President Joe Biden recognized the mass killings perpetrated against the Armenian people in 1915 as a genocide Saturday.
Saturday marks Armenian Remembrance Day, in which the horrors perpetrated by Ottoman Turkish forces are acknowledged. Estimates indicate that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died.
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“We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history,” the president said in a statement. “And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”
The deaths happened when the Ottoman Turks attempted to expel Armenians from Eastern Anatolia and sent them to the Syrian desert. Those targeted were predominantly Christians. Biden did not use the word “Christian” in his statement.
The president’s decision to recognize the atrocities as a genocide could anger Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who previously warned that such a declaration would harm U.S.-Turkish relations.
“Erdogan, who some refer to as a neo-Ottoman leader, is emotionally invested as much in the Ottoman Empire as he is in the Turkish republic,” said former Turkish opposition lawmaker Aykan Erdemir, who leads the Turkey program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “So for him, this is one red line very difficult to cross.”
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“When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact,” then-U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau recalled in his memoirs at the time of the killings.
“Over the decades, Armenian immigrants have enriched the United States in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history that brought so many of their ancestors to our shores,” Biden added. “We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”
