President Joe Biden held a highly anticipated phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday, the White House said, a day before the US administration is widely expected to recognize the century-old massacre of Armenians in modern-day Turkey as a “genocide.”
Biden conveyed “his interest in a constructive bilateral relationship with expanded areas of cooperation and effective management of disagreements,” the White House said in a statement, adding that the two leaders agreed to hold a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit in June.
The US readout of the call — Biden’s first with Erdogan since he took office in January — comes a day before Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, but did not mention the issue. During the campaign, Biden pledged to be the first president to support a resolution labeling the mass killing and mass deportation of up to 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turkish forces in 1915 as a “genocide.”
Ankara has long denied that a genocide took place. The Turkish government estimates the number of Armenians who died was closer to 300,000.
A US recognition of the Armenian genocide would deal another blow to already strained relations between the two NATO allies. In a statement ahead of Biden’s expected announcement, Erdogan said Thursday that Turkey “will continue to defend truths against the so-called Armenian genocide lie and those who support this slander with political motivations.”
In 2019, Congress voted to label the atrocities as a genocide following Turkey’s incursion into Kurdish-held parts of northeast Syria that displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. President Donald Trump rejected the resolution, but described the World War I-era killings as “one of the worst mass atrocities.”
As a candidate, Barack Obama pledged to recognize the genocide but never delivered on that promise for fear of inflaming tensions with Ankara.
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