Valezka Murillo: By refusing to call it genocide, U.S. complicit Turkey’s atrocities

The UN definition of genocide is: “any of acts committed with intent to destroy ... a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Abiding by this definition it is indisputable that the actions committed by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, which took the lives of 1.5 million Armenians, constitute genocide.

The United States holds a long history of avoidance when it comes to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The last U.S. president to use the word genocide when referring to it was Ronald Reagan. Every American president since has conveniently avoided the truth by using the term “meds yeghern” which translates to “great tragedy” in Armenian. America’s lack of recognition of the Armenian genocide can be summed up to guilt and fear. Guilt that the United States was aware that human rights violations were occurring yet did nothing to stop it. Fear that they will be charged with war crimes; another factor the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide uses in their persecution of genocidal crimes is complacency in genocide.

By simply standing by, the United States is guilty of being complicit in the Armenian genocide. After all silence is what allows genocide to happen.

This story was originally published May 2, 2017 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Valezka Murillo: By refusing to call it genocide, U.S. complicit Turkey’s atrocities."