Turkey has strongly criticized U.S. President Donald Trump for officially acknowledging that 1.5 million Armenians were deported and killed by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War.
Just like his predecessors, Trump stopped stop short of describing the mass killings as genocide in a statement issued on Monday. He spoke instead of “one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century.”
“Beginning in 1915, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in the final years of the Ottoman Empire,” added his statement.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry denounced the statement, saying that it contains “misinformation and false definitions” provided by “some Armenian circles in the U.S.”
“We expect from the new U.S. Administration not to accredit the one-sided historical narrative of these circles which are known for their tendency to violence and hate speech and to adopt an approach which will take into consideration the sufferings of all sides,” said a ministry spokesman.
The leading Armenian-American advocacy groups were just as critical of Trump’s statement issued on the 102nd anniversary of the start of the Armenian genocide. They denounced his apparent desire not to anger Turkey, a longtime U.S. ally, with an explicit recognition of the genocide.
Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush used similar language in their April 24 statements. The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, pointed to this fact when he commented on Trump’s failure to use the word “genocide.”
“I think if you look back to the language that President Obama, President Bush have used, the language the President used is consistent with all of that,” Spicer told reporters in Washington.
Earlier on Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan again offered his condolences to the descendants of Armenians killed in the Ottoman Empire. But he blamed their deaths on “the harsh conditions of the First World War,” rather than a deliberate government policy of extermination.
The current and former Turkish governments have claimed that Ottoman Armenians died in smaller numbers and as a result of civil strife. They have condemned the 26 nations -- including France, Germany, Italy and Russia -- for officially recognizing the mass killings as genocide to date.
Most Western historians specializing in research of crimes against humanity dismiss the official Turkish position. “The historical record on the Armenian Genocide is unambiguous and documented by overwhelming evidence,” the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) said in 2007.
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