By John Bowden*
Turkey’s foreign ministry summoned the U.S. ambassador on Saturday to condemn President Biden’s declaration that the killings and forced displacement of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire constituted a genocide.
The Associated Press reported that Turkish officials expressed their displeasure with Biden’s decision after the president released a statement claiming that the U.S. does not “cast blame” for the genocide, which the U.S. stressed did not occur under Turkey’s modern-day government.
“The statement does not have legal ground in terms of international law and has hurt the Turkish people, opening a wound that’s hard to fix in our relations,” said the foreign ministry in a statement, according to the AP.
A spokesman for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also said in a tweet on Sunday that Biden’s position was “irresponsible and unprincipled.”
“President Erdoğan opened Turkey’s national archives & called for a joint historical committee to investigate the events of 1915, to which Armenia never responded. It is a pity @POTUS has ignored, among others, this simple fact and taken an irresponsible and unprincipled position.”
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