System Of A Down have saluted Joe Biden for becoming the first US President to officially recognise the Armenian Genocide.
Biden issued a statement on April 24, Armenian Remembrance Day, to acknowledge the horrors inflicted upon the Armenian people by the Ottoman Empire.
“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,” Biden’s statement begins. “Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”
In response, System Of A Down posted their own statement on social media, thanking President Biden for his historic announcement.
“This is extremely important,” the quartet stated, “but only a milestone towards the long road of justice ahead with Turkey and its imminent need to do the same and make amends towards the descendants of 1.5million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians systematically slaughtered by its Ottoman Turkish ancestors.”
All Armenian-Americans, System Of A Down have long campaigned for official recognition for the genocide, in which all four band members lost family members. The song P.L.U.C.K. on the band’s self-titled 1998 debut album explicitly referenced the murderous campaign, and called for ‘Recognition, Restoration, Reparation’.
