Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday that Turkey "entirely rejects" the US decision. "We will not take lessons from anyone on our history," he tweeted.
[History such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's staging his own coup in order to oppress/persecute his critics/opponents/enemies?]
Joe Biden has become the
first US president to issue a statement formally describing the
1915 massacre of Armenians as a
genocide. The
killings took place in the waning days of the
Ottoman Empire, the forerunner of modern-day Turkey.
Ottoman Turks had
accused Christian Armenians of treachery after
suffering a heavy defeat at the hands of Russian forces and began
deporting them en masse to the Syrian desert and elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were
massacred or
died from starvation or
disease.
Atrocities were widely recorded at the time by witnesses including journalists, missionaries and diplomats.
The number of Armenian dead has always been disputed. Armenians say about
1.5 million people died. Turkey estimates the total to be closer to 300,000. According to the
International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the death toll was
"more than a million".Although Turkish officials have accepted that atrocities took place, they
argue that there was
no systematic attempt to destroy the Christian Armenian people
[Did they expect that Armenians would thrive in the Syrian desert? I think not. Deliberately rendering much likelier the deaths of a particular nationality is GENOCIDE]. Turkey says many Muslim Turks also died in the turmoil of World War One.
[People die in wars, but pointing at a different wrong does not exonerate Turkey.]
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The
Armenian Genocide (
see other names) was the
systematic mass murder and ethnic cleansing of around one million ethnic Armenians from
Asia Minor and
adjoining regions by the
Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), during
World War I.
During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory,
Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians; massacres turned into
genocide following the
catastrophic Ottoman defeat in the Battle of Sarikamish (January 1915), a loss blamed on Armenian treachery.
Ottoman leaders took isolated indications of
Armenian resistance as evidence of a nonexistent widespread conspiracy. The
deportations were intended as a
"definitive solution to the Armenian Question" and to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence. Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman Army were
disarmed pursuant to a February order, and were later
killed. On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman authorities
rounded up, arrested, and
deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders from
Constantinople (now Istanbul).
At the orders of
Talat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenian women, children, and elderly or infirm people were
sent on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were
deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre. In the
Syrian Desert, they were dispersed into a series of
concentration camps; in early 1916
another wave of massacres were ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of 1916. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were
forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households.
Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors were carried out by the
Turkish nationalist movement during the
Turkish War of Independence after World War I.
The
Armenian Genocide resulted in the
destruction of more than two millennia of Armenian civilization in eastern Asia Minor. With the destruction and expulsion of
Syriac and
Greek Orthodox Christians, it
enabled the creation of an ethno-national Turkish state. Prior to
World War II, the Armenian Genocide was
widely considered the greatest atrocity in history. As of
2021, 30 countries, including France, Germany, Russia and the
United States, have
recognized the events as genocide. Against the academic consensus, Turkey
denies that the deportation of Armenians was a genocide or wrongful act.
