The United States President Joe Biden has become the first president who has used “genocide” term to refer to the 1915 incidents during Ottoman Empire.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” said Biden in a statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.

“Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”

On the other hand, Turkey immediately condemned Biden’s statements that named the killing of Armenians in the hands of Ottomans in 1915 a “genocide.”

“We totally reject this statement that is only based on populism. Words cannot change history. No one can teach us a lesson about our history” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said. (ILKHA)