During a coronavirus briefing on May 4, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used a most derogatory phrase "the leftovers of the sword".
"We do not allow terrorist leftovers of the sword in our country," he said, "to attempt to carry out [terrorist] activities. Their number has decreased a lot but they still exist."
"Leftover of the sword" (kılıç artığı in Turkish) is a commonly used insult in Turkey that often refers to the survivors of the Christian massacres that mainly targeted Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire and its successor, Turkey.
As the head of state, Erdoğan using the phrase publicly is alarming on many levels. The phrase not only insults the victims and the survivors of the massacres but also endangers the safety of Turkey's dwindling Christian community, who are often exposed to pressures that include physical attacks.
In protest, Garo Paylan, an Armenian MP in Turkey's parliament, wrote on Facebook:
"In his hateful speech last night, Erdoğan once again used the phrase 'leftover of the sword.'
"'Leftover of the sword' was invented to refer to orphans like my grandmother who survived the [1915] Armenian genocide. Every time we hear that phrase, it makes our wounds bleed."
Other Armenian activists and writers on social media also criticized Erdoğan. Journalist Aline Ozinian wrote:
"For those who don't know 'terrorist leftover of the sword' means Armenian 'terrorists' who survived the genocide and could not be butchered via the sword. What does 'terrorist' mean? Well, it changes daily: It could be a journalist, a civil society representative, a writer, a doctor or a mother of a beautiful child."
"They do not want those who held the swords," she continued, "but the grandchildren of the survivors of a people and culture that were slaughtered by the sword to be ashamed."
The columnist Ohannes Kılıçdağı wrote:
"Think about a country that actively uses a phrase like 'leftover of the sword' in the political culture and language. It is used by the highest authorities. But the same authorities of the same country claim that 'there is no massacre in our history'. If there is not, then where does this phrase come from? Who does it refer to?"
The crimes that Turkey attempts to hide by blaming the victims are actually well-documented historical facts. In 2019, for instance, historians Professor Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi published a book, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, describing "the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, and then the Turkish Republic, against their Christian minorities." According to their research:
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