Turkey “Rejects entirely” recognition of the Armenian genocide by the United States, said Mevlüt Çavusoglu, Turkish Foreign Minister, a few minutes after President Joe Biden’s statement on Saturday April 24. “Words cannot change or rewrite history. We have no lessons to receive from anyone on our history ”, he tweeted in reaction to the decision from Washington. He summoned the US ambassador to protest in the evening, state news agency Anadolu reported.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, warned on Friday by his American counterpart, Joe Biden, did not react. Before the official announcement, he sent his condolences to Sahak Masalyan, the Patriarch of the Armenian community of Turkey, for the ” Difficult conditions “ she endured during the First World War. He deplored the instrumentalization of history “By third parties”, an expression that had been used previously by the Armenian Patriarch, apparently as upset as Mr. Erdogan by the recognition of the genocide. “Recep Tayyip Erdogan” has been “The only high state official in the history of the Turkish Republic” to share “Our pain and a certain respect for the children of our nation who lost their lives in exile”, underlined the religious leader.
” The dog barks the trailer moves on “
Turkish officials believe Washington’s move to be counterproductive, “Without legal basis”, explained the Speaker of Parliament, Mustafa Sentop. It risks damaging the Turkish-American relationship, degraded by multiple disputes, including the purchase by Ankara of Russian S-400 missiles.
Pro-government media shouted at “Biden’s scandalous statement”. “Macron did not remain calm either”, noted the daily Yeni Safak, an allusion to the French President’s visit to the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Paris. Lapidary, the Islamist daily Yeni Akit titled: ” The dog barks the trailer moves on “.
Recognized by some thirty countries and by the community of historians, the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire has been denied by Turkey since the birth of the Republic in 1923. Historians estimate that in 1915 about 1.5 million people Armenians and several hundred thousand Eastern Christians have been killed, or have died as a result of forced marches and systematic deportations.
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