US SENATE PANEL CONDEMNS DINK MURDER

The New Anatolian, Turkey
March 30 2007

A U.S. Senate panel condemned on Wednesday the murder earlier this
year of a prominent Turkish-Armenian editor, Hrant Dink, who had been
charged with "insulting Turkishness," a crime under controversial
penal code Article 301.

The resolution approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
reopened the question of whether Congress should weigh in on the
debate over Armenian genocide claims — a sensitive issue in Turkey.

Turkey strongly opposes the claims that its predecessor state, the
Ottoman government, caused the Armenian deaths in a planned genocide.

The Turkish government has said the toll is wildly inflated and that
Armenians were killed or displaced in civil unrest during the empire’s
collapse and conditions of World War I. Ankara’s proposal to Yerevan to
set up a joint commission of historians to study the disputed events
is still awaiting a positive response from the Armenian side. After
French lawmakers voted last October to make it a crime to deny that the
claims were genocide, Turkey said it would suspend military relations
with France.

The Senate resolution that passed the committee with a voice vote does
not explicitly refer to the killings as genocide, but says 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 a Turkish diplomatic source.

The author of the Senate resolution, Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said he was not deterred
by Turkish sensitivities.

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 House resolution recognizing
the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by Turks as genocide.

The Bush administration supported the view that the term "Armenian
genocide" must be removed from the House text.

That resolution was introduced 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 being passed.