ERDEM: ANTI-GENOCIDE RESOLUTION LETTER SENT TO US CONGRESSMEN

The New Anatolian, Turkey
Feb 27 2007

A ruling party deputy yesterday made public details of a letter he
delivered to the members of the U.S. House of Representatives which
is about to discuss a resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide
claims.

Ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party Kirikkale Deputy and NATO
Parliamentary Assembly Turkish Group Chairman Vahit Erdem delivered
the letters at the Parliamentary Assembly of NATO in Belgium last week.

Erdem, at a press conference in Parliament, said that he underlined
in the letter the need for historical research rather than political
talk over the issue and that he persuaded several congressmen to work
against the resolution.

Erdem also said that he told them the death toll was blown out of
proportion by Armenian sources conveying the data in Ottoman Archives,
which says the total population of Armenians in Turkey before the
World War I was around 1,300,000.

Several Turkish historians give smaller figures on the Armenian
population, while Armenian and European sources give a range between
1,500,000 and as high as 3,000,000.

"If the Armenian resolution is passed by the U.S. Congress, relations
between the two allies would be deeply hurt, and U.S. Congress
would fall into error, making a political judgment rather than a
historical one, as several European parliaments have done," Erdem
said in the letter.

He also added that genocide is internationally acknowledged as a
crime against humanity that should be dealt with by independent courts.

In related news, a group of Turkish parliamentarians has begun
anti-resolution campaigning in the U.S. The group is expected to hold
personal talks with congressional representatives and officials from
the U.S. Secretariat of State in order to persuade them not to pass
the resolution.

Turkish deputies were set to lobby in the U.S. against the resolution
weeks ago, but the delegation’s visit was postponed in order to assess
the outcome of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and Chief of General
Staff Gen. Yasar Buyukanit’s recent talks with American officials.

After the visit by the group, two others will pay visits to the U.S.
in March.

Turkey denies the allegations that some 1.5 million Armenians were
massacred during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in World
War I, arguing that Armenian deaths were part of general partisan
fighting in which both sides suffered.

Ankara and Yerevan are at odds over the Armenian claims of genocide.

To break the deadlock, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
last year suggested the establishment of a committee of Turkish
and Armenian historians to study the claims, in a letter sent to
Armenian President Robert Kocharian. But Kocharian rejected Erdogan’s
proposal, saying that the two countries must first establish diplomatic
relations and that committees could be formed only within the process
of normalization of relations.