Biden Becomes First President To Officially Recognize The 1915 Armenian Genocide
On Saturday, President Joe Biden officially recognized the Armenian Genocide of the early 1900s, becoming the first U.S. leader to ever call the mass killing a “genocide.”
Today actually marked the annual Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which recognizes the Ottoman Empire’s killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians from a traumatic period that lasted sometime between 1915 and 1923, PEOPLE magazine notes.
Biden, 78, said in a statement:
“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Biden began. “Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination.”
He went on to say,
“We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”
Closing out his statement, Biden concluded:
“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today.”
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