The COVID-19 crisis continues to dominate our news coverage, as it rightly should, and on this podcast and elsewhere in The Hindu we're working to get you the most relevant news and the best coverage. However, we switch focus on this podcast briefly today to look at international affairs. We’re going to be discussing something that happened in 1915 during the course of the First World War — the mass killing of about 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman empire. Over the last weekend, U.S. President Joe Biden formally recognised this act of mass killing as a genocide. In doing so, he was fulfilling a long-standing American promise that his predecessors had failed to act on. In 2019, both Houses of the U.S. Congress passed resolutions calling the slaughter as genocide but the then President Donald Trump stopped short of a formal recognition, mainly because of Turkish opposition. Turkey, America’s NATO ally and the successor of the Ottoman empire, has never acknowledged that a genocide took place, and it sees a mention of it as an insult or a moral stain.
Today, we’re going to speak about what happened to the Armenians in 1915, and why they were targeted for these killings. We’ll then talk about the timing of President Biden’s move to recognise the killings as a genocide and what it says about a changing geopolitical picture, especially when it comes to Turkey. I’m joined by The Hindu ’s International Affairs Editor Stanly Johny.
