Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
The office of Vice President JD Vance made multiple posts commemorating the Armenia n genocide on Tuesday, but was forced to take them down because the Trump administration doesn't formally recognize that the genocide happened.
Vance's X account posted a photo of the vice president and his wife, Usha, attending a wreath-laying ceremony at a memorial in the Armenian city of Yerevan. The post said the Vances were there 'to honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide.'But the post was swiftly taken down, with a Vance spokesperson blaming it on a staff member. 'This is an account managed by staff that primarily exists to share photos and videos of the vice president's activities,' they said. 'For the vice president's views on the substance of the question, I refer you to the comments he made earlier on the tarmac in response to the pool's question.'This was referring to Vance's comments to reporters about visiting the memorial, which were posted by an official White House account. 'I'm the first vice president to ever visit Armenia. They asked us to visit the site... I wanted to go and pay my respects.'That post has since been deleted as well.Alex Galitsky, the policy director for the Armenian National Committee of America reacted: 'This is brazen genocide denial. An insult to the memory of the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide—and an affront to a community that fought tirelessly for decades to ensure recognition of that crime.' Historians widely agree that the Ottoman Empire's systemic killing and deportation of mostly Christian Armenians during the First World War constitutes one of the 20th century's worst genocides. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: There were approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire in 1915. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation.But the government of Turkey continues to adamantly deny the genocide committed by its predecessor state to this day. And due to Turkey's status as a NATO ally, US presidents dating back more than half a century have likewise refused to describe the historic crime as a 'genocide.'This began to change in 2019, when Congress passed a historic resolution finally recognizing the genocide more than a century after it began. In 2021, then-President Joe Biden became the first US president to formally acknowledge the genocide without ambiguity.But in April 2025, after President Donald Trump returned to office, he rolled this acknowledgment back, referring to the mass killing as a 'great catastrophe' and 'one of the worst disasters of the 20th century' while evading the term 'genocide.'Julien Zarifian, a professor of US history at the University of Poitiers in France, wrote that 'Trump's reversal seemed to make genocide recognition taboo not only in the White House, but in the whole executive branch.' The return to a denialist stance put the US back into line not only with Turkey, but with Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has been locked in conflict over the disputed Nagorno‑Karabakh region for decades. In 2023, more than 100,000 Armenians—virtually the whole population—were forced to flee the territory in what has been described as an ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan, which occupied large parts of the area.While the US has remained formally neutral in the conflict, it has provided hundreds of millions of dollars of security assistance to Azerbaijan under presidents of both parties, which critics say has emboldened Azerbaijan to act more aggressively. Azerbaijan notably has the steadfast backing of Turkey in the conflict, as well as key US ally Israel.Vance's visit to Armenia was the first leg of a trip that continued to Azerbaijan, where he met with its leaders to discuss ending the conflict and to shore up an agreement that would give the US greater access to the region's natural resources. Last August, Trump boasted of brokering a “peace deal” between the two nations, but Azerbaijan had not signed anything—only agreed to further talks.One of the provisions of the deal pushed by the Trump administration is that Armenia would drop any legal claims against Azerbaijan over its human rights abuses, which Just Security analysts David J. Simon and Kathryn Hemmer said would be 'thereby depriving Nagorno-Karabakh’s 150,000 victims of justice.' During a summit with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Vance laid on the flattery: 'Other than President Trump, the only leader in the world that has really good relations with both the Turks and the Israelis is President Aliyev,' he said. 'That means one, the food must be really good here, or two, he must be really charming. I can confirm that he's very charming.'Gev Iskajyan, the advocacy director of ANCA, responded: 'Vance thinks Aliyev is really charming. Especially when he’s committing war crimes, rigging his own elections, or ethnically cleansing an entire people.'
Turkey Azerbaijan Jd-Vance Trump-Administration Ethnic-Cleansing Armenia
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