St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
October 11, 2007 Thursday
0 South Pinellas Edition

DEATHS IN WWI ERA EMBROIL CONGRESS

by WES ALLISON, Times Staff Writer

A finding of genocide could seriously affect U.S. interests today.

You probably haven’t spent much time pondering the massacre of
Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago, and
whether it was really genocide.

But the question has Congress tied in knots.

After a four-hour hearing Wednesday, pro-Armenian forces in the House
won the Foreign Affairs Committee’s approval of a resolution that
would brand the Turks’ violence against their Armenian neighbors
during World War I as genocide.

The resolution is expected to reach the full House later this fall,
forcing a long-delayed showdown between Turkey and its U.S. allies,
including the White House, and the Democrat-led Congress, which these
days has eyes for the Armenians.

The question of whether the Armenians were victims of an organized
extermination campaign has been bitterly disputed for decades by
Turkey, which contends the Armenians were simply collateral damage in
a brutal war.

But the battle over the distinction in the House serves as a classic
example of how a seemingly parochial matter can roil Washington, and
how even symbolic actions – the resolution has no binding effect – by
Congress can affect U.S. interests halfway across the globe.

-Turkey, a crucial U.S. ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, has hired
former Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt and former prominent
House Republican Bob Livingston to lobby.

-The relatively small but impassioned Armenian-American community has
bombarded members of Congress with phone calls and e-mails, and the
leading Armenian advocacy group has put a three-minute video about
the massacres on YouTube.

-The Bush administration is begging Congress to back off, for fear of
alienating a crucial Muslim ally. In a letter to Congress, all eight
living former secretaries of state concurred with the
administration’s concerns.

Documented history

What most of the world now regards as the Armenian genocide traces
its beginning to 1914, in World War I, when Armenian guerillas
attacked Turkish supply lines as the Ottomans invaded Russia’s
frontier.

Armenian battalions also fought with the Russian army against the
Turks. After an Armenian uprising in the town of Van in 1915, the
Turks were convinced that the Armenians living among them constituted
a major threat. They moved to neutralize it.

Before the war, Armenians within the Ottoman Empire numbered
2-million. By 1922, the population was nearly nil. As many as
1.5-million were killed outright or died en route to camps in Syria,
and 500,000 were exiled, making the Armenians one of the world’s most
displaced peoples. (The Turkish government disputes the death toll,
saying it was closer to 500,000.)

France, Sweden, Italy, Argentina, Canada and other nations have
officially condemned the "Armenian genocide." In a recent letter to
Congress, the International Association of Genocide Scholars says the
genocide was "unambiguous and documented by overwhelming evidence."

In 2005, the Turkish government called for the creation of a joint
Turkish-Armenian commission to research the historical record and
determine, once and for all, what happened. It promised to open its
documents to scrutiny and invited outside scholars to join.

But the Armenians showed no interest. For them, there was nothing
more to discuss.

Old issue in Congress

Congress has been wrestling with this for three decades. Various
forms of a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide have been
proposed since the 1980s, but relations with Turkey have always won
out.

The resolution came up most recently two years ago, passing the House
Foreign Affairs Committee easily. But with Republicans in control and
President Bush opposed, there was no intention to bring it to the
floor.

That changed when Democrats regained control of Congress in January
and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a longtime supporter of condemning
the Armenian genocide, became speaker of the House.

Full House to debate

Bryan Ardouny and his group, the Armenian Assembly of America, had
been laying the groundwork for Wednesday’s vote for years. They had
worked with 53 other nonprofit and human rights groups to build
support in Congress.

By the start of Wednesday’s hearing, 226 members of the House had
signed onto the resolution as co-sponsors – more than half the entire
House.

"Members of Congress know, and certainly the ones we work with year
in and year out know, how important this is to the Armenian
community, and we make sure our constituents are weighing in and
making their voices heard," Ardouny said.

But the Armenians’ passion is matched by Turkey’s. Turkey agreed to
pay DLA Piper, Gephardt’s lobbying firm, $100,000 a month to fight
the resolution.

Gephardt recently arranged meetings for the Turkish ambassador to
Washington, Nabi Sensoy, with Pelosi and other top Democrats. He and
Livingston also worked members of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, which Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., described as a
"ferocious lobbying effort."

In the end, even committee members who opposed the resolution
stridently agreed that, yes indeed, a genocide occurred. But, they
argued, America’s relationship with Turkey is just too important to
risk for the sake of condemning what happened more than 90 years ago
at the hands of a government that no longer exists.

"We have to look at the here and the now," said Rep. David Scott,
D-Ga.

The resolution’s supporters, however, prevailed by arguing that
America’s allegiance to Turkey was no excuse. At least three members,
including Sherman, recalled Adolf Hitler, who told his staff that the
world would tolerate Germany’s extermination of the Jews because "who
today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Wednesday’s bipartisan 27-21 vote essentially guarantees a vote by
the full House, probably next month, a spokesman for Pelosi said. An
identical resolution has been filed in the Senate as well.

"Let us do this and be done with it," Sherman said. "We’ll get a few
angry words out of Ankara for a couple days, then it will be over."

Sensoy, the Turkish ambassador, was sitting in a reserved seat in the
second row of the audience. He considered Sherman’s remarks and said,
"I hope he would see that he is wrong."