The following letter is in response to the April 5 op-ed on the Armenian genocide. The Times deserves praise for taking a moral andprincipled stance in calling on the President to formally denounce Turkey’s policies against the Armenians in 1915 for what they were-genocide. The Ottoman government of the time led by the notorious Young Turks likewise targeted the Greeks and the Assyrians in whatwas a policy of genocide of Christians under Turkish rule. The recent scholarly work, “The Thirty Year Genocide” by Israeli scholars and experts Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi makes very clear that Turkish leaders targeted these groups for extermination largely on the basisof their faith.
Furthermore, the genocide of the Christians did not cease after the downfall of the Young Turks. The infamous Mustafa Kemal who emergedas the successor to the Young Turks proceeded to complete the campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing that his predecessors had begun. Kemal’s armies slaughtered all Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christian communities that had managed to survive the Young Turks.In fact, the foundation of modern Turkey by Mustafa Kemal was achieved through the genocide of these Christian communities.
The legacy of the Turkish orchestrated genocide can be seen today through Turkish expansionism in Syria and by the support given by Turkey to the genocidal ambitions of Azerbaijan which instigated a war of aggression against democratic Armenia. Furthermore, Turkey has been threateningthe democratic countries of Greece and Cyprus. Ankara has claimed several Greek islands as being Turkish despite the fact that they are recognized as part of Greece by international treaties. Turkish leaders disregard that the populations of these islands are exclusively Greek and therefore any Turkish assault upon them would make possible a repetition of the mass slaughter of Greek and Armenian Christians that occurred in Smyrna in 1922 when that freed city was reconquered by the Turks.
President Biden must by all means condemn the Armenian genocide. He should also condemn the genocide of the Greeks and Assyrians as well.Then his administration should proceed to take action to punish Turkey for its acts of aggression against Greece and Cyprus and to punish Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia.
Theodore G. Karakostas
Boston