A CONTROVERSY OVER HISTORY
By Bay Fang

Seattle Times, WA
Oct 11 2007

WASHINGTON – A key House committee defied forceful opposition from the
Bush administration and Turkey on Wednesday and passed a resolution
labeling the Ottoman-era killings of Armenians as "genocide."

President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense
Secretary Robert Gates warned that passage of such a resolution would
be "highly destabilizing" to U.S. goals in the Middle East.

"Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally
in NATO and in the global war on terror," Bush said hours before the
27-21 vote in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Administration officials cautioned that the nonbinding measure would
jeopardize cooperation by Turkey in Iraq and Afghanistan. Turkey has
warned of serious consequences if the resolution is approved and has
launched a vigorous lobbying campaign against it, including full-page
ads in various newspapers and buttonholing lawmakers.

Appearing with Rice just after a weekly briefing with military leaders
in Iraq, Gates said 70 percent of all air cargo going into Iraq and
one-third of the fuel consumed there goes through Turkey. He also said
"access to airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be
very much put at risk if this resolution passes, and the Turks react
as strongly as we believe they will."

The measure comes at a sensitive time for U.S.-Turkey relations.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who telephoned Bush last week
about the Armenian resolution, said his government would submit
a motion to Turkey’s Parliament today to authorize a cross-border
incursion into northern Iraq to strike a Kurdish rebel group known
as the PKK, after 15 Turkish soldiers were killed in attacks in
recent days.

If Parliament approves, the military could choose to launch an
operation immediately or wait to see if the United States and its
allies decide to crack down on the rebels, who have been fighting
for autonomy in southeast Turkey since 1984 in a conflict that has
claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Perhaps in a prelude, Turkish warplanes and helicopter gunships
attacked suspected positions of Kurdish rebels near Iraq on Wednesday.

The military offensive also reportedly included shelling Turkish Kurd
guerrilla hide-outs in northern Iraq, which is predominantly Kurdish.

U.S. officials are already preoccupied with efforts to stabilize
other areas of Iraq and oppose Turkish intervention in the relatively
peaceful north.

The Turks are scheduled to play host to the next ministerial-level
conference of Iraq’s neighbors, which will be held in Istanbul the
first week of November.

"It will be hard to do much of anything collaborative with the Turks
for a while," a senior administration official said.

Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, predicted mass
demonstrations in Turkey, especially at the U.S. military base in
the south.

"Anti-Americanism in Turkey is already at an all-time high, and people
think the U.S. is protecting the PKK by not doing anything against
them, so this rubs salt on an open wound," Cagaptay said.

"They will not just see it as a House resolution but as the
U.S. government making a judgment on Turkish history."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., long a supporter of the measure,
is likely to bring the resolution before the full House for a vote
before Congress breaks for the Thanksgiving recess in mid-November.

Although the resolution has been introduced before, this is the first
year in which it has the support of more than half the House. Also,
Democrats control both chambers of Congress and appear more likely
to bring the measure to a vote than the Republicans were.

The Armenians say 1.5 million of their people were killed by the Turks
in a campaign of genocide during World War I. Turkish officials say
widespread strife and forced relocations during the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire caused the deaths of 250,000 to 500,000 Armenians and
that an equal number of Turks also died during that time.

House Resolution 106, officially the Affirmation of the United States
Record on the Armenian Genocide, says the killings should be fully
acknowledged in U.S. policy toward Turkey.

The full House last approved an Armenian genocide resolution in 1984.

The resolution is symbolic, without force of law, and so it needs
neither Senate approval nor the president’s signature.