Cape Times , South Africa
March 23 2006

Telling it like it is
March 23, 2006

By the Editor

Johan Evans is the US ambassador to Armenia, as of this writing. But
he probably won’t be for long.

Evans, a career diplomat who was selected to receive an award last
year for his frank public speaking, irked his superiors at the State
Department by uttering the following words at the University of
California Berkeley in February 2005: “I will today call it the
Armenian genocide.”

For that bit of truth-telling, Evans was forced to issue a
clarification, then a correction, then to endure having his award
rescinded under pressure from his bosses, and finally to face losing
his job altogether.

What happened in Armenia in 1915 is well known. The Ottoman Empire
attempted to exterminate the Armenian population through slaughter
and mass deportation. It finished half the job, killing about 1.2
million people.

Yet the State Department has long avoided the word “genocide”, not
out of any dispute over history but out of deference to Turkey, whose
membership in Nato and location between Europe and Asia make it a
strategic ally.

It is time to stop tiptoeing around this issue and to accept settled
history. Genocide, according to accepted UN definition, means “the
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group”.

Armenia is not even a borderline case. Punishing an ambassador for
speaking honestly about a 90-year-old crime befits a cynical,
double-dealing monarchy, not the leader of the free world.

One day, the country that was founded as a direct repudiation of its
Ottoman past will face its history squarely, as part of a
long-overdue maturing process.

Some day before then, we hope, the State Department will too.