Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashed out Tuesday at US President Joe Biden for again characterizing the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces as a genocide.
“Mr. Biden should first learn and know very well the history of Armenians. We cannot forgive this attempt aiming to challenge Turkey despite lacking such knowledge,” Erdogan said in a televised address following a Cabinet meeting.
Last Sunday, Biden issued a statement on Armenian Remembrance Day using the term “genocide” to describe the one and a half million Armenians who were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination in 1915.
“Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thus began the Armenian genocide—one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century,” Biden said.
Commenting on the US President’s statement, Erdogan said: “Since it is based on completely false information, we do not even find it worthy of being dwelt upon.”
The Turkish President also insisted that such statements were “provoking enmity” between the Turkish and Armenian people and maintained that the Armenians would suffer the most from the “hypocrisy.”
He said that in World War I, the Armenians in Anatolia, provoked and equipped by foreign states, started a revolt and attacked the Muslim population.
Even though Armenian “propaganda expresses absurdly ridiculous numbers,” it is a fact that many times more Muslims were “brutally martyred by these gangs” than the Armenians who lost their lives in Anatolia, Erdogan stressed.
Ankara has rejected the term “genocide” to describe the mass killing of Armenians 100 years ago. It insists that a civil waraccompanied by a famine took place in Anatolia where 300 to 500 Armenians died, and the equivalent of Turks.
