THE POLITICS OF SAYING ‘GENOCIDE’
By Matt Welch, MATT WELCH is The Times’ assistant editorial pages editor
Los Angeles Times, CA
April 22 2007
More than 90 years after the Armenian genocide, the U.S. is deadlocked
in a humiliating linguistic debate.
ON TUESDAY, President Bush will be obliged, by law, to wrap his
double-talking mouth around one of the most curiously persistent
debates in modern geopolitics: Whether to call a 92-year-old genocide a
"genocide."
Every April 24 since 1994, the U.S. president has delivered a
proclamation honoring the people Congress has declared to be "the
victims of genocide, especially the 1 1/2 million people of Armenian
ancestry who were the victims of the genocide perpetrated in Turkey
between 1915 and 1923." And every year since 1994, the U.S. president
has managed to do it without once uttering the G-word. It’s a ritual
of linguistic realpolitik in deference to the massive objections from
Washington’s important NATO ally, Turkey.
But 2007 may be the year that the cop-out finally blows up in a
president’s face. What was once the obscure obsession of marginalized
immigrants from a powerless little Caucasus country has blossomed
in recent years into a force that has grown increasingly difficult
to ignore. In 2000, the Armenian issue helped fuel one of the most
expensive House races in U.S. history; two years ago, it turned a
mild-mannered career U.S. diplomat into an unlikely truth-telling
martyr. Now the question of how to address these long-ago events is
having an impact on next month’s elections in Turkey.
What’s more, Congress appears poised to vote on a resolution urging
the president to say the words "Armenian genocide" when observing
the awkwardly named "National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity
to Man" on April 24 – the date in 1915 when the Ottoman predecessors
of modern Turkey launched the genocide by rounding up 250 Armenian
intellectuals for eventual execution.
The resolution won’t take effect on Tuesday. The Bush administration,
ever mindful of its delicate relationship with Turkey (especially with
a war in Iraq next door), takes the bill so seriously that Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M.
Gates warned in a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San
Francisco) that it could "harm American troops in the field." The
lobbying has been successful enough that the House has delayed its
vote until after this year’s April 24 commemoration. But passage
later this year would still be an enormous blow to the White House.
Why is this hairsplitting exercise over a single word – in a nonbinding
resolution, no less – reverberating so strongly more than nine
decades later? The easy answer is that there has been a confluence
of mostly unrelated events. Democrats took control of Congress in
January and are spoiling for a fight, especially one that can paint
Bush’s foreign policy as hypocritical. The president, after all,
used "genocide" as a justification to topple Saddam Hussein before,
during and after the war against his regime, and the United States
has not hesitated to apply the word to the crisis in Darfur, where
more than 200,000 people have died since 2003.
Across the Atlantic, the Armenian question – especially Turkey’s
offensive laws against "insulting Turkishness," which have been
used to prosecute even novelists who create fictional characters
questioning the government’s denialist position – has become one of
the main lines of attack against Turkey’s bid to become the first
majority-Muslim country to join the European Union. Most of the 15
countries that have officially recognized the genocide are European
(with Switzerland and France even going so far as to pass over-the-top
laws making it a crime to deny the genocide).
Then there was the January murder of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink in broad daylight on a busy Istanbul street. Dink’s assassination,
at the hands of a Turkish nationalist, shocked the world and led to
a wave of anxious introspection in Turkey. Yet Ankara quickly – and
disastrously – concluded that the proper response was to redouble its
losing campaign to prevent foreign governments from using the G-word.
High-level Turkish ministers were dispatched to Washington over the
last few months to warn that the resolution in Congress could force
them to close the crucial U.S. Air Force Base at Incirlik and could
imperil relations at a tipping-point moment for the Middle East. (The
exact same argument was used by President Clinton in October 2000
to convince then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert to withdraw at
the last moment a similar bill, introduced by then-Rep. James Rogan
(R-Glendale), who was fighting a losing battle against Democratic
challenger Adam Schiff in an $11-million race.)
For Turks, the genocide is taboo for a host of reasons, but perhaps
the most important is that it occurred at the time of the founding of
modern Turkey under Kemal Ataturk, a man so sainted that insulting
his memory is still punishable by jail. So the battle continues,
year after year.
Earlier this month, Turkish lobbyists successfully scotched a United
Nations exhibit on the 13th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide because
it dared refer to the "1 million Armenians murdered in Turkey." "Every
time they try to censor discussion of the Armenian genocide," a New
York Times editorial observed, "they only bring wider attention to
the subject and link today’s democratic Turkey with the now distant
crime." Turks even helped water down a U.S. Senate resolution
condemning Dink’s murder.
Yet this flurry of recent developments doesn’t adequately explain
the enduring potency of the recognition issue.
For that I will defer to the most recent U.S. ambassador to Armenia,
John Marshall Evans: "In the real world," Evans told a packed Beverly
Hilton hall of diaspora Armenians in February, "when an official policy
diverges wildly from what the broad public believes is self-evident,
that policy ceases to command respect."
Evans, a career, keep-your-head-down foreign service type, surveyed
the available literature on the events of 1915-23 before taking the
Armenian post in September 2004 and concluded that the U.S. position
of avoiding the word "genocide" diverged so wildly from the historical
consensus that it undermined Washington’s moral authority.
He attempted to budge the policy from behind the scenes, but when
that failed he took a page from a man he knew well from his pre-
and post-communist postings to Prague – former Czech President Vaclav
Havel and decided to publicly "call things by their proper names."
So in February 2005, while speaking in California, Evans said:
"I will today call it the Armenian genocide. I think we, the U.S.
government, owe you, our fellow citizens, a more frank and honest
way of discussing this problem." For that remark he was recalled from
his post so that Washington could get back to the business of evading
the historical truth.
President Bush won’t say "genocide" on Tuesday. In the words of
Condoleezza Rice, the administration’s position is that Turks and
Armenians both need to "get over their past" without American help.
But this issue won’t go away. Watching Rice’s linguistic contortions
in response to harsh congressional interrogation by Schiff, who has
become the Armenians’ great House champion, is profoundly dispiriting;
it makes one embarrassed to be American. Of all issues subject to
realpolitik compromises, mass slaughter of a national minority surely
should rank at the bottom of the list.
Hitler reportedly said, just before invading Poland, "Who, after
all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" It’s a
chilling reminder that forgetting is the first step in enabling future
genocides. Yet Hitler was eventually proved wrong. No temporal power
is strong enough to erase the eternal resonance of truth.