LANTOS BACKS ARMENIAN GENOCIDE VOTE
By Lisa Friedman, WASHINGTON BUREAU
The Daily Review, CA
Sept 17 2005
Lawmaker changes stance after accusing Turkey of not failingto support
U.S. interests
WASHINGTON – In a momentous victory for California’s sizable Armenian
communities, the House International Relations Committee voted
overwhelmingly Thursday to declare the massacre of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire an act of genocide.
In a surprise move, Rep. Tom Lantos,
D-San Mateo, declared that after years of opposing the genocide
resolution, he now would support it. The only Holocaust survivor in
Congress and the founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus,
Lantos had long cited Washington’s close relationship with Ankara as
a key reason for objecting to the resolution.
The separate resolutions by Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, and
George Radanovich, R-Fresno, still must pass several hurdles. The
State Department and House Speaker Dennis Hastert fiercely oppose
recognition of the Armenian genocide, arguing its passage would
rupture U.S.-Turkish relations. Both are expected to try to block a
full House vote.
Nevertheless, Armenians on Thursday said by voting 35-11 for Schiff’s
bill and 40-7 for Radanovich’s, the panel sent a strong message that
Congress should not equivocate when it comes to recognizing crimes
against humanity.
“If the United States does not step up and acknowledge this history
and show moral backbone and clarity on these sorts of issues, people
are going to be disappointed in us. We believe in this country because
it does the right thing,” said Armen Carapetian, spokesman for the
Armenian National Committee of America.
The panel voted after more than three hours of tense debate in which
lawmakers invoked the Holocaust, slavery, Darfur and the fate of
American Indians.
Every Californian on the panel voted for the resolutions.
In 2000, when the issue came before the same committee, Lantos told
his colleagues, “There is a long list of reasons why our NATO ally,
at this point, should not be humiliated.”
On Thursday, Lantos said that while he was “profoundly moved and
anguished by the Armenian people’s horrendous suffering,” he remained
unconvinced that the massacres they endured technically constitute
genocide.
Instead, he cited Turkey’s unwillingness to allow U.S. troops to use
its territory to launch an invasion of northern Iraq as well as the
country’s growing closeness with Syria even in the wake of former
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination.
“Turkey ignored our interests,” Lantos said. “Our allies must
understand that if they expect the U.S. to support matters of great
interest to them, we expect them to support the things that are
important to the United States.”
Armenians estimate that more than 1.5 million died and hundreds of
thousands of others were displaced in a planned genocide campaign from
1915 to 1923. Turkey maintains there was no systematic extermination
plan, that only about 300,000 Armenians were killed, and that Armenians
also killed thousands of Turks in the tumultuous last years of the
Ottoman Empire.
Rep. Dan Burton, D-Ind., who led the debate against the resolutions,
argued that historians disagree that evidence of genocide exists
and said the fact that Armenians today live peaceably in Turkey is
“proof that the genocide standard can not be met.”
Nursen Mazici, a Turkish visiting professor at Georgetown University
who came to watch the proceedings, said she was disappointed by the
vote and said she thinks most U.S. lawmakers don’t know the full
history of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
“Many Armenians were killed, but at the time many Turks were killed
by Armenian terrorists. I am so sorry for them, for both sides,”
Mazici said.