What It Means If Biden Recognizes the Armenian Genocide

On 21 April 2021, The New York Times published an article reporting that President Joe Biden plans to declare that the mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918 was an act of genocide. The declaration is planned to take place on 24 April, which the Republic of Armenia has designated Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

This declaration will mark the fulfillment of a campaign promise that Barack Obama made in 2008 but never fulfilled and a campaign promise that Biden himself made last year. The declaration is controversial, however, because it may further harm the United States’ already-frayed relationship with the Republic of Turkey, whose government officially maintains that the genocide never happened. As a student of history, I thought I would give some background on the Armenian Genocide and what Biden’s declaration might mean.

What the Armenian Genocide was

For most of its history, the Ottoman Empire was relatively tolerant towards the various non-Turkish ethnic groups living within its borders. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, various subjugated peoples within the Ottoman Empire developed nationalist independence movements and broke free from Ottoman control, forming their own independent nation-states.

This trend began in the early nineteenth century. The Serbian Revolution (lasted 1804 – 1817) led to the formation of the semi-independent Principality of Serbia and the Greek Revolution (lasted 1821 – 1829) led to the formation of the fully independent modern nation-state of Greece. These revolutions were soon followed by others, which led to the formation of even more independent nation-states and the deterioration of Ottoman control.

ABOVE: Painting produced before 1939 by Afanasij Scheloumoff depicting the Battle of Mišar, which was fought in 1806 during the First Serbian Uprising

By the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was a mere shadow of its former self. Many people who belonged to non-Turkish ethnicities in territories that were still under the Ottoman Empire’s control either wanted to establish their own independent nation-states or wanted the territories in which they lived to be annexed by existing non-Turkish nation-states. The Ottoman government therefore began to perceive the existence of non-Turkish ethnic groups within the territories it controlled—especially ethnic groups that were predominantly Christian—as an inherent threat to its authority.

Armenians were one of the many non-Turkish ethnic groups who lived in the Ottoman Empire at this time. Most Armenians were Christians and many Armenians wanted to establish their own autonomous region overseen by Russia, a country the Ottoman Empire was at war with, so the Ottoman government targeted Armenian people as a whole for extermination.

The Armenian Genocide is conventionally said to have begun on 24 April 1915, a day known as “Red Sunday.” On this day, Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of the Interior, ordered the arrest and imprisonment of between 235 and 270 prominent individuals in the Armenian community of Constantinople. Over the course of the next three years, the government of the Ottoman Empire conducted the systematic mass-murder of somewhere around 1.5 million Armenians. Thousands of additional Armenians were either deported, forced to flee, or forced to convert to Islam.

Although the main wave of killings and deportations under the Ottoman Empire ended in 1918, members of the Turkish National Movement continued to commit acts of violence and genocide against Armenian civilians until as late as 1923. For instance, as I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2020, after Turkish National forces recaptured the city of Smyrna on 9 September 1922, they massacred large numbers of Greeks and Armenians and most likely started the Great Fire of Smyrna, which destroyed both the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city. They deported many able-bodied Greek and Armenian men who survived the fire to work camps in the Anatolian interior. Many of these men died as a result of the harsh conditions or were executed.

ABOVE: Photograph of the corpses of Armenians murdered in summer 1915 during the Armenian Genocide

Meanwhile, over course of the period between 1913 and 1923, first the Ottoman government and later members of the Turkish National Movement simultaneously carried out additional genocides against ethnic Greeks and Assyrians. They are estimated to have killed somewhere between 300,000 and 750,000 Greeks and somewhere between 200,000 and 275,000 Assyrians. The genocides against Greeks and Assyrians, however, are not nearly as well known as the Armenian Genocide.

At the time that these genocides took place, there was not a single word to describe what they were. In 1943 or 1944, however, the Polish Jewish human rights lawyer Raphael Lemkin (lived 1900 – 1959) coined the word genocide by combining the Greek word γένος (génos), meaning “lineage,” “family,” “clan,” or “nation,” with the suffix -cide, which is derived from the Latin third-conjugation verb caedo, meaning “to kill.” Lemkin defined the word genocide to refer to the systematic mass murder of people on account of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or personal views. He explicitly cited the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust as examples of genocide.

Most contemporary historians outside the Republic of Turkey agree that the late Ottoman killings of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians amount to genocide. Academic historians commonly group these three genocides together as “late Ottoman genocides.” For instance, in 2017, the academic publisher Berghahn Books published an edited volume on the subject with articles written by various historians, titled Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913–1923. The volume is edited by George N. Shirinian, the Executive Director of the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies.

ABOVE: Photograph of Armenian refugees on the deck of a French ship fleeing the massacres in the Ottoman Empire in 1915

The Republic of Turkey’s persistent denial of the late Ottoman genocides

Despite the consensus of historians, the government of the Republic of Turkey has consistently insisted ever since its foundation in 1923 that there was no genocide and that the killings and deportations of ethnic minorities that did occur were justifiably conducted in the interest of national security.

