Biden and the Armeania Genocide

President Joe Biden has made an important statement about the Armenian genocide. Daniel Politi reports (President to Formally Recognize Armenian Genocide Slate 04/24/2021):

President Joe Biden became the first commander in chief to officially recognize that the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire was a genocide, in a move that fulfilled a campaign promise and illustrated how Washington isn’t as worried as it once was about angering Turkey. ...

President Donald Trump and his predecessors had largely chosen to dance around the issue in order to avoid angering Turkey. The closest a U.S. president had come to this kind of statement was Ronald Reagan, who referred to the “genocide of the Armenians” in passing In a 1981 statement on the Holocaust but that was not followed up by a formal recognition. George W. Bush had vowed to recognize the genocide during the 2000 presidential campaign but didn’t end up following through as Turkey ended up becoming a key ally in the Iraq invasion. Barack Obama also said he would recognize the genocide during the 2008 presidential campaign but never ended up doing it during the eight years he was commander in chief. [my emphasis]

Aljazeera's Inside Story has this report and analysis, Is the US-Turkey relationship at risk of falling apart? 04/25/2021:

Nicholas Danforth of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in the Inside Story discussion notes that US relations with Turkey are at a relatively low level at the moment, which removed some of the risks previous Presidents say in explicitly using "genocide" to describe the mass expulsion and systemic killings of Armenian civilians by the Ottoman Empire.

The Britannica Online article on the Armenian Genocide (Ronald Grigor Suny, 05/19/2020 version) describes it this way:

In January 1915 [Turkish leader] Enver Paşa attempted to push back the Russians at the battle of Sarıkamış, only to suffer the worst Ottoman defeat of the war. Although poor generalship and harsh conditions were the main reasons for the loss, the Young Turk government sought to shift the blame to Armenian treachery. Armenian soldiers and other non-Muslims in the army were demobilized and transferred into labour battalions. The disarmed Armenian soldiers were then systematically murdered by Ottoman troops, the first victims of what would become genocide. About the same time, irregular forces began to carry out mass killings in Armenian villages near the Russian border. ...

Armenian resistance, when it occurred, provided the authorities with a pretext for employing harsher measures. In April 1915 Armenians in Van barricaded themselves in the city’s Armenian neighborhood and fought back against Ottoman troops, On April 24, 1915, citing Van and several other episodes of Armenian resistance, Talat Paşa ordered the arrest of approximately 250 Armenian intellectuals and politicians in Istanbul, including several deputies to the Ottoman Parliament. Most of the men who were arrested were killed in the months that followed.

Soon after the defeat at Sarıkamış, the Ottoman government began to deport Armenians from Eastern Anatolia on the grounds that their presence near the front lines posed a threat to national security. In May the Ottoman Parliament passed legislation formally authorizing the deportation. Throughout summer and autumn of 1915, Armenian civilians were removed from their homes and marched through the valleys and mountains of Eastern Anatolia toward desert concentration camps. The deportation, which was overseen by civil and military officials, was accompanied by a systematic campaign of mass murder carried out by irregular forces as well as by local Kurds and Circassians. Survivors who reached the deserts of Syria languished in concentration camps, many starved to death, and massacres continued into 1916. Conservative estimates have calculated that some 600,000 to more than 1,000,000 Armenians were slaughtered or died on the marches. The events of 1915–16 were witnessed by a number of foreign journalists, missionaries, diplomats, and military officers who sent reports home about death marches and killing fields. [my emphasis]

Donald Bloxham provided the following description in The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916 Past & Present 181: 2003 (Nov 2003):

From late summer 1914, Armenian settlements on either side of the Ottoman borders with Persia and the Caucasus were plundered by Ottoman forces, and the Armenian menfolk were killed. From 24 April 1915, prominent members of the Ottoman Armenian community were incarcerated en masse in Constantinople. From late March to late May, arrests and limited deportations from Armenian communities were also conducted in the Cilicia region to the south-east, around the Gulf of Alexandretta. Thereafter, in a wave spreading westwards and southwards throughout the empire from the provinces of eastern Anatolia - the areas of heaviest Armenian population – the Turkish government, led by the Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress: CUP), implemented an increasingly radical programme of deportation and murder.

Communal leaders and civilian men were incarcerated and/or murdered outright. The women, children and elderly were forced to emigrate to the southern desert regions, in modem-day Syria and Iraq, and along the way their numbers were decimated by depredations - rape, kidnap, mutilation, outright killing and death from exposure, starvation and thirst - at the hands of gendarmes and soldiers, irregulars, and Muslim tribespeople. Many surviving this process then perished from privation or disease in desert concentration centres, where they were left without provision and, in mid 1916, subjected to a further spate of massacres. A total of at least one million Armenians died, more than two-thirds of those deported. Many of the kidnapped, some of the other surviving women, and an indeterminate number of orphans were forcibly converted to Islam - in total 5 to 10 per cent of the Ottoman Armenians. Up to 400,000 survived the First World War within the empire, with a particular concentration in Constantinople, from which there were only selective deportations of the leadership and provincial sojourners. [my emphasis]

Turkey has had numerous tensions with its NATO allies in recent years, particularly as President Tayyip Erdoğan has he has become more of an authoritarian ruler. Recent tensions have involved conflicts with Greece over territorial waters, interventions in Syria and Libya, refugees, human rights issues, and performative arrogance. Turkey has provided assistance to Ukraine in its on-going standoff with Russia. But Russian arms sales to Turkey have also raised serious concerns in NATO.

