocide was among the first of the 20^th century’s genocidal horrors. U.N. bodies, Pope Francis, the European Parliament, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and many national governments (e.g., France) all recognized the Armenian Genocide. But successive U.S. administrations — Democratic and Republican — did not.

Until today. 

“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,” President Joe Biden said.

Why the long delay? Why did the U.S., champion of human rights, resist use of “the g-word” for so long? When I worked on this issue, my colleagues and I knew the facts of the killings. We did not deny that they were genocide. But we did not use genocide to describe them. We used terms like atrocities, mass killings, slaughter, and mass murder. Strong terms all, but not genocide.

There were two reasons why the U.S. took that position. One, long championed in the U.S. government, had to do with relations with Turkey, a staunch NATO ally during the Cold War and after. Turkey regarded any U.S. use of the word genocide as a redline in relations and made clear that using the term would trigger a harsh reaction. Given U.S. interests in relations with Turkey, particularly military and security relations, such Turkish warnings carried weight. Besides, the U.S. had for decades maintained its close alliance with Turkey despite that country’s authoritarian bent, including a pattern of military rule. The U.S. didn’t much like that but had learned to live with it. In that context, putting the bilateral relationship under stress for the sake of recognizing the Armenian Genocide, something some in the U.S. government regarded as a historical dispute, was simply not seen as worth it.

That sort of “realist school” calculation was common in U.S. government thinking for decades. Support for the Greek Colonels regime after 1967, for the authoritarian Shah of Iran, and for Chile’s military rule after 1973, followed that pattern of swallowing hard yet remaining allied with authoritarian countries. Trying to brush away the Armenian Genocide as an irritating distraction that could disrupt otherwise close U.S.-Turkish relations fit that model. It was the norm for U.S.-Turkey policy for many years. These sorts of calculations made a kind of sense at the time. But they often do not look good in retrospect. Hypocrisy has a price. 

I and my colleagues in the Bush administration had another, hopefully better, reason for avoiding use of the term Armenian Genocide: we wanted to encourage Turkey to come out of its shell of historical denial and hostility to Armenia; to find its own way to reconcile with Armenia and its own past.

This wasn’t just wishful thinking. Turkish-Armenian relations were and remain burdened by a lot of issues, including but not only the Armenian Genocide and Turkey’s refusal to look at the that dark chapter in the historical legacy of the Ottomans, but also by terrorism perpetuated against Turks by Armenian terrorist groups. And there is more. When the Soviet Union broke up and Armenia declared its independence, it fought a brief, successful war with another emerging country, Azerbaijan, Turkey’s friend and ethnic cousin, over the disputed Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited by a lot of Armenians. As a result of that war in the 1990s, Armenia ended up in effective control of Nagorno-Karabakh and its seven surrounding Azerbaijani regions. To support Azerbaijan, Turkey shut its border with Armenia. So, Armenia had not only its bitter historical experience with Turkey but a current dispute that would not yield to years of diplomacy (in which I also participated) and that left its land border with a NATO country and its best potential economic partner closed.

The U.S. government saw an opportunity for Turkey to make peace with its neighbors and at home emerging in the early years of the 21^st century. And it wanted to give Turkey the opportunity to own its history, not to have to react to a U.S. government statement acknowledging the Armenian Genocide. 

Starting in 2001, non-governmental Turks and Armenians joined in a reconciliation effort to try to deal with the past and build a better future. In 2002, the new AK Party swept to power in free elections and promised a deepened democracy and “zero problems with neighbors,” as the Turkish saying then went. Soon, the Turkish Foreign Ministry opened a confidential channel to Armenia, with Swiss help and quiet U.S. support, to pave the way for reconciliation, diplomatic relations, an open border, and a commission of historians to examine the past, including “The Great Calamity,” as the Armenian Genocide is often called in the Armenian language. By 2008, 

Starting in 2001, non-governmental Turks and Armenians joined in a reconciliation effort to try to deal with the past and build a better future. In 2002, the new AK Party swept to power in free elections and promised a deepened democracy and “zero problems with neighbors,” as the Turkish saying then went. Soon, the Turkish Foreign Ministry opened a confidential channel to Armenia, with Swiss help and quiet U.S. support, to pave the way for reconciliation, diplomatic relations, an open border, and a commission of historians to examine the past, including “The Great Calamity,” as the Armenian Genocide is often called in the Armenian language. By 2008, the Turks and Armenian negotiators had reached agreement on a text; by 2009, thanks to the able efforts of the Obama administration, they had signed it. 

But in the end Turkey — by far the stronger country — could not bring itself to ratify the agreement or otherwise act to reconcile with Armenia. Even though Turkish President Erdogan himself acknowledged in 2014 that the Ottoman treatment of the Armenians was “inhumane,” Turkey did not then or later open its border to Armenia. Senior Turks used to say that they could not do so with the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute pending, given the fierce resistance to any normalization from Azerbaijan. But the Turkish government — not shy about asserting itself — could have acted at some point. It did not. Nor has the Turkish government acted in the wake of renewed fighting last year between Armenia and Azerbaijan, in which Azerbaijan with Turkish help retook much of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Bush and Obama administrations showed what they thought was forbearance on genocide question. But that forbearance was not permanent. 

The Biden administration, with its stress on democracy and human rights as fundamentals, knew the record: years of efforts to urge the Turkish government to reach out to Armenia and to deal honestly with the Ottoman historical legacy. They would not return to the realist school calculation of the past. And temporary forbearance to encourage Turkey to do the right thing had run its course. So, they decided — finally — to do the right thing.

There will be a price in U.S.-Turkish relations. Hopefully, that will be temporary and not too costly. The US-Turkish relationship remains important. But a line has been crossed. The U.S. will no longer have to engage in elaborate linguistic contortions to remain honest with history and truth while maintaining its immediate interests with Turkey and the region. The Biden team has made a tough, potentially costly, but correct decision.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/24/inside-americas-long-handwringing-over-the-armenian-genocide-484547