Baltimore Sun, United States
Aug 10 2007
A debate not needed
August 10, 2007
The 90-year-old genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks is being
turned into a spectacle – in Washington, naturally, where even the
past becomes a fruitful topic for lobbyists.
On one side are well-organized and locally influential
Armenian-American interest groups and their Democratic friends in
Congress, who want to push through a resolution declaring that the
deaths of 1.2 million Armenians during World War I were in fact a
result of genocide. On the other side is the Turkish government,
which has hired former congressmen Richard A. Gephardt and Robert L.
Livingston to push its case that Armenians died in the brutal chaos
of war but that it wasn’t genocide, and the Bush administration,
which believes that current relations with Turkey are more important
than parsing a crime that took place during Woodrow Wilson’s
presidency.
Last year the White House yanked the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John
Evans, out of his post in Yerevan for daring to utter the G-word.
Last week, the career foreign service officer who was nominated to
replace him, Richard Hoagland, withdrew his name from Senate
consideration after Sen. Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, put
a hold on his bid because he won’t say "genocide."
This is not edifying.
It is painful for Armenians to have the deaths of so many dismissed
as virtually an accident by the government in Ankara. Much of the
documented record was assembled by Americans – diplomats and others –
who were in Turkey when it happened.
(By the 1920s, though, the chief of the U.S. mission in Istanbul
tended to give some credence to the Turkish claim that the Armenians
were victims of ineptitude and individual acts of cruelty, both of
which were in ample supply in Turkey. He noted that Americans seemed
much more concerned about the travails of Christians in the old
Ottoman Empire, such as the Armenians, than those – also horrible –
of millions of Muslims.)
But have you noticed something? This is starting to delve into
history, which is another way of saying it’s not a question that
belongs before Congress in 2007. The verbose, pompous (and, yes,
pandering) resolution cheapens Armenian history, not the reverse.
But it’s also not a matter over which the White House should be
issuing a gag order. History is messy and ugly and is best served by
free and robust discussion. Americans as well as Turks and Armenians
should have the confidence to recognize that.
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