After all, the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, Turkey, murdered more than a million Armenians, beginning in 1915. Henry Morgenthau, American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, described it as “a campaign of race extermination” in a 1915 telegram to Washington. By late 1920, the Soviet Army arrived and their region became the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. In June the Bundestag passed a resolution labelling the event a genocide, causing Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to recall his ambassador. The pope has publicly used the word genocide in connection with the Armenians and says he has always done so.

Source: National Post September 16, 2016 20:03 UTC