ARMENIAN RESOLUTION TESTS OUR CONSCIENCE
Cincinnati Post, OH
ID=/20071015/LIFE03/710150357/1008/LIFE
Oct 15 2007
A fascinating crisis of conscience is underway in the halls of Congress
and the result will tell us a great deal about the state of America’s
soul in the year 2007.
All great nations are tested between the two imperatives of national
interest and national identity. The crucible is now an event that
happened nearly a century ago in a land far away.
Armenia is one of that jumble of nations we always got mixed up in
geography class. There’s Turkey over there and that’s Azerbaijan –
or is it Georgia? – and down there somewhere is Iran.
In the dawning of the First World War, something terrible happened
to the Armenians. The nation and its people had long been an anomaly.
Most historians consider it the first completely Christian nation,
founded 350 years before Islam began its march over the region.
Empire after empire swept over Armenia, changing its borders and its
form of government, but its people remained fiercely independent.
The lowest moment in their national fortune came when they were
declared part of the Ottoman Empire from the late 19th century through
the First World War. The Armenians wanted their national identity
back and were not shy about demanding it.
The dominant Turks were not amused. First in 1894 and then,
catastrophically, in 1915, they slaughtered the Armenians. At the
beginning of the Great War they charged that Armenians were helping the
Russians, so they exiled nearly 2 million, sending them to Syria and
other countries worldwide. In the process, they killed at least 600,000
men, women and children. Some historians put that number at a million.
These facts are not in dispute, except in Turkey, where, to this day,
even ordinary citizens deny that it happened.
How does all of this touch the White House and the Congress of the
United States? For many years, the descendants of those Armenian
victims who settled in the United States have asked that the terrible
thing that happened to their ancestors be declared genocide. They
wanted to set the record straight.
They came close in the 1990s. A committee in the House of
Representatives voted to designate the tragedy a genocide. However,
the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, refused to bring the
resolution before the full House for a vote, so it died aborning.
Why did the Speaker do that? Some in the Armenian-American community
and at least one investigative journalist ascribe a dark motive to
him. In my view, the reason is more prosaic. It is power politics.
Turkey is a fragile ally of the United States in a region where we
have few friends. Pressure was applied to Hastert from his party and
from the White House.
However, the Armenian-Americans did not give up and they have
accumulated some powerful friends. They have also produced a
hard-hitting documentary called "Screamers," ostensibly denouncing
all genocide, but concentrating on the Armenian tragedy.
Last week in Washington, the same committee in the House once again
passed the resolution, 27-21. Voting with the majority, bucking a
great deal of pressure, was Cincinnatian Steve Chabot.
Now the ball is in the court of the new Speaker of the House, Nancy
Pelosi. She has long advocated recognition of the genocide, but she
now has wider responsibilities.
Moreover, the full-court press is on. The President, the Secretary
of State and the Secretary of Defense have hauled out every cliche in
their arsenal, particularly the always potent "War on Terror" to demand
that the issue go away. They need Turkey, they say. Let historians
sort out the details of an event lost in the mist of a century.
However, historians have already spoken. By any rational measure, what
happened to the Armenians was genocide. There are deniers of every
great atrocity in world history. Some say American slavery wasn’t
really so bad, that not nearly as many were butchered in Rawanda as
was claimed, that Stalin didn’t kill millions, that the Holocaust
didn’t happen.
Sometimes, standing up for truth and justice can be painful. Clinton
didn’t do it, Bush doesn’t want to do it. Now, how about our
much-maligned elected representatives?
Who will speak for America’s soul?