Trump Grapples With Armenian Genocide Remembrance

In issuing a proclamation for Armenian Remembrance Day (April 24), the president used the term “meds yeghern” (the Armenian word for “atrocity” or “catastrophe”) when describing “one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century, in which 1.5 million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their final deaths in the final years of the Ottoman Empire" (as Turkey was known at the time).

But Trump, like most of his predecessors, stopped short of using the word “genocide” to describe these events. The American Armenian community — outside of Armenia, the largest such community in the world — wants the word used in an official statement from the U.S.

Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) Executive Director Aram Hamparian said President Trump’s statement “once again enforced [Turkey’s] gag rule against honest American condemnation and commemoration of Armenian genocide.”

Turkey has long fiercely denied that the events of 1915 were genocide. As he was recalled to Ankara in 2007 over a proposed congressional resolution condemning Armenian genocide, Turkey’s then-Ambassador Nabi Sensoy told me, “We are very sorry for what happened. And we mourn the loss of life. But nobody is talking about the hundreds of thousands of people who perished at the hands of the Armenians in that period.”

“The sentiments of the Turkish people are totally disregarded in this whole affair,” said Sensoy (who died in February), “and it is being presented that all of a sudden the Turkish nation, after 1,000 years of togetherness with the Armenians went simply berserk and started killing the Armenians. The real truth is that the population living in the east of the Ottoman Empire at the time sided with the invading Russian army and they attacked the Turkish population.”

Since Turkey is considered a U.S. ally in the war against ISIS and the U.S. president has a good relationship with Turkish President Erdogan, White House sources say, Trump refrained from using the term “genocide.”

Noting the president’s choice of words on Armenian Remembrance Day, Newsmax asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders whether the president believes in Armenian genocide.

“I haven’t had a detailed conversation with him about that,” Sanders told me. “But I understand the resolution the president signed was consistent with past administrations as well.”

As a candidate, Barack Obama made clear he believed in Armenian genocide and promised to sign a proclamation that said just that. But he never did — reportedly because he considered Turkey an ally in the war against terror.

The closest any president has come to invoking the term “Armenian genocide” was in Ronald Reagan’s Proclamation 4838 (April 22, 1981) remembering victims of the Holocaust: “Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it — and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples — the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.”

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.