Türkiye’s foreign ministry CAVASOGLU has summoned the US ambassador in Ankara to protest the US decision to mark the deportation and killing of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire as “genocide.”

On April 24, 2021, US President BIDEN recognized the events that began in 1915 and killed an estimated 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians as genocide.

Sedat ONAL the deputy foreign minister met David SATTERFIELD on April 24, 2021, to express Ankara’s strong condemnation. “The statement does not have a legal ground in terms of international law and has hurt the Turkish people, opening a wound that’s hard to fix in our relations,” the ministry said.

The statement was carefully crafted to say the deportations, massacres and death marches that took place in the Ottoman Empire. “We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated,” it said.

The White House proclamation immediately prompted statements of condemnation from Turkish officials, although President ERDOGAN is yet to address the issue.

The Turkish foreign ministry said April 24, 2021: “The nature of the events of 1915 does not change according to the current political motives of the politicians or domestic political considerations. Such an attitude serves only a vulgar distortion of history”.

“We have nothing to learn from anybody on our own past,” said CAVASOGLU.

The announcement comes as Turkish-American relations have become increasingly strained. The US has sanctioned Turkish defence officials and kicked Türkiye out of a fighter jet programme after Türkiye bought the Russian-made S400 missile defence system.

ERDOGAN and BIDEN had a call by phone on April 23, 2021, for the first time since the US elections.

“President Erdogan opened Türkiye’s national archives & called for a joint historical commission to investigate the events of 1915, to which Armenia never responded. It is a pity @POTUS has ignored, among others, this simple fact and taken an irresponsible and unprincipled position” said Ibrahim KALIN, the spokesman to the president on Twitter.

This article was edited using the data from Aljazeera.com, Arabnews.com, Dw.com, Washingtontimes.com and France24.com