Fresno Bee (California)
October 18, 2007 Thursday
FINAL EDITION

Sugarcoated history is for sale, but I’m not buying it

Bill McEwen The Fresno Bee

President Bush and some members of Congress say this isn’t the time
to rile Turkey by addressing horrors of the past.

The things you learn.

I didn’t know there was a wrong time to denounce the massacre of
Armenians carried out by the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915.

Or that situational ethics should trump America’s moral obligation to
officially recognize the truth: The Turks waged genocide.

Well, we can make at least one thing official.

History’s on sale, and the politicians are wheeling and dealing with
an ally in the Iraq war.

"One thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical
record of the Ottoman Empire," says Bush, who is pressing the House
of Representatives to forget about a nonbinding resolution
recognizing the genocide.

Bush is wrong, and so is Rep. Jane Harman, a liberal Democrat from
Los Angeles who co-sponsored the resolution but wants to tuck it away
until a more convenient day.

The Turks can call it what they want, but historians have provided
ample evidence of the atrocities. Women and children died because of
forced starvation. Cultural leaders were murdered. Thousands of
Armenians were asphyxiated in caves that foreshadowed Nazi gas
chambers.

The final death count: 1.5 million Armenians. A goodly number of
their descendants live here in the San Joaquin Valley.

One of them is Rob Saroyan of Fresno, who is disappointed about the
resolution’s diminishing prospects for passage. "When we so easily
compromise the truth," he says, "it erodes my faith in the tenets
we’re founded on."

Saroyan knows better than most that compromise is part of politics.
Early in his professional career, he was an aide to then-California
Gov. George Deukmejian and held other political jobs in Sacramento.

"I understand how the process works and how deals are cut," Saroyan
says. "It’s just too bad [Armenian-Americans] don’t have the
political leverage. Every year, there’s an excuse why we can’t do the
resolution."

Rep. George Radanovich of Mariposa repeatedly has sought genocide
recognition. This year, with Democrats in charge of Congress,
lawmakers Jim Costa of Fresno and Dennis Cardoza of Merced are
leading efforts.

If this resolution fails, the Armenian community will try again next
year. And the next. Until — international relations of the moment be
damned — the right thing, finally, is done.

"This only strengthens my resolve to carry on, because it resurrects
the suffering of our grandparents and great-grandparents," Saroyan
says, his voice cracking during a telephone interview.

"I remember seeing my grandfather, a strong man, crying. He was
robbed of his mother and father as a child. It burned him, and I felt
like he lived with hate and questions of why it happened."

Longtime Republican activist Mike Der Manouel Jr. of Fresno wants
Bush and Congress to call Turkey’s bluff and adopt the resolution.
His paternal grandfather’s first wife and their children were killed
in the genocide.

"How is the official denial in Turkey any different than the Iranian
[president] denying the Jewish Holocaust? It isn’t," Der Manouel
says.

The resolution isn’t only about what happened to Armenians a long
time ago. It’s about what America stands for. Have we reached the
point that right and wrong and the sanctity of life matter less than
strategic imperatives?

With history for sale, the ugly answer stares us in the face.