President Biden has an opportunity this month to use honest and accurate terminology in describing the Ottoman Empire’s killing of more than 1 million Armenians a century ago Los Angeles Times editorial says. When the anniversary of the start of the massacre arrives, he can and should call it a genocide, a term that only one president — Ronald Reagan — has previously used in that context. And even then, Reagan made the reference as an aside in a proclamation about another atrocity, the Holocaust.
In fact, it’s dumbfounding that calling what happened to the Armenians “genocide” is even debatable. It’s like saying, “You know, if we don’t call the time when the river water raged down Main Street a flood, then the damage wasn’t so bad.”
And it was bad, a crime against humanity whose pain resonates all the more through history because global governments have been slow to recognize it and some factions have intransigently refused to acknowledge the truth.
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day occurs annually on April 24, reflecting the day in 1915 when Ottoman authorities rounded up hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in what is now Istanbul. Many were hanged in the streets. Although Armenians had suffered violent oppression under the Ottoman Empire before, that roundup marked the start of a campaign of much broader and more consequential attacks and forced deportations. When it was over, the estimated population of Armenians living in Turkey dropped from 2.1 million to 389,000.
Deniers of the Armenian genocide — led by the Turkish government — claim that while predominantly Christian Armenians did indeed die in Turkey through violence and starvation before, during and after World War I, so too did Jews and Muslims. Read the full article
here.
