“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,” president Joe Biden said in a statement on Saturday, recognizing the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as “genocide.” The announcement was made on the 106th anniversary of the start of the massacre.
In response, Kim and Khloé Kardashian shared posts on their social media accounts thanking President Biden. The Kardashians’ late father, Robert Kardashian was Armenian-American, and back in 2015, Kim wrote a Time essay urging Barack Obama to acknowledge the killings as genocide.
“After more than a century of fighting for truth and acknowledgment, today the Armenian people received the recognition we have all been hoping and praying for, with President Biden declaring the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 a genocide,” Kardashian wrote in a post on Instagram.
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“Although nothing will ever bring back the Armenians who were murdered, I hope that their families will now feel a sense of peace,” wrote Kardashian in the same post.
Khloé Kardashian thanked President Joe Biden on social media for being the first US president to officially recognize the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as a genocide.
“Thank you for honoring the stories, the pain, suffering and loss of the Armenian people,” the reality TV star and entrepreneur of Armenian descent wrote on Instagram. “Today we honor our ancestors on Armenian Remembrance Day.”
The Kardashian’s paternal great-great-grandparents fled Armenia for the U.S. in the early 1900s.
By recognizing the massive killings as a genocide, Biden risks a potential fracture with longtime regional ally and NATO partner: Turkey. After Biden made his statement, the Turkish presidency’s communications director, Fahrettin Altun, issued a statement condemning his use of the term “genocide.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday that Ankara completely rejects Biden’s use of the term “genocide.”
“We are not going to take lessons about our history from anyone. Political opportunism is the biggest betrayal of peace and justice. We completely reject this statement that is only based on populism,” he said via Twitter.
