U.S. President George W. Bush called on Thursday the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Empire as "one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century."
"I join the Armenian community in America and around the world in commemorating this tragedy and mourning the loss of so many innocent lives," he said in a statement that stopped short of calling it genocide.
Armenians claim that more than 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a systematic genocide in the hands of the Ottomans during World War I, before modern Turkey was born in 1923.
Turkey categorically rejects the claim, insisting that some 300,000 Armenians and thousands of Turks are victims of widespread chaos and governmental breakdown as the 600-year-old empire collapsed in the years before 1923.
In his statement, Bush said "we welcome the efforts by individuals in Armenia and Turkey to foster reconciliation and peace, and support joint efforts for an open examination of the past in search of a shared understanding of these tragic events."
"We look forward to the realization of a fully normalized Armenia-Turkey relationship," he said.
The Bush administration appealed last October to Congress to drop a resolution that designated the deaths of Armenians from 1915 to 1923 as genocide amid concerns that Turkey might enact damaging diplomatic reprisals.
Source:Xinhua
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