LONDON: Domestic politics and Washington’s intention of returning to the international stage were the two real reasons behind U.S. President Joe Biden’s recent recognition of 1915 events as “genocide,” Turkey’s Vice President Fuat Oktay said.
“I guess. He’s trying to use such a phenomenon as a tool to come back to one part of the world. And I strongly believe that these two reasons are totally the wrong start for him and for U.S. foreign policy,” Fuat Oktay told TRT World.
Biden’s remarks that called the events of 1915 “genocide” on April 24 broke with a long-held tradition by American presidents of refraining from using the term.
Turkey swiftly rejected the term as null and void, and Oktay told TRT that Biden’s comments have to be based on the facts of history and evidence.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called Biden’s remarks “unfounded, unjust and contrary to the facts about the painful events that took place more than a century ago.”
On why the international community has been ignoring Turkey’s insistence to set up an international commission to examine the archives, Oktay said that even a primary school student will understand Ankara’s proposition of a committee being formed by historians, not by politicians.
He said that politicians might be moved by the tendency of political reason. “Just because of the lobbies, just because of the promises made to those Armenian or Armenian affected lobbies, you cannot make a historic decision and you cannot claim a nation is responsible for a genocide.”
“The term ‘genocide’ itself is not an easy word to use for anyone. If the word ‘genocide’ has to be used, that has to be used for the United States, not for Turkey,” he said. Biden’s letter on 1915 events ‘legally unfounded’ In another statement on the issue, the senior presidential aide said in an article published on Saturday that Washington’s ties with Turkey could suffer after Biden’s recent letter on the events of 1915 that was “disputed, sensitive and historically and legally unfounded.” “Turkey’s relations with the U.S. have suffered a blow, but the U.S. needs to understand that in a changing world, regional stability cannot be achieved without Turkish cooperation,” said Gülnur Aybet, a professor at the Turkish National Defence University, in an article she penned for the U.K.-based Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security. –Agencies
