Joe Biden’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide has great meaning for the global Armenian diaspora

Christa Kuljian is the author of Sanctuary (Jacana 2013) and Darwin’s Hunch (Jacana 2016). She is a Research Associate at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research).

US President Joe Biden made a statement on 24 April that officially recognised the Armenian Genocide. Between 1915 and 1917, over a million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks and another million were forced into exile.

“Of those who survived,” Biden said, “most were forced to find new homes and new lives around the world, including in the United States. With strength and resilience, the Armenian people survived and rebuilt their community.” 

Biden’s statement on the 106th anniversary of the start of the genocide had great meaning for me personally. I grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts, which is a major centre of the Armenian diaspora in the United States. Watertown is home to the Armenian Library and Museum of America, as well as Armenian churches, grocery stores and bakeries and several Armenian newspapers.

In addition to reminding me of my childhood, Biden’s statement also made me think of the mid-1980s when I worked as a young foreign policy aide in Senator Edward Kennedy’s office in Washington, DC.

For more than 40 years, Senator Kennedy was a proponent of recognising the Armenian Genocide and represented Massachusetts in the US Senate. The major focus of my work at the time was South Africa and the region of southern Africa, supporting efforts to bring attention to the atrocities of apartheid. The end of apartheid seemed distant if not impossible, and it would be another eight years before South Africa would hold its first democratic elections.

I remember the 71st and 72nd anniversaries of the Armenian Genocide passed with several senators reading statements into the Congressional Record with little attention from the broader public. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 and arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union were Kennedy’s foreign policy priorities at the time.

In 1989, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kennedy joined with then-committee chairman, now President Joe Biden, in leading the effort to pass a resolution that would mark 24 April 1990 as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Over the objections of the US State Department and the Turkish government, the committee adopted the resolution. From then on, Kennedy spoke on the Senate floor numerous times commemorating the Armenian Genocide.

Samantha Power has long campaigned for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. She was president Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and was recently nominated by President Biden, and then confirmed as the head of USAID. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell published in 2002, Power described the newspaper coverage of the massacres of Armenians in the early 20th century and how a young Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin was observing events.

Lemkin drafted a paper about the Ottoman massacre of Armenians and wrote that those crimes had been largely ignored by most Europeans as an “Eastern” problem. Lemkin drew attention to the rise of Hitler and he was concerned that if it could happen to the Armenians, it could happen again. In 1933, he suggested that, if the international community wanted to prevent mass slaughter, they had to unite in a campaign to ban it, but he was not successful in getting people’s attention.

Lemkin was correct that Hitler had learnt from the past. In 1939, Hitler made a speech declaring “Who today still speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” A week later, the Nazis invaded Poland.

When words such as “barbarity” failed to take Lemkin’s campaign forward, he decided that he needed a new word. He coined the word “genocide” in 1944 combining the Greek geno meaning “race” or “tribe” and the Latin cide meaning “killing”: genocide.

In December 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution that condemned genocide as “the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups”. Lemkin’s efforts to create the word genocide were motivated by what happened to the Armenians in 1915 and to the Jews in the 1940s.

The Armenian Genocide looms large in my family history. My great-grandmother Semma Marashlian survived the 1895 massacre of Armenians in the Turkish town of Marash and another massacre in Tarsus in 1909 that foreshadowed the genocide. The stories of her life, spanning from Turkey to Syria to Brazil to the United States have inspired me.

This global recognition is important because it rejects the decades of lobbying and denial from the Turkish government. Hopefully, this recognition will encourage Turkey to come to terms with its past.