President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the ongoing conflict at the Ukraine/Russia border, February 15, 2022 (Official White House photo by Cameron Smith/Flickr)
On April 24th last year, President Biden officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. Last year’s announcement constituted an important reversal of decades of US complicity in Turkey’s denial of the Genocide. In the wake of Biden’s statement, commentators highlighted its importance in terms of what it said about the state (read: nadir) of US-Turkish relations and about Biden’s commitment to a moral foreign policy. While such analyses captured central factors behind this long-resisted official acknowledgment, its most important function was to end the US’ own denial of the Armenian Genocide.
Turkey has long denied both the nature of the Genocide and the role of Ottoman officials in orchestrating and executing the World War I-era atrocities. This involved substantial efforts to enjoin US officials in suppressing references to the organized deportation and massacres of Ottoman Armenian (and other non-Muslim) citizens in the context of the war. In 1923, soon-to-be-Turkish negotiators in Lausanne refused to allow references to the massacres in the peace treaty that was being negotiated. In the mid-1930s, Turkey enlisted the help of the US State Department in successfully preventing the making of a Hollywood film about the resistance and international rescue of an Armenian community during the Genocide. In the 1960s, Turkish officials called on the State Department to stop a California community’s plan to erect a monument to the Genocide.
Starting in the early 1980s, as part of a broad effort by Turkish officials to better articulate and defend Turkey’s official position on the “Armenian question,” US involvement in Turkey’s denial dramatically increased. With the help of US lobbying firms, Turkey enlisted the active support of the State Department, Department of Defense and the White House in successfully opposing a series of Congressional resolutions that would have recognized the Armenian Genocide.
Since the mid-1970s, such resolutions have been repeatedly proposed in both houses of Congress. Until 2019, no resolution managed to pass both houses of Congress. A key reason is that, when such resolutions were introduced and considered, the US State Department sought to reassure Turkish officials that it opposed their passage, and more surprisingly, it helped fight them. In 2000, President Clinton even personally intervened to prevent the passage of such a resolution.
Additionally, every year since the mid-1990s, the US President has made a statement commemorating the Genocide on April 24, but until last year, the statements had assiduously avoided using the term that most appropriately and accurately described what they were purporting to commemorate: genocide. President Obama, in an apparent attempt to signal that he viewed the Genocide as such without using the term, deployed the Armenian phrase Medz Yeghern (“Great Catastrophe”). Such rhetorical adaptations mirror Turkey’s own evolving effort to craft a message that resonates with international normative expectations but rejects the label genocide.
While the US’ long-standing “complicity” in Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide was noted in passing by others, its ending deserves to be singled out and highlighted as arguably the most important implication of President Biden’s shift to acknowledging the Genocide as such.
Of course, in publicly recognizing and naming dark parts of other countries’ pasts, Biden invites charges of hypocrisy, given the US’ failure to fully or properly reckon with its own dark pasts, which include slavery, institutionalized racism and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. But the answer to the charge that other historic wrongs have not been acknowledged should not be the silencing, forgetting and denial of all dark pasts. Rather, Biden’s historic acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide should galvanize much-needed truth-seeking and truth-telling in the US. The final paragraph of Biden’s 2021 statement looked “to the future—toward the world that we wish to build for our children” and closed with the goal of “healing and reconciliation for all the people of the world.” Not long after recognizing the Armenian Genocide, President Biden took a step in this direction by designating Juneteenth a national holiday. Another key opportunity lies in H.R. 40, which proposes the creation of a commission to “study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans.” This proposed bill – a version of which was first introduced in 1989 – was approved by the House Committee on the Judiciary in a historic vote last April, but the House has taken no further action on the bill and the Senate Judiciary Committee has not taken action on a related bill. Given President Biden’s expressed support for the bill and stated commitment to racial justice, perhaps Biden’s long-awaited acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide can serve as a catalyst for greater attention to and more concrete steps toward the acknowledgment of and redress for the US’ own dark pasts.
Jennifer M. Dixon is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University and the author of Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018).