The Trump administration has attracted anger by refusing to recognize the Armenian genocide as a “genocide.” But why is this issue so controversial? Why does every president shy away from stating the obvious?
This issue sits at the intersection of historic suffering and contemporary politics. But regardless of how you want to refer to it, the Armenian genocide or atrocity that began in 1915 led to the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians — it is likely that more than one million lost their lives in total. These deaths were not accidental, but rather a direct result of an intentional campaign by the Ottoman Empire.
The short story is that having long regarded the Armenians as an inferior people, the Ottoman elites decided they had to be purged. As a result, they sent many Armenians out into the Syrian desert to starve and die, drowned them in the Black Sea, or simply murdered them.
Few disagree that this happened. What’s at contention, however, is whether these atrocities rise to the definition of “genocide.” The first problem here is that the term “genocide” did not even exist until the Second World War. But essentially, it means “race killing.” Genocide implies a deliberate effort to annihilate an entire group of people.
Turkey, the modern successor to the Ottoman Empire, denies there was a deliberate campaign against the Armenians. Ethnic Armenians and historians disagree. They say that the Ottoman Empire’s intent was most certainly collective elimination and that its action should be thus characterized as genocide.
That takes us back to the debate in Washington.
While the Senate has now unanimously recognized the Armenian Genocide, President Trump is concerned that doing so will alienate the Turkish government, our least reliable NATO ally. The always-emotional Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already threatened to withdraw Turkish basing rights to U.S. forces if the genocide recognition movement gathers steam. And with U.S.-Turkey relations already fractured by Erdogan’s purchase of a Russian air defense system and his invasion of northern Syria, Trump seems to have judged that he cannot afford to make relations any worse.
So, that’s where we are now. With the executive branch playing a careful language game in order to protect other foreign policy interests, and the legislature recognizing a genocide in the promotion of global moral leadership. But the two interests are not easily matched together.
