Armenian National Committee of America
1711 N Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Tel. (202) 775-1918
Fax. (202) 775-5648
Email. anca@anca.org
Internet

PRESS RELEASE

December 8, 2009
Contact: Elizabeth S. Chouldjian
Tel: (202) 775-1918

FORMER DIPLOMAT REVEALS SECRET STATE DEPT. ATTACKS ON 1980s
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESOLUTIONS

WASHINGTON, DC – A retired Foreign Service officer, U.S. Ambassador
Arma Jane Karaer, has revealed a series of shocking revelations
about the State Department’s behind-the-scenes efforts on behalf of
Turkey during the 1980s to kill Congressional initiatives
commemorating the Armenian Genocide, according to now public
documents circulated today by the Armenian National Committee of
America (ANCA).

The revelations are part of an oral history interview with Karaer,
a foreign service officer who served, among other postings during
her long diplomatic career, as a commercial officer in Ankara and
as the State Department’s senior Turkish Desk Officer. Excerpts
from her lengthy interview concerning Armenian issues, including
Armenian Genocide legislation before the U.S. Congress, are
provided below.

"We’re circulating Ambassador Karaer’s interview – a truly stunning
example of undisguised cynicism in the face of genocide and denial
– as a public service," said Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of
the ANCA. "As painful as her callous remarks are to read, they do –
in their candor – provide powerful insights into the depths to
which U.S. officials have sunk in enforcing Turkey’s genocide
denial dictates. Sadly, it would seem, the pervasive attitude of
expediency over morality characterized by her words remains, even
today, much more the rule rather than the exception among the
senior ranks of our nation’s Foreign Service."

#####

=========================== =====================================
Library of Congress – Historical Collections (American Memory)
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for
Diplomatic Studies and Training

The Library of Congress makes digitized historical materials
available for education and scholarship. This transcription is
intended to have an accuracy rate of 99.95 percent or greater.

AMBASSADOR ARMA JANE KARAER
Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy
Initial interview date: April 19, 2004

[EXCERPTED]

Q: Yes, absolutely. Anyway, I think we were all over the place,
kind of rewriting the book on this and I had served in Yugoslavia
for five yeas running the consular section and we’d had the same
thing. I mean you learn to discriminate between the real communists
and the ones who were kind of nominal or belong to the labor
movement. If you’ve got a job you belong to a labor movement.
Anyway, I mean it was a period of sort of revamping the rules.

KARAER: One of the things that we were doing in that office was
trying to wipe out the ineligibilities of cases that came to our
attention for which there was no fundamental proof that the person
was ever a communist or was, in any sense, dangerous to the United
States. Another thing that made me sensitive to this problem was a
task that I undertook when I was in Istanbul. In my office there
were two three-drawer filing cabinets with big bars and padlocks on
them. Upon inquiring I found out that they contained files of
refugees from Eastern Europe who had been processed in Istanbul
through the Refugee Relief Program. INS had taken whatever they
wanted from those files and left years before, but my immigrant
visa clerk, who was the world’s greatest pack rat, didn’t want to
destroy them because she thought they might contain some original
documents, like birth certificates.

Of course this is now 20 years later. If they haven’t missed their
birth certificate by now, they’re probably not going to need them,
but I’m conscientious too. I went through every one of those
doggone files, six drawers full, not a single original document in
any of it, number one. Number two, I learned a lesson about
refugees trying to get to the United States. Most of them claimed
to have left their home countries because they were anti-Communist.
Anti-Communist? These guys were taxi drivers. What did you do that
was so anti-Communist? Well, I just am, and that’s why I left and
that’s why I have to go to the United States, to fight the
communists. So much of it was so fluffy, but that’s what they
needed to say to get their visas for the U.S., so they said it. Of
course we’ve got that still. When I was on the Turkish desk I was
got routine inquiries sent to me by immigration courts about people
who were Turks of Kurdish background who were illegal aliens here.
They were being tried by the immigration court. Do they go back or
do they stay? Every single one of them were said they had to stay
in the United States because their life would be in jeopardy if
they returned to Turkey. Not true. They were economic refugees, not
political refugees. There were even some Armenian Turks who had
left Turkey just in the previous few years who were claiming that
as an Armenian if they went back to Turkey they were in fear of
their live, which was all a bunch of bunk.

