Countries which recognize armenian genocide

Provincial legislative bodies, governments, city councils. December , Home Foreign policy Genocide recognition Recognition. Bilateral and multilateral relations in alphabetical order.

Not using the word has come to be felt as a denial of trauma by the descendants of those who lost their lives. The Turkish authorities have tenaciously resisted the description, despite historical evidence to the contrary. Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Almost reflexively, Turks complain their forebears are being judged as Nazis by implication. A total of 5 million people died in the empire during those years, vast numbers of them Muslims.

Some Turks irrationally fear that the push to recognize the slaughter of Armenians as a genocide is a campaign to break up Turkey, just as the Christian powers did a century ago.

Dink opposed international recognition campaigns, arguing with great moral force that Turkey must first democratize and that would naturally lead to a true reckoning in the country where the killings happened.

In the mids, progress was made in Turkey. Kurdish municipalities in eastern Turkey apologized to the Armenians and erect memorials to them. Groundbreaking memoirs were published and conferences were held. Yet Dink himself was cruelly assassinated in , and the civil rights movement he was part of has been all but dismantled.

In this political environment, it makes little difference for the United States finally to call a spade a spade. There may be some political fallout—though fortunately everything has been on the level of words not deeds so far—but the Ankara-Washington relationship is no longer that of close allies.

The first way it is used is as a legal term, as set out in the Genocide Convention of The U. Lemkin himself would seem to have supported this view. In his memoirs , he describes how in he approached the Turkish mission to the United Nations and successfully lobbied the Turkish government to be one of the first to ratify the convention. The clear implication of his recollections is that it was understood that this would not trigger the prosecution of Turkish perpetrators of crimes against Armenians, many of whom were still alive at that time.

This legal clarification will not deter Armenian lawsuits already under way. Yet it will undoubtedly be hard to prove legal claims dating back more than a century.

Khatchig Mouradian, a scholar on genocide at Columbia University and editor of The Armenian Review, said that the US had been advancing toward recognition for the past two decades, moving from questioning the veracity of the crime to acknowledging that it was indeed genocide.

President Biden adhered to his campaign promise to finally deliver that recognition. Many believe that the often hostile relationship between Turkey and Israel under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan left Ankara without the support of pro-Israel groups in Washington. Turkey has always reacted furiously in its official rhetoric to accusations of genocide. It acknowledges that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died during World War I, but argues there were far fewer victims than most scholars claim, and denies any intention by Ottoman authorities to carry out a genocidal campaign against Armenians.

The Turkish position is rooted in historical pride, said Cohen. If the Armenian genocide is internationally recognized like the Jewish Holocaust, then it will be a huge stain on the perception of Turkish history. Many countries have refrained from recognizing the genocide out of fear of the Turkish response, which often involves recalling its ambassador for a period of time. It also recalled its ambassador to the Vatican when Pope Francis used the word genocide during a mass marking the th anniversary of the slaughter, and its ambassador to Germany after the Bundestag passed a resolution calling the murder of Armenians a genocide in Erdogan is unlikely to take that step against the US.

Ankara also faces worsening ties with Europe. Refugees have also been an ongoing sticking point, with Erdogan threatening to let refugees across the border into Greece if the EU does not keep its end of a refugee deal. EU leaders have also criticized Turkey for human rights abuses. At the same time, Turkey faces dire economic challenges. These problems took on new dimensions once the virus hit: food prices skyrocketed as the lira lost 30 percent against the dollar.

Erdogan has managed to reverse some of these trends, but the government will have to continue to invest significant sums into health care and social services to deal with the coronavirus and its aftereffects. Even worse for Erdogan, the US is now governed by Biden, who has had an acrimonious relationship with the Turkish leader for years.