U.S. UNABLE TO NAME NEW ARMENIA ENVOY AMID GENOCIDE ROW
By Emil Danielyan
Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
Jan 23 2007
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
For months the Bush administration has been unable to appoint a new
U.S. ambassador to Armenia due to a dispute with the influential
Armenian community in the United States over the mass killings and
deportations of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey. The row broke out last
summer and is continuing amid growing indications that at least one
of the houses of the U.S. Congress will soon recognize the World War
I-era deaths of more than a million Ottoman Armenians as genocide.
The diplomatic post has been vacant since September, when the
previous U.S. envoy, John Evans, left the Armenian capital. Evans is
believed to have had his tour of duty cut short because of his public
descriptions of the Armenian massacres as "the first genocide of the
20th century." His apparent recall infuriated the Armenian-American
community, which for decades has been campaigning for official U.S.
recognition of what most historians regard as a deliberate effort to
exterminate the Armenian population of the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
Like his predecessors, President George W. Bush has refrained from
using the word "genocide" with regard to the massacres, anxious not
to antagonize Turkey, a major U.S. ally that maintains that Armenians
died in much smaller numbers as a result of internal strife, rather
than a premeditated government policy. Richard Hoagland, a career
diplomat nominated by Bush for the job, stuck to this line during
confirmation hearings at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
last June, prompting strong criticism from pro-Armenian members
of the panel. Just when the White House seemed to have overcome
their objections, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), placed a "hold"
on Hoagland’s confirmation in September.
Menendez repeated the extraordinary move on January 11, two days after
Bush re-nominated the diplomat. "We must call genocide by its name,"
he said in a statement. Also urging the administration to nominate
a new candidate was Harry Reid (D-NV), the new Senate majority
leader. Both lawmakers have been praised by the Armenian National
Committee of America (ANCA), one of the two main Armenian lobbying
organizations. But the more moderate Armenian Assembly of America
(AAA) believes that the U.S.-Armenian community has gotten its message
across and should now stop obstructing Hoagland’s appointment.
In a January 17 statement, the AAA said the presence of a U.S.
ambassador in Yerevan is "vitally important" for Armenia. Pro-Western
circles in Armenia share this view, with the Yerevan daily Aravot
editorializing on January 11 that Armenian-American leaders should
back away from further confrontation with Washington. The Armenian
government, which formally agreed to Hoagland’s appointment last year,
has declined to comment on the controversy.
Buoyed by the Democratic takeover of Congress, both the ANCA and the
AAA helped to circulate this month a new draft resolution that calls
on Bush to "accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate
annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide." It has already
been co-sponsored by more than one hundred members of the House of
Representatives. Two similar bills were already approved by the
Republican-controlled House International Relations Committee in
September 2005, but they never reached the House floor because of
strong opposition from the White House. The new House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D-CA) is a longtime advocate of Armenian issues. "I think
we have the best chance probably in a decade to get an Armenian
genocide resolution passed," Adam Schiff (D-CA), another pro-Armenian
congressman, said on December 25.
The genocide recognition drive is expected to gain new momentum
after the January 19 assassination in Istanbul of Hrant Dink, a
prominent Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor and vocal challenger of the
official Turkish version of the bloody events of 1915-18. The daylight
shooting, widely linked with Dink’s public pronouncements, drew strong
international condemnation and will put Turkey under greater pressure
to confront one of the darkest episodes of its Ottoman past.
Ironically, Dink was among the few Armenians who believed that
Armenia and its worldwide diaspora should focus on educating the Turks
instead of lobbying for genocide resolutions by the U.S. and other
Western parliaments. "Turkish society needs time to learn things,"
he said at a September news conference in Yerevan. "There needs to
be a serious examination of history. Armenians must play a role in
that examination."
Many Armenians, including the Washington-based lobbyists, will now
argue that Dink’s violent death showed that international pressure
is indispensable for a genuine Turkish-Armenian dialogue. "Today’s
brutal murder serves as a wake up call to the United States and the
entire international community to unite together in ending forever
the Turkish government’s denial of the Armenian Genocide," the ANCA
executive director, Aram Hamparian, said in a statement.
Turkish-Armenian reconciliation is also seriously hampered by the
absence of diplomatic relations and an open land border between Armenia
and Turkey. Successive Turkish governments have made normalization of
bilateral ties primarily conditional on a resolution of the Karabakh
conflict that would be acceptable to Azerbaijan, Turkey’s main regional
ally. Ankara refuses to drop this precondition despite pressure from
the United States and the European Union.
Kaan Soyak, a co-chair of the non-government Turkish-Armenian Business
Connection (TABC), predicted on January 15 that the Turkish blockade
will not be lifted before a Karabakh settlement. TABC was set up
in 1996 to promote a rapprochement between the two neighboring
states. "We then hoped that the border will open next month," the
Turkish businessman told reporters in Yerevan. "We now want to [see
it] open before we die."
(Western news agencies, January 19; Statement by the ANCA, January
19; Statement by the AAA, January 17; Haykakan Zhamanak, January 16;
Aravot, January 11; RFE/RL Armenia Report, January 11, September 19)