Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has decried the latest recognitions by France, Germany, Austria and Russia of the 1915 Armenian genocide and criticized the United States for nearly doing the same.
In another angry speech delivered on Saturday, Erdogan also reiterated his view that the rulers of the crumbling Ottoman Empire were right to force its Armenian subjects out of their homes.
“While we were struggling to give a peace message to the world, countries, such as Russia, France, Germany, Austria, took the side of enmity, hatred and grudge by supporting an allegation based on the lies told by Armenians,” Erdogan told members of a Turkish business association,
“Unfortunately, the U.S. also joined them with a different expression,” Erdogan said in reference to a statement released by U.S. President Barack Obama ahead of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide marked on Friday.
In that statement, Obama again avoided calling the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians a genocide. Still, he implicitly praised Pope Francis for referring to the massacres as “the first genocide of the 20th century” and paid tribute to Henry Morgenthau, the First World War-era U.S. ambassador in Constantinople who tried to stop what believed was an Ottoman “campaign of race extermination.”
“Those, who criticize the relocation we implemented in self-defense under the circumstances of World War One, must first answer for the bloody stains in their own history. While we struggled to protect our homeland, they committed these crimes against humanity for their imperialist goals,” Erdogan said, again defending the mass deportations of Armenians ordered by the Ottoman regime of “the Young Turks.”
“The last countries to speak of genocide are Germany, Russia and France. What happened during the two world wars that had been initiated by Germany in the past century is before our eyes,” Erdogan added in a scathing attack on German President Joachim Gauck and Bundestag members who publicly recognized the genocide last week.
The Turkish leader also hit out at his French and Russian counterparts, Francois Hollande and Vladimir Putin, who attended the official commemorations of the genocide centenary in Yerevan. Speaking at the ceremony Putin described the 1915 mass killings and deportations as “one of the most appalling events in the history of humankind,” while Hollande called on Ankara to admit to the genocide.
The French president thus echoed a resolution adopted by the European Parliament earlier this month. Not surprisingly, Erdogan took a swipe at the European Union legislature as well. “Hey European Union! Don’t offer us any thoughts, keep them to yourself,” he said.
The Turkish Foreign Minister similarly slammed Obama, Putin, Hollande, Gauck as well as the Austrian parliament in five separate statements issued last week. “We reject this selective and biased understanding of justice,” it said of Obama’s April 23 message.
Meanwhile, Armenia, which has been seeking a greater international recognition of the genocide together with its worldwide Diaspora, dismissed the Turkish statements on Monday. “I think it would have been easier for Turkey to issue a single statement criticizing the entire civilized world for speaking in a language which Ankara doesn’t understand,” Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian told reporters in Yerevan.
“But if the entire world speaks a language you don’t understand then you should realize that perhaps you are wrong,” Nalbandian said.
The Armenian genocide has been recognized by not only more than 20 states but also most Western historians specializing in research of crimes against humanity. “The historical record on the Armenian Genocide is unambiguous and documented by overwhelming evidence,” the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) said in a 2007 statement.
The New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) similarly concluded in 2003 that the Armenian massacres “include all of the elements of the crime of genocide” as defined by a 1948 UN convention.