Turkey also supported Azerbaijan in its conflict last year with Armenia. Armenia has been closer to Russia diplomatically than Azerbaijan. But Russia's position on last year's conflict wasn't entirely supportive of Armenia, either.

There is no Biden Tower in Turkey. So he is presumably more willing to consider a wider variety of policy options with Turkey than the Former Guy did.

Despite official Turkish claims that the death toll as recounted in those two sources is far too high, there's no real disagreement among actual genocide scholars and historians about the basic factual picture of what happened.

And regardless of how exactly it fits in with overall US policy toward Turkey, it's a good thing that Biden made that statement. The official text is here, Statement by President Joe Biden on Armenian Remembrance Day White House 04/24/2021.

A left criticism of Ilhan Omar over her Turkey policy

Djene Bajalan and Michael Brooks give their view from the left on the issue of Ilhan Omar's voting "present" on the resolution condemning the Armenia genocide that I talked about in my previous post, Ilhan Omar and the Turkey Question Jacobin 11/01/2019:

First, Omar might balk at the use of genocide recognition as a “cudgel.” However, given Turkey’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing and brutalization of the Kurds it is precisely the moment for such recognition. Indeed, Eroğan’s plan to “cleanse” Turkey of three to four million Syrian refugees by deporting them to a small strip of desert — a plan announced to the whole world at the United Nations in late September — also has ominous echoes of what the Ottomans did to the Armenians in 1915.

Second, it seems naive at best to believe that the debate on the Armenian genocide can be decoupled from politics, especially given the social and political taboo in Turkey against discussing the massacre. Worse still, the “leave it to the academic consensus” echoes Turkish talking points. There is no serious debate about whether the Armenian genocide was a genocide. Decades of scholarship have shown that the Committee of Union and Progress that governed the Ottoman Empire during the First World War sought to destroy its Armenian population. Most recently, Turkish scholar and dissident Taner Akçam has provided extensive documentation of the systematic nature of the assault visited upon the Anatolian Armenians. To draw an analogy, the debate about Armenian genocide is akin to the debate about whether Hitler sought to annihilate the Jewish people.

Finally, Omar’s demand that no recognition of the Armenian genocide take place until other historical crimes are acknowledged is a case of what-aboutism — one that is especially jarring because it comes from the mouth of such a committed advocate of solidarity and human rights. [my emphasis]

It's important to keep in mind that Turkey is a NATO ally. It was always one of the big risks in direct US military involvement in Syria is that in practice it put the US in opposition to a Turkish direct involvement. The Kurdish ethnic-cleansing operation against the Syrian Kurds is wrong and the US should be condemneing it (rather than greenlighting it!) and trying to arrange a peaceful solution. But for now, it looks like that ship has sailed.

The National Interest's Matthew Petti writes (U.S.-Led Coalition Blocks Russia in Syria While Allowing Turkey to Terrorize the Kurds 11/01/2019):

The Pentagon is using a well-known two-steps-to-the-right tactic to avoid becoming immersed in regional chaos. It is observing acts of war while not preventing them from happening in order to appease an ally that has more political clout than another partner—and a stockpile of U.S. nuclear weapons in its backyard. In fact, an official at the U.S.-led counter-ISIS coalition recently reiterated to the National Interest that “no U.S. forces will participate in operations related to the implementation of the ‘safe zone.’”

But he goes on to explain that this is more complicated that it might sound from that summary. For one thing, professional hawks have their own agenda on Syria that doesn't entirely align with the Administration's current policy. The US troops in the Deir ez-Zor to enforce Trump's take-the-oil policy are another complication. And Petti's report suggests that observed movements of US troops may not align with the current stated policy. And:

The Rojava Information Center, a collective of journalists based in northeast Syria, and Deirezzor24 both reported that coalition aircraft bombed pro-Assad forces in the eastern countryside of Deir ez-Zor on October 29. But a [US] coalition spokesman says that no such military action has occurred.

“The Coalition did not conduct airstrikes in Syria in recent days,” the spokesman told the National Interest. “The Coalition de-conflicts military operations with other forces operating in Syria through pre-existing communication channels and interlocutors.”

When dealing with particular issues with Turkey, I don't think the US should treat NATO as a sacred cow. But even if we want some kind of revision - we revised it by expanding the membership several times since 1989 - it would be reckless to do it by Presidential whim.

And here's a reminder from Juan Cole about the real situation in Syria (Syria’s Al-Assad: Trump, Openly Criminal, is the best US President we could Wish for Informed Comment 11/02/2019):

[Syrian President Bassar] Al-Assad branded [Turkis President Tayyip] Erdogan an American agent in his invasion of Syria. He warned that if Turkey continued on its present path, at some point the Syrian Army would have no choice but to go to war with the Turkish invasion force.

(This is just bluster. Al-Assad’s army is small, weak, and poorly equipped whereas Turkey is a member of NATO with a big new American arsenal. Turkey is four times as populous as Syria and would make mincemeat of it. Syria’s only advantage is its Russian patron, and it is Moscow that will get Turkey back out of Syria over time, by reassuring Ankara on its security concerns. Russian gendarmes are already patrolling part of the border). [my emphasis]