EDITORIAL: POLITICS AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Milford Daily News, MA
Oct 17 2007

Other than placating their Armenian American constituents, it’s hard
to tell what interest the House Foreign Affairs Committee thought it
was serving when it approved, 27-21, a nonbinding, wholly symbolic
resolution condemning as genocide the deaths of over a million
Armenians when the Ottoman Empire, which was then not long for the
world, expelled them from eastern Turkey between 1915 and 1923.

Certainly it didn’t serve America’s geopolitical interests. The
resolution infuriated modern Turkey, which, as President Bush and
eight former secretaries of State of both parties pointed out, is
a vital NATO ally, a necessary partner in the war on terror, site
of an American airbase critical to supporting the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and generally altogether pro-U.S.

The Turks immediately summoned their ambassador to Washington home
for consultations and their Foreign Ministry called in our ambassador
to express their "unease" over the resolution. These are diplomatic
ways of displaying extreme pique. And if the Turks are well and truly
angry they can legitimately cause us a lot of trouble in Iraq. They
are amassing troops, helicopter gun ships and armor near the border
of Iraq. So far they have only attacked Kurdish rebels on their own
side of the border but they are threatening to go after facilities in
Kurdish Iraq that they say support the rebels. This would destabilize
the one tranquil part of Iraq.

The expulsion and murder of the Armenians is a part of its history that
Turkey has never come to grips with, and even today reconciliation
talks between Turkey and Armenia are moving very slowly – but
nonetheless moving unless this resolution impedes them.

It is important that Turkey face up to its history, not least
because there are still tensions between Armenians and Turks in
Turkey. There is healing to be gained whenever a nation finds the
courage and honesty to recognize historic wrongs committed in its
name. It was appropriate, for instance, for Congress to apologize
for the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II and the
mistreatment of Native American tribes.

But it is unclear what Congress accomplishes by condemning century-old
actions on the other side of the world committed by a regime
long passed into history. The resolution may bring some comfort to
Armenian-Americans who have long felt popular history slighted their
people’s nightmare, but this "feel-good" legislation comes at a price:
Spotlighting this history undermines current national interests in
a critical part of the world.

The resolution should be allowed to quietly languish in the clerk’s
office, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems determined to bring
it to a vote. Told that this was a bad time for the resolution,
the speaker said she’d been hearing that every year for the last 20.

Maybe there’s a good reason for that.