Armenian-Americans have welcomed President Joe Biden’s historic declaration that the killing and deportation of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War I constituted genocide as a long overdue yet positive step in reckoning with history. The U.S. is now among 30 countries, including France, Germany and Canada, that have formally recognized the Armenian genocide, according to the Armenian National Institute. Other U.S. allies, including the U.K. and Israel, have not. Turkey’s foreign ministry said that Biden’s statement “opened a wound” in Ankara-Washington relations and “deeply injured the Turkish people,” in a statement, according to the Financial Times. Simon Maghakyan, a human rights activist and lecturer in international relations at the University of Colorado, Denver, says that Biden’s statement was an important step in “healing the Armenian community’s intergenerational trauma, but that the U.S. recognizing the Armenian genocide “only truly matters” if the White House takes strong measures to help protect the security of Armenians, including in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region over which Armenia and Azerbaijan recently went to war. “Recognizing Armenia’s past without its present is not meaningful,” he adds. To read the full story, check out the article on Time.
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