The US State Department has condemned the mass extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, but refused to define these events as genocide.
"The president and other senior administration officials have repeatedly acknowledged as historical fact that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred in the final days of the Ottoman Empire and stressed that full acknowledgement of the fact is in all our interests, including Turkey's, Armenia's and America's," State Department spokesman Marie Harf said, commenting on the statement of Pope Francis that "it was the first genocide of the 20th century."
However, she did not say the word 'genocide' again, RIA Novosti reports.
