Embroiled in controversary within his own country, Turkey's President Erdogan threatens to recognize Native American genocide

By Kaniehtonkie

Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan threatens to recognize killings of Native Americans as genocide in response to the Armenia resolution.

The US Senate voted in favor of recognizing the Armenia Genocide last week. Republican initially stalled the vote at the urging of Donald Trump.

The US Senate has passed a resolution recognizing the Ottoman Empire’s killings of Armenians in the early 20th century as a genocide, a move that Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly tried to block.

The resolution overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 405-11 in October, but Republicans refused to vote in the Senate after Trump intervened. Now with the bill passed recogcning the Armenain genocide, Mr. Erdogan has threatened to respond by recognizing the US killings of Native Americans saying the deaths of millions of Indigenous people at the hands of European settlers should also be viewed as a genocide.

Speaking on the pro-government A Haber news channel, he said: “Can we speak about America without mentioning [Native Americans]? It is a shameful moment in US history”

Around 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were killed by modern-day Turkey’s predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, in the early 20th century.

European settlers killed 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. The reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a “vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record,’, according to History News Network.

By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people.”

Turkey, like the United States denies the killings amounted to genocide, instead marking up the deaths of Armenians and Turks as the consequences of the ongoing war. It claims a lower death toll of hundreds of thousands.

While the implications of the US legislation are largely symbolic, its timing and the targeting is a sore spot for the Turkish state.

Turkey’s leader was not alone in wanting the issue of indigenous Americans addressed with left-wing Democrat Ilhan Omar refusing to back the bill until the deaths of Native Americans and the transatlantic slave trade were viewed in the same light by US Congress.