Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day: Much ado about nothing?

US President Joe Biden became the first American President by taking
a stand on the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on April
24 and recognising that killing of Armenians in 1915-16 during World War-I in territories under the control of the Ottoman Empire constituted
"an act of genocide".

What impact his stand will have on the 60,000 plus Armenians living in Turkey remains to be seen. All past Presidents including President Obama had avoided taking a stand despite intense lobbying by Armenians and human rights activists. While President Biden was careful in saying that the recognition was not to blame anyone, and he indeed called up the Turkish President to break the news in advance, relations between Ankara and Washington D.C. are likely to remain frosty.

Perhaps, the US President primarily wanted to express his displeasure over the Turkish decision to buy Russian missiles --- S400 defence system --- and a Turkish state bank's role in facilitating payments to Iran for its transactions with other countries despite the US sanctions against Teheran being in force.

Turkey's role has also been controversial in last year's war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Ankara openly supported Azerbaijan, ignoring the views of many countries, as this suited its regional interests.

In any case, the relations between the US and Turkey have been tense ever since an unsuccessful but bloody coup in July 2016 to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by elements supported by US-based controversial religious figure Fetullah Gulen in the Turkish armed forces. The Turkish government has punished all those involved in the failed coup attempt except for Gulen, a Turkish national who lives in the US and the authorities in Washington DC refuse to hand him over to Turkey.

Turkey suffered crippling US sanctions during the Donald Trump administration following the arrest of a controversial American pastor, Andrew Brunson, in October 2016 on charges that included his links with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Fethullah Gulen's movement, accused of being involved in the 2016 failed coup in Turkey. Brunson was a pastor associated with the Izmir Resurrection Church, not a big institution. But he was a US citizen who lived in Turkey for a long time. He was ultimately released by the Turkish authorities, but his arrest brought the relations between the two NATO members to such a low point that ultimately the US came out with sanctions against Turkey. A NATO power punished a NATO ally for the first time in the history of the military alliance.

Turkey under the leadership of Erdogan has been made to suffer for a few years by the US with the ultimate objective of economically weakening it to such an extent that it abandons its active role in West Asia as well as in Central Asia where the US and its regional allies feel their interests are seriously threatened. Turkey has also emerged as a major threat to the dominant position of Saudi Arabia, a close US ally, in the Muslim world which cannot be tolerated by America. So, Turkey has to suffer the US wrath, come what may.

Biden and Erdogan are scheduled to be in Brussels, Belgium, for the NATO meeting on June 14 when they may discuss the Armenian genocide issue with the Turkish President trying to convince the American leader to abandon his controversial stand, an exercise unlikely to succeed.

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‘First genocide’ of the 20th Century

Often called the first genocide of the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide refers to the physical annihilation of the Armenian Christians living in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1916. By the end of 1916, between 660,000 and 1.2 million of them were killed, either through massacres or from systemic ill-treatment, exposure and starvation. Turkey maintains the conflict represented a civil war triggered by an armed uprising of the Armenian minority

• The American people honour all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago. Beginning on 24 April 1915 with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination.” President Joe Biden
• “Words cannot change or rewrite history,”, said on Twitter. “We have nothing to learn from anybody on our own past. Political opportunism is the greatest betrayal to peace and justice. We entirely reject this statement based solely on populism.” Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, Turkish Foreign Minister
• 
  
• “This is a critically important moment in the defence of human rights…It’s been a long journey. President Biden is standing firm against a century of denial, and is charting a course for human rights everywhere.” Bryan Ardouny, head of the Armenian Assembly of America
• 
  
• My great grandfather and his sons were executed by Ottoman government forces in 1915. His daughter, my grandmother, then a teenager, only escaped by pretending to be dead. She walked barefoot with her mother from Erzerum, where the family lived, arriving weeks later in Mosul, northern Iraq. I was born in Baghdad, where we lived as refugees. It is unconscionable for the British government to continue to deny the Armenian genocide. Genocide is a global issue. We have seen it in Rwanda and Darfur and in what happened to Christian communities at the hands of Isis in Syria and northern Iraq. Prof Ara Darzi Member, British House of Lords, in a letter to The Guardian

(The writer is a senior journalist and columnist based in New Delhi)