[ . . . ]

Q: You were on the Turkish desk from ’84 to?

KARAER: ’84 to ’86, yes.

Q: At the time you went there, in the first place, did you, was
the southeast Europe thing, did it fall along the lines that
happened between the Greeks and the Turks? I mean I’m talking about
the American personnel there. Was there, did you find it a pretty
objective bunch or did you see kind of that division within people
who are looking at that area off of our side?

KARAER: No, I think that they were objective. The Greek government
truly was being difficult. At the time we had a real terrorism
threat against our people.

Q: November 17th group, but anyhow.

KARAER: Yes. So, that was their main focus as I recall. Turkey was
the big, big issue, almost the whole time that I was there. About
the time I arrived, then California Congressman Tony Coelho had
introduced a bill in the Post Office Committee of the House of
Representatives to declare April 25th or April something. Genocide
Day. The purpose, ostensibly, was to help the American people
recall the people who were lost in the so-called Armenian genocide.
Why the post office committee? Of course this is a foreign policy
thing. If the U.S. Congress says that their government committed a
genocide, it would enrage the Turks. However, there were a lot of
Armenian-Americans in Mr. Coelho’s congressional district, and
apparently whatever makes the Turks unhappy, makes them happy. He
probably couldn’t have even got it onto the schedule of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, but he thought he could slip this
through the Post Office Committee, which is in charge of declaring
national pickle day, national rose day and things like that.

Mr. Coelho is famous now, infamous, for his money raising
abilities, so he had a lot of friends on the Hill. This thing had
just popped up on the Department’s screen when I arrived. The Turks
had informed the Secretary of State that if that bill got passed,
something awful was going to happen in the bi-lateral relationship.
They didn’t know what, but something awful was going to happen. The
Secretary had told the Assistant Secretary who told my boss, "Stop
it." Well, fortunately, we were able to find some members of the
House who, although they didn’t know very much about this piece of
history, were peeved with Coelho for trying this end-run around the
Foreign Affairs Committee. Whatever the justice of his claim it
didn’t belong in the Post Office Committee.

I worked very closely with one of the senior aides to one of those
Congressmen. This man was a master of House procedure. This was my
next great learning experience – how much of what happens or
doesn’t happen on the Hill depends on finessing procedure. What
they wanted from us primarily were lots of short speeches. Three
minute speeches, two minute speeches, that they could pass out on
the subject on why this was a bad idea. Why this could not or
should not be done. We, mostly me, spent hours writing these little
speeches that could be given to members to use from the floor to
speak against this proposal. The Turks had belatedly learned that
they had to lobby Congress. They had for many years just sort of
sat back with their typical chip on the shoulder attitude. " We
know that we’re great. We know that you need us. That should be
good enough for everybody. Why should we go around hat in hand to
your legislators?"

It took them a long time to understand the power of members of
Congress in this country. I think that they looked on our members
of congress as equivalent to their members of parliament which is
not the same thing. They thought that if they dealt with the
administration that was all that should be necessary. By the time
the Coelho bill came up, they had already been convinced that this
wasn’t the case. They had hired a lobbyist that was giving them
advice on things that they could do – primarily not stick their
feet in their mouths too often. There was an American professor who
was a specialist in Turkish and Ottoman history who got together a
bunch of other academics in the same line. They too were putting
out public statements that the version of history supported by the
Coelho bill was not as clear cut as it implied. One of the big
problems with this issue is that so much of what has been written
in English about the Armenian massacres in Turkey in the early 20th
century was written by Armenians or Armenian Americans. Our main
line of attack on this whole thing was that yes, something really
horrible happened in Turkey in what was then the Ottoman Empire
during the First World War, but whatever happened there was not a
genocide.

We did get a certain amount of support from the Jewish lobby. They
don’t particularly want to share the genocide label with other
groups. The gratuitous killing of a lot of people is an ugly thing.
You don’t like to be picking nits over language. But the word
genocide means a particular thing, and the history does not support
the charge that the Turks were trying to wipe an ethnic group. From
their point of view, they were trying to stop a minority group from
breaking off another part of the country. While many people died in
Eastern Turkey, the Armenian communities in Western Turkey, who
were not engaged in rebellion, were not touched. The Turks had
already lost a large portion of their empire to rebellion by the
Greeks and the Bulgarians who had won their independence with the
help of the Russians. The Armenians in northeastern Turkey, in
their old homeland contiguous with Russia, tried the same thing.
They formed militias and, with Russian help, attacked Turkish
villages in the same area. This was all happening about the time
that Turkey entered the First World War on the side of the Germans
and Austro-Hungarian Empire. Russia, of course, was on the other
side of the conflict. From the Ottoman Government’s point of view,
not only were those Armenian groups rebelling, they were making
common cause with the enemy. The army put down the rebellion and
then rounded up all of the Armenian villagers, pointed them towards
Syria and said, "Start walking." There was no attempt to provide
any sort of food or even any real protection. There were Kurds and
bandits who had preyed on these villages for centuries, just
waiting in the hills. When these unprotected convoys came along,
they did what they always did, they attacked these people and
killed them and raped the women.

What we know about what actually happened comes a great deal from
the oral histories that were collected of people who lived through
that period and ended up in the United States. A lot of them were
young children at the time that this happened and some of them were
still alive at the time that I was the desk officer. There are at
least three Armenian newspapers in the United States. I think two
of them in English and one of them in Armenian. We used to get all
of these papers and read this stuff. Every issue would have an
interview with some grandmother or grandfather who remembered what
happened to them when they were a child. Now, how did they survive?
Almost all of them survived because a Turkish family had taken them
in and taken care of them until Christian missionaries arrived
looking for these kids and then they gave them to the missionaries.
A lot of the information that was published in the United States at
the time of this event was provided by American missionaries who
were working in that area. The history of Christian missions in
Turkey is rather a strange one in my view, because while everybody
was out there to try to convert someone to their particular brand
of Christianity, they had very little luck with the Muslims. Almost
none whatsoever. So, then what did they do? They proceeded to try
to convert the Armenian Catholics to their particular Protestant
denomination. Of course many missionaries had a very biased view of
who was right, who was worthy of saving, who was worthy of having
their freedom and so on.

I found some books in the Department library written by a man who
was our consul in Izmir. He was there at the end of the Turkish
independence war where Izmir is burned. Reading what he wrote in
the mid-1980s was shocking. According to him whatever the Muslims
said or did was wrong and they were all liars and whatever a
Christian said was good and whatever they said was the absolute
truth. This was the kind of stuff that was being fed to the U.S.
public.

Q: In a certain respect, I’ve looked into this a little bit, only
from a consular point of view I think this was the consul I can’t
think of his name, did quite a heroic deed when the Greeks were
pushed out and he saved a lot of lives.

KARAER: Well, there’s no question that these people did the job
that they were sent to do, but the fact is that he and others like
him were so incredibly partial to one religion and so anti-Turk.
This is one of the reasons why the Turks, Ataturk and others, felt
that the whole world was against them, and this remained the theme
in Turkish diplomacy right up until the time that I was working
there.

[ . . . ]

Our issue with the Coelho gambit was not to try to say that the
Ottoman government hadn’t done something awful. They had. What we
were focusing on was the genocide language. I remember once my boss
and I went to call on the man who was the Vice President’s chief
political advisor. They didn’t want to get in trouble with Coelho,
but they didn’t want to rock the boat with the Turks either. He
said, "Now, why is this so important?" I said, "It’s the genocide
thing. These people want their own state. Armenian territory right
now is a part of the Soviet Union. The rest of what the Armenians
claim as their homeland would have to come from Turkey, and they
will never ever agree to that. We need their cooperation in NATO
and elsewhere and that’s why we’re siding with them. If the
Armenian group can get