US President Joe Biden called the mass extermination of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War a genocide. "We remember all those who died during the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman period," he said on Saturday, April 24.
According to the head of the White House, this is not about "blaming" Turkey, but about confirming a historical fact. Biden became the first American president to recognize the 1915 Armenian massacre as genocide. This is expected to sour US relations with NATO ally Turkey. The day before, during a telephone conversation, he called on Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan to understand this step.
Until that time, the US leadership avoided such a definition, so as not to spoil relations with Ankara. Biden himself promised during his election campaign that he would seek to define the tragedy of 1915 as genocide. "Silence means complicity," he said during the presidential race.
In 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate voted for a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. However, the US has not yet officially recognized the genocide.
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