Activists hold pictures of Armenian victims during a demonstration to commemorate the 1915 mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, in Istanbul April 24, 2014. | Reuters
A U.S.-based Christian group has commended President Joe Biden for âstanding upâ to Turkey and becoming the first president since Ronald Reagan to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide on Saturday, the 106th anniversary of when the Ottoman Empire (modern Turkey) began to massacre its Armenian Christian minority, resulting in 1.5 million deaths.
âPresident Biden is the only president since Ronald Reagan to refer to this mass atrocity perpetuated by Ottoman-era Turkish authorities against Armenian Christians as a genocide,â persecution watchdog group International Christian Concern said in a statement.Â
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President Biden recognized the mass killings of Armenians more than a century ago as genocide, in a test of America’s somewhat strained relationship with Turkey. For more on the significance of Biden s statement, Alex Hinton, Director of Rutgers University’s Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights and author of It Can Happen Here: White Power and The Rising Threat of Genocide in the U.S. joins.
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Hari Sreenivasan:
For more on the significance of President Biden s statement, I spoke with Alex Hinton, Director of Rutgers University s Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights.
In the wake of a February 1 military coup in Myanmar, experts are concerned the change in power will further endanger human rights protections, especially for Rohingya Muslims an ethnic minority that faced atrocities potentially amounting to genocide under the previous, and freely elected, administration.
“The man who oversaw genocidal acts against the Rohingya, and war crimes and crimes against humanity against other ethnic minorities, is now the sole leader of the country: Min Aung Hlaing,” said Shayna Bauchner, a researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.
Since gaining independence from the British colonial rule in 1948, Myanmar’s government has shifted back and forth between military and civilian control. The most recent period of military rule ended in 2011, with the newly deposed leader, State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, taking office in 2015 after winning the first free election in 25 years. With the coup, the military removed and detained Suu Kyi and other