SENATE PANEL CONDEMNS MURDER OF TURKISH-ARMENIAN
Reuters
Wed Mar 28, 2007 6:07PM EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Senate panel condemned on Wednesday
the murder earlier this year of a prominent Turkish-Armenian editor,
Hrant Dink, who had urged Turks to acknowledge the mass killings of
Armenians on Turkish soil in 1915.
The largely symbolic resolution approved by the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee reopened the question of whether Congress should
weigh in on the debate over whether the killings were genocide —
a sensitive issue in Turkey, a key NATO ally.
Armenia says some 1.5 million Armenians suffered genocide at Ottoman
Turkish hands, but Turkey denies a systematic genocide of Armenians
took place, saying large numbers of Christian Armenians and Muslim
Turks died in inter-ethnic fighting during World War One.
The Senate resolution that passed the committee on a voice vote does
not explicitly refer to the killings as genocide, but observes that
Dink, before his death, was subjected to legal action in Turkey for
doing so.
It condemns Dink’s murder and urges the people of Turkey to "honor
his legacy of tolerance." Dink was murdered by a Turkish nationalist
gunman outside his Istanbul office in January; his funeral drew
100,000 mourners.
Turkish diplomats do not look favorably on the Senate proposal, which
can now go to the floor for a vote. "We don’t see the benefit of such
a resolution," said Tuluy Tanc, the minister-counselor at the Turkish
Embassy in Washington.
But the author of the Senate resolution, Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said he was not deterred
by Turkish sensitivities.
"A relationship that rests on a requirement of a denial of an
historical event, is not a sound basis for a relationship," Biden
told Reuters.
Continued…
Turkish officials, as well as members of the Bush administration, have
expressed more concern about other resolutions pending in Congress,
but it is unclear how quickly they may advance.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan warned last month that Congress
would harm bilateral ties if it backs a resolution recognizing the
1915 mass killings of Armenians by Turks as genocide.
Such a resolution has been introduced in the House by Rep. Adam Schiff,
a California Democrat, and in the Senate by Assistant Majority Leader
Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. Schiff told Reuters that with
Democrats now in charge of Congress, he believed his resolution had
its "best chance in a decade" of passage.