History textbooks approved by the Turkish government for grade schoolers maintain that the Armenian Genocide is a hoax invented by enemies of Turkey. In some cases, Turkish citizens who have publicly described the Armenian Genocide as a genocide have even been criminally prosecuted and imprisoned under the Turkish penal code’s repressive Section 301, which states:

“Public denigration of Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years.”

Partly as a result of the Turkish government’s century-long official policy of genocide denial, recognition of the Armenian Genocide is extremely unpopular with the Turkish public. A poll conducted in 2014 found that only 9.1% of Turkish citizens believed that the Turkish government should recognize the Armenian Genocide as a genocide. The only Turkish political parties that do not support denial of the Armenian Genocide are the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and the Green Left Party, both of which are generally seen as left-wing.

The Turkish government has spent millions of dollars aggressively lobbying foreign governments and organizations to prevent them from recognizing the Armenian Genocide or even mentioning it. In 2001, the Turkish government even created an official government agency, known as the Committee to Coordinate the Struggle with the Baseless Genocide Claims (ASİMKK), whose sole, explicit purpose was to promote denial of the Armenian Genocide and prevent foreign governments from recognizing the genocide as such. The agency existed until 2017.

Naturally, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the sitting president of Turkey, is a strident denier of the Armenian Genocide. He has repeatedly railed against foreign leaders who have described the genocide as such. Most notably, in April 2015, Pope Francis held a special mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in which he described the Armenian Genocide as “the first genocide of the twentieth century.” Erdoğan responded by recalling the Turkish ambassador to the Holy See in protest. He also summoned the Holy See’s ambassador to Turkey to express his “disappointment” in Pope Francis’s words.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Associated Press of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current president of the Republic of Turkey, who is a strident denier of the late Ottoman genocides

A short history of the United States’ recognition of the Armenian Genocide

Despite the government of the Republic of Turkey’s longstanding public opposition, the United States has already clearly recognized the Armenian Genocide as a genocide on multiple occasions. Notably, the U.S. Department of State listed the Armenian Genocide as an example of a genocide all the way back in 1951. The U.S. House of Representatives also approved resolutions that described the Armenian Genocide as a genocide in 1975, 1984, and 1996.

President Ronald Reagan used the phrase “genocide of the Armenians” in a written statement he issued on 22 April 1981 commemorating victims of the Holocaust. Presidents since Ronald Reagan have issued statements commemorating the people who were killed during the Armenian Genocide, but they have avoided publicly calling it a genocide while in office in order to avoid offending the Turkish government.

Barack Obama described the Armenian Genocide as a genocide in 2008 while he was still a Senator and made an explicit campaign promise that, as president, he would recognize it as a genocide. He said:

“Two years ago, I criticized the secretary of state for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term ‘genocide’ to describe Turkey’s slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. … As president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.”

Disappointingly, after he was elected president, Obama went back on his promise, almost certainly in order to appease the Republic of Turkey. Like most presidents before him, Obama refrained from publicly calling the Armenian Genocide a genocide while he was in office. In 2009, after his inauguration, he affirmed that his view on the Armenian Genocide had “not changed” since the time when he was a Senator, implying that he still personally believed that the Armenian Genocide was a genocide, but he carefully avoided using the word genocide publicly.

Currently, every U.S. state except for Mississippi has individually passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide as a genocide. Moreover, on 29 October 2019, the House of Representatives passed a resolution defining the United States’ official position that the Armenian Genocide was a genocide. Although President Donald Trump opposed this resolution, the Republican-controlled Senate still passed it in a unanimous vote on 12 December.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing every U.S. state that has passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide as a genocide in green. (Notice that Mississippi is the only state that has not passed a resolution.)

Why Joe Biden recognizing the Armenian Genocide matters

On 24 April 2020, Joe Biden, who was still a presidential candidate at the time, made his own promise that, if he was elected president, he would recognize the Armenian Genocide. If Joe Biden does indeed keep his promise and declare that the Armenian Genocide was a genocide on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, it will be the first time a sitting president has described it as such since Ronald Reagan did it almost exactly forty years ago.

If Biden does recognize the Armenian Genocide, his decision will almost certainly infuriate President Erdoğan, but, at this point, Biden probably doesn’t have much left to lose in terms of U.S. relations with Turkey, especially since Congress has already passed an official resolution stating the United States’ position that the Armenian Genocide was indeed a genocide. By calling it a genocide, Biden will simply be continuing the policy that Congress has already set.

Moreover, if he recognizes the Armenian Genocide, Biden will fulfill a campaign promise that Obama notoriously left unfulfilled. It will win him major points with human rights activists, historians, and Armenian Americans. It will also potentially improve U.S. relations with the Republic of Armenia and other countries that have shown strong support for recognition of the Armenian Genocide, such as Kypros and Greece.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a monument commemorating victims of the Armenian Genocide in Larnaka, Kypros