page_title: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
section_title: Armenian Genocide
hierarchical_section_title: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan / Premiership (2003–2014) / Domestic Policy / Armenian Genocide
caption_attribution_description: English: Monument to Humanity (İnsanlık Anıtı) by Mehmet Aksoy in Kars, Turkey. In 2011 it was dismantled. References Ελληνικά: Μνημείο Αρμένικης-Τουρκικής φιλίας σχεδιασμένο από το γλύπτη Μεχμέτ Ακσόι το 2009 στην πόλη Καρς της Τουρκίας. Στις 25 Απριλίου 2011 ξεκίνησε η διάλυση του μνημείου από την Τουρκία.
context_page_description: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a Turkish politician serving as the 12th and current President of Turkey. He previously served as Prime Minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He founded the Justice and Development Party in 2001, leading it to election victories in 2002, 2007, and 2011 before standing down upon his election as President in 2014. He later returned to the AKP leadership in 2017 following the constitutional referendum that year. Coming from an Islamist political background and as a self-described conservative democrat, he has promoted socially conservative and populist policies during his administration.
  Erdoğan played football for Kasımpaşa before being elected as the Mayor of Istanbul in 1994, as the candidate of the Islamist Welfare Party. He was later stripped of his position, banned from political office, and imprisoned for four months for inciting religious hatred, due to his recitation of a poem by Ziya Gökalp. Erdoğan subsequently abandoned openly Islamist politics, establishing the moderate conservative AKP in 2001, which he went on to lead to a landslide victory in 2002.
context_section_description: Prime Minister Erdoğan expressed multiple times that Turkey would acknowledge the mass killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War I as genocide only after a thorough investigation by a joint Turkish-Armenian commission consisting of historians, archaeologists, political scientists and other experts. In 2005, Erdoğan and the main opposition party leader Deniz Baykal wrote a letter to Armenian President Robert Kocharian, proposing the creation of a joint Turkish-Armenian commission. Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian rejected the offer because he asserted that the proposal itself was "insincere and not serious". He added: "This issue cannot be considered at historical level with Turks, who themselves politicized the problem".
  In December 2008, Erdoğan criticised the I Apologize campaign by Turkish intellectuals to recognize the Armenian Genocide, saying, "I neither accept nor support this campaign. We did not commit a crime, therefore we do not need to apologise ... It will not have any benefit other than stirring up trouble, disturbing our peace and undoing the steps which have been taken". In November 2009, he said, "it is not possible for those who belong to the Muslim faith to carry out genocide".
  In 2011, Erdoğan ordered the tearing-down of the Statue of Humanity, a Turkish–Armenian friendship monument in Kars, which was commissioned in 2006 and represented a metaphor of the rapprochement of the two countries after many years of dispute over the events of 1915. Erdoğan justified the removal by stating that the monument was offensively close to the tomb of an 11th-century Islamic scholar, and that its shadow ruined the view of that site, while Kars municipality officials said it was illegally erected in a protected area. However, the former mayor of Kars who approved the original construction of the monument said the municipality was destroying not just a "monument to humanity" but "humanity itself". The demolition was not unopposed; among its detractors were several Turkish artists. Two of them, the painter Bedri Baykam and his associate, Pyramid Art Gallery general coordinator Tugba Kurtulmus, were stabbed after a meeting with other artists at the Istanbul Akatlar cultural center.
  On 23 April 2014, Erdoğan's office issued a statement in nine languages (including two dialects of Armenian), offering condolences for the mass killings of Armenians and stating that the events of 1915 had inhumane consequences. The statement described the mass killings as the two nations' shared pain and said: "Having experienced events which had inhumane consequences – such as relocation – during the First World War, (it) should not prevent Turks and Armenians from establishing compassion and mutually humane attitudes among one another". The Ottoman Parliament of 1915 had previously used the term "relocation" to describe the purpose of the Tehcir Law, which resulted in the deaths of anywhere between 800,000 and over 1,800,000 Armenian civilians in what is commonly referred to as the Armenian Genocide.
  Pope Francis in April 2015, at a special mass in St. Peter's Basilica marking the centenary of the events, described atrocities against Armenian civilians in 1915–1922 as "the first genocide of the 20th century". In protest, Erdoğan recalled the Turkish ambassador from the Vatican, and summoned the Vatican's ambassador, to express "disappointment" at what he called a discriminatory message. He later stated "we don’t carry a stain or a shadow like genocide". US President Barack Obama called for a "full, frank and just acknowledgement of the facts", but again stopped short of labelling it "genocide", despite his campaign promise to do so.
caption: In 2011, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered the Monument to Humanity, a statue dedicated to fostering Armenian and Turkish relations, to be destroyed.
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