ARMENIANS USE TURKEY-SUDAN TIE FOR RECOGNITION

Hurriyet
Feb 23 2009
Turkey

WASHINGTON – The largest U.S. Armenian group has launched a campaign
to urge the administration in Washington and Congress to formally
recognize Armenians’ claims of "genocide", by using Ankara’s developing
ties with Sudan.

Washington views the killings of people in the Darfur region of Sudan
by militias backed by the Khartoum government as genocide.

The Armenian National Committee of America, or ANCA, in a weekend
statement, accused Turkey and Sudan of establishing an "axis of
genocide."

The ANCA said it had alerted members of Congress to "the human costs
of the emerging axis of genocide" between the Ankara and Khartoum
governments.

ANCA said Turkey had been directly selling weapons to Sudan, that
Ankara diplomatically supported the Sudanese government’s genocide
denials and that Turkey was using its U.N. Security Council seat to
block anti-genocide efforts. "The genocidal Ankara and Khartoum regimes
have grown markedly closer over the past two years, driven by Turkey’s
increasingly brazen efforts to undermine the international community’s
efforts to isolate Sudan’s genocidal regime," the ANCA said.

Sudanese visit "In recent weeks, Turkey came under considerable
international scrutiny for hosting Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman
Mohammed Taha who during a meeting with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan
asked Turkey to use its position in the U.N. Security Council to block
any possible attempts to arrest Sudanese President Omer al-Bashir
on charges of genocide," it said. The ANCA also posted on its Web
site a photograph in which President Abdullah Gul was shaking hands
with al-Bashir.

The U.S. Armenians’ top objective this year is to win U.S. recognition
of the 1915 incidents as "genocide".