ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MEASURE IS MISGUIDED
Bruce Fein, insight@sfchronicle.com.

San Francisco Chronicle, CA
Oct 21 2007

Passing judgment on Turkey without all of the facts would be a travesty
of justice

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believed that the Armenian genocide
resolution (HR106) that passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee on
Oct. 10 would be a slam dunk for her national stature and leadership.

Instead, it exposed the speaker as not well-informed and a champion
of parochial interests.

One week after the committee vote, Pelosi backtracked to reporters:
"Whether it will come up for a floor vote or not, what the action
will be remains to be seen." The speaker should block the genocide
resolution because the known historical events are inconclusive
at present. The Turkish government’s proposal for an international
fact-finding commission should be endorsed.

Before comprehensive facts are gathered by experts and without a
trial, HR106 would convict the Ottoman Empire and its successor
state, the Republic of Turkey, of an Armenian genocide more than
92 years ago. And the idea that members of Congress – thoroughly
unschooled in American history and the Constitution and responsive to
special-interest lobbies – are qualified to pronounce on the Armenian
genocide controversy encroaches on the domain of the fatuous.

The House speaker compares the Armenian genocide claim to Rwanda,
Darfur, or the Holocaust. But listen to author and Professor Bernard
Lewis of Princeton: "The point that was being made was that the
massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was the same as
what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany, and that is a downright
falsehood. What happened to the Armenians was the result of a massive
Armenian armed rebellion against the Turks, which began even before
war broke out, and continued on a larger scale."

Armenian terrorism against the Ottoman Empire – aimed at provoking
an overreaction by the sultan and European intervention – had
flourished for 60 years before World War I. The Armenian patriarch
was assassinated, and an attempt was made on the life of the sultan
while he was leaving prayer. Ottoman Armenians saw World War I as an
opportunity to carve out a separate Armenian state from the crumbling
Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, they defected in the tens of thousands to
fight with Russia and France, committed espionage, massacred Ottoman
Muslims, and otherwise sought to obstruct the Ottoman war effort.

Capt. Emory Niles and Arthur Sutherland, on an official 1919
U.S. mission to the eastern Anatolia region of what is now Turkey,
reported on Armenian war crimes or crimes against humanity: "In the
entire region from Bitlis through Van to Bayezit, we were informed
that the damage and destruction had been done by the Armenians, who,
after the Russians retired, remained in occupation of the country and
who, when the Turkish army advanced, destroyed everything belonging
to the Musulmans (Muslims). Moreover, the Armenians are accused of
having committed murder, rape, arson and horrible atrocities of every
description upon the Musulman population. At first, we were most
incredulous of these stories, but we finally came to believe them,
since the testimony was absolutely unanimous and was corroborated by
material evidence."

More than 1 million Ottoman Muslims and Kurds died in eastern
Anatolia from massacres or inhumane conditions of warfare. About
600,000 Armenians died in that time frame, according to historians.

The vast majority of those Armenians perished in a wretchedly executed
relocation order issued on April 24, 1915, as the Allies were landing
at Gallipoli, and Van was falling to the Russians on the eastern
front. War crimes were committed by both Armenians and Ottoman Muslims.

Persuasive evidence discredits the allegation that the Ottoman
government intended to exterminate Armenians as opposed to removing
them from regions notorious for anti-government activity such as
espionage and sabotage. Tens of thousands were left undisturbed in
Istanbul, Izmir and Aleppo. The core of the crime of genocide is a
specific intent to destroy a national, ethnical, religious or racial
group, as such.

Bryan Ardouny of the Armenian Assembly of America clucked in a
videotaped interview for a documentary on the Armenian revolt:
"We don’t need to prove the genocide historically, because it has
already been accepted politically." It is time for Speaker Pelosi
to repudiate that cynicism, insist that historical truth matters and
defer to an international commission of experts.