Genocide vote sets a face-off with Bush

WWI Armenian issue tests US-Turkey ties

By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | October 11, 2007

WASHINGTON – A key congressional committee approved a resolution
yesterday that brands the World War I-era Ottoman Empire massacres of
Armenians as genocide, despite warnings from President Bush that the
measure would anger Turkey, a crucial US ally assisting the effort in
Iraq.

In a rare show of urgency, Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates each declared that the
resolution the House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved could lead
Turkey’s leaders to curb vital US military supply routes through their
country, leaving American troops without enough equipment to conduct
operations in neighboring Iraq.

"We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people,"
Bush told reporters on the White House lawn hours before the vote.
"This resolution is not the right response to these mass killings."

The 27-to-21 vote by the Democratic-controlled committee, which broke
largely along party lines, sends the resolution to the House floor for
a vote in the coming weeks. Supporters argued that the resolution is
long overdue, while those against it declared that it comes with a
high price for US interests in the region.

"We will not forgive this genocide. But I cannot support this
resolution at this time," said Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana
Republican, citing US troops in Iraq who depend on Turkish supply
lines. "This is not the time for this nation to speak on this dark
chapter of history."

In Massachusetts, home to an estimated 50,000 Armenian-Americans,
activists dedicated to having the killings designated as genocide
welcomed the news.

"It’s absurd to think that we can have a foreign policy that does not
acknowledge the past," said Sharistan Melkonian, a Waltham resident
who chairs the Armenian National Committee of Eastern Massachusetts.
She said US foreign policy has up until this point been "held hostage
to lies."

The Armenian-American community began a successful movement this
summer to persuade local towns to withdraw from the No Place for Hate
program run by the Anti-Defamation League, an antidiscrimination
group, because the League did not formally recognize the Armenian
genocide. Last month the League acknowledged that the mass killings
were "tantamount to genocide," but it has declined to support the
resolution in Congress. The League has said it will revisit that
position next month.

The Armenian community also has plans for a memorial to the massacre,
to be built on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in downtown
Boston. But the proposal has generated controversy and opposition from
some residents and officials, including Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who
want to keep the Greenway free of such monuments.

In Washington, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat whose
district has a large Armenian population, vowed to bring the measure
to the House floor for a vote. A similar bill is making its way
through the Senate, where Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama have supported it.

Speaking with the Globe editorial board yesterday, Clinton said she
cosponsored the bill because it seemed "to be a statement of
recognition of a horrible period in the history of the Armenian
people." But she acknowledged concern about Turkey’s reaction, saying
the opposition there has been greater than anticipated.

"Many of us have been somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of the
[Turkish prime minister Tayyip] Erdogan government’s response," she
said. "The adamant expression of real dismay and outrage by this
Turkish government has to be factored into this."

US officials believe the resolution would further strain the already
tense relationship between the United States and Turkey, which
recently massed troops on Iraq’s northern border to battle alleged
terrorist incursions from Kurdish separatists in Iraq’s northern
region.

President Abdullah Gul of Turkey has sent Bush a letter warning of
repercussions if Congress passes the genocide resolution. A
parliamentary delegation from Istanbul is in Washington this week to
argue against the resolution, and Turkey has retained DLA Piper, a top
Washington lobbyist firm, to represent it on Capitol Hill.

Armenians, a centuries-old Christian minority that came under
oppressive rule by the Ottoman Empire in southwest Asia, have
struggled for world recognition of the slaughter of their people
nearly a century ago, in the area that now makes up modern-day Turkey.

Armenian scholars and others say more than a million men, women, and
children died or were executed between 1914 and the late 1920s as
nationalist Turkish leaders expelled or exterminated them in an
attempt to create a modern state. Turkish officials reject that view
of history, saying that the ethnic clashes between Turks and minority
Armenians resulted from war and chaos following the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire, not from a coordinated campaign.

The historical question of whether those killings constitute a
state-sponsored attempt to destroy the Armenian people has been hotly
debated. Each side has pushed for resolutions declaring its viewpoint
at the state, local, and national level.

US officials have said that they do not dispute the significance of
the mass killings, but that it is not in American interests to risk
angering Turkey by declaring the slaughter genocide, an
internationally recognized term that would bring shame and dishonor to
the nation. In a statement issued after yesterday’s vote, State
Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the resolution does little to
help Turks and Armenians bridge their differences, yet risks "grave
harm to US-Turkish relations and to US interests in Europe and the
Middle East."

US administrations have wrestled over how to deal with the topic for
years. Eight former secretaries of state recently wrote to Pelosi
warning that the nonbinding resolution "would endanger our national
security interests."

President Reagan called the Armenian killings genocide but none of his
successors has done the same, out of deference to Turkey.

Past efforts in Congress to force the president to call the killings a
genocide have failed to get a vote on the House floor. In 2000, a
similar resolution was aborted when President Clinton convinced House
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, that consideration
of the measure would jeopardize American lives.

But Bush and Pelosi are unlikely to reach that kind of agreement,
according to Bulent Aliriza, a Turkey analyst at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

"Given the relationship, and the fundamental disagreements they have
on national security, one has to wonder whether those kinds of
personal calls would make a difference," Aliriza said.

That’s good news to Sevag Arzoumanian, a Cambridge resident who runs
the website noplacefordenial.com. Arzoumanian, who spearheaded the
local movement against the Anti-Defamation League, said yesterday that
he is "really disappointed" that Turkey can bully Bush, the leader of
a superpower. "Every time it comes up in Congress, it is killed by the
administration, the Pentagon, the State Department," he said. "They
say, ‘It is not the right time.’ It is never the right time."

(c) Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Source: /11/genocide_vote_sets_a_face_off_with_bush/

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress