President Biden on Saturday formally declared that the massacre of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire more than a century ago was “genocide,” a move that is likely to exacerbate tensions with Turkey.
In doing so, Biden is fulfilling a campaign promise and becoming the first sitting president since Ronald Reagan to use the term “genocide” to describe the mass killings that occurred during the 20th century at the end of World War I.
“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Biden said in a statement released by the White House.
“Beginning on April 24, 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,” Biden continued. “We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”
