WASHINGTON
Ahead of Saturday’s annual commemoration of the killing of more than a million Armenians a century ago, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are pressing President Biden to become the first U.S. president to acknowledge the events as genocide.
Armenian Americans, including the large diaspora in Southern California, have fought for decades to get the federal government to identify the years-long slaughter during the fall of the Ottoman Empire as a genocide. But the acknowledgment has remained elusive, falling victim to political worries about destroying an important relationship with what is now Turkey, a NATO ally.
Biden is widely expected to make the declaration in a statement Saturday, according to several people familiar with the conversations. Asked Wednesday whether he would do so, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said she didn’t “have anything to get ahead of that at this point in time.”
Biden preparing to declare that atrocities against Armenia were genocide
By Lara Jakes New York Times,Updated April 21, 2021, 2 hours ago
Email to a Friend
President Joe Biden.Evan Vucci/Associated Press
WASHINGTON â More than a century after the Ottoman Empireâs killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian civilians, President Joe Biden is preparing to declare that the atrocities were an act of genocide, according to officials familiar with the internal debate. The action would signal that the American commitment to human rights outweighs the risk of further fraying the US alliance with Turkey.
Biden is expected to announce the symbolic designation on Saturday, the 106th anniversary of the beginning of what historians call a yearslong and systematic death march that the predecessors of modern Turkey started during World War I. He would be the first sitting American president to do so, although Ronald Reagan made a glancing reference to the Armenian genocide in a 1981
President Biden is poised to formally declare that the massacres of Armenians in the early 20th century constituted genocide, U.S. officials said, a rare step that would further inflame ties with Turkey.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Biden is expected to describe as genocide the deportation, starvation and massacres of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks beginning in 1915, the officials said.
The language would come as part of an annual statement coinciding with a day of remembrance on Saturday. Officials added no final decisions or briefings have taken place and that Biden could opt to issue the symbolic statement without describing the killings as genocide, as have other presidents.
Joe Biden expected to recognise massacre of Armenians as genocide irishtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.