American Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

On 29^th of October 2019, the House of Representatives of the United States voted overwhelmingly to recognize the Armenian genocide. This is a belated recognition of the loss of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian lives during the World War One, when they were deported from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian deserts, by the Ottomans. The actual figures are disputed. Armenians say 1.5 million were killed while the Republic of Turkey puts the figure at 300,000. The Turkish government had long denied the use of the term ‘genocide’ to describe the slaughter and its role as NATO ally had meant that the term was skilfully avoided by many including the United States. While other countries had previously officially recognised the genocide, the recognition by the US Congress came with Turkish offensive against Syrian Kurds, one time US allies against the Islamic State.

The term ‘genocide’ is a composite of the Greek word ‘genos’ meaning ‘race’ and the Latin word ‘caedo’ meaning ‘act of killing’. It was coined by a lawyer of a Polish Jewish parentage Raphael Lemkin in his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe published in 1944. The United Nations Genocide Convention that was established in the year 1948, recognised genocide as the “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole, in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”. Turkey strongly condemned the resolutions arguing that it lacked legal or historical basis. According to Turkey the Armenians were killed in the course of the civil war and the unrest that prevailed in the region at that time and not due to any systemic attempt at genocide. However, to trace the roots of this annihilation one needs to flip through the pages of history.

This history begins with the downfall of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century under the rule of Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II. According to historians of the Armenian genocide approximately 1.5 million Armenians were killed (specifically in the year 1915) and a number of them were forced to leave the country. This mass extermination was carried out by the Ottomans against the then minorities including the Armenians, Syrians and Greeks. The threat that the Christian Armenian civilians posed to the Ottomans by their rising prosperity in the spheres of education and wealth made the Ottomans eager to free Turkey from the Armenian minority. They also feared the loyalty of the Armenians towards the Christian governments such as Russia which shared an unsettled boundary with Turkey. Villages were burned, Armenian women were abducted and raped, and many deported. The time period in which it took place (1915-1923) marks it as the first genocide of the twentieth century.

The timing of the resolution is significant. It came in the wake of the Turkish offensive “Operation Peace Spring” that followed the withdrawal of the US forces from Syria on 6 October. In Syria the United States had partnered with the Syrian Kurds, specifically the Kurdistan Democratic Union (PYD) and the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) against the Islamic State. Turkey considers the PYD/YPG to be the Syrian wing of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which both Turkey and the US have labelled as a terrorist group. While Turkey equates the PKK with the PYD and the YPG, Washington tended to view them apart. However, the US also never had a formal arrangement to fight for the Syrian Kurds and there was mutual acceptance that the partnership was against the Islamic State. Post withdrawal, President Trump tweeted that the Kurdish groups “were no angels” and the transactional nature of the relationship became evident when the PYD/YPG, which had never totally severed links with the Bashar al Assad government, struck a deal with Damascus soon after,   mediated by Russian officials.

Turkish President Erdogan on the other hand looked on Operation Peace Spring as a litmus test for Turkey’s ‘friends’. He considered President Trump to be a friend and did not expect the threat of sanctions from the US that followed the offensive. However, the Turkish offensive, reports of war crimes in what was to be a safe zone and Ankara’s acquisition of Russian S-400 missile defence system formed the background of a negative mood that enabled the passage of the resolution.

Critiques have however noted that the timing of the resolution was not propitious. It instrumentalized a serious issue and has the potential of causing a Turkish backlash. While recognition of the 1915 issue as genocide within Turkey remains at best a distant prospect, there have been efforts in recent times to address contentious issues in its history and seek a common ground in Armenia. Rather than yet another foreign resolution about the event, what would be important would be for the Turks themselves to come to terms with their own history.

Sanandita Chanda

Intern, AGA