President Obama is refusing to call the massacre of Armenians of the Ottoman Empire genocide. White House officials defended his decision saying it’s necessary to maintain the cooperation of Turkey, a NATO ally, in the Middle Eastern conflicts.
“As president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide,” then presidential candidate Barack Obama said in 2008.
Not only did he renege on his word, he proved himself to be a hypocrite as he criticized the Bush administration for recalling an ambassador who used the word genocide.
“Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence,” Obama stated January 19, 2008. “The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy.”
California Congressman Adam Schiff, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the president’s decision.
“The United States has long prided itself for being a beacon of human rights, for speaking out against atrocity, for confronting painful chapters of its own past and that of others,” said Schiff. “This cannot be squared with a policy of complicity in genocide denial by the president or Congress.”
“How long must the victims and their families wait before our nation has the courage to confront Turkey with the truth about the murderous past of the Ottoman Empire? If not this president, who spoke so eloquently and passionately about recognition in the past, whom? If not after 100 years, when?” he added.
California has the country’s largest population of people of Armenian descent, with more than 200,000 living in Los Angeles County.
The head of the Armenian National Council of America went further.
“President Obama’s surrender to Turkey represents a national disgrace,” said Ken Hachikian. “It is, very simply, a betrayal of truth, a betrayal of trust.”
No sitting U.S. president has ever used the word “genocide” when speaking of the atrocities committed against Armenians. However, President Ronald Reagan, in 1981, did issue a written proclamation about the “genocide of the Armenians,” but because of diplomatic pressure he dropped all references to the term.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Turks, a Sunni Islamic state, aligned itself with the German Empire and ordered the wholesale slaughter of Christian Armenians. Large-scale massacres were also committed against the Empire’s Greek and Assyrian minorities as part of the same campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Turkey denies the word genocide is the correct term for the mass killings and in recent years been faced with repeated calls to recognize them as genocide, claiming that many people, including Turks died during the war. To date, twenty-three countries have officially recognized the murder of more than 1.5 million people as genocide.
Armenians and others will observe the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide Friday, which began in 1915 and lasted until 1923, long after the world war ended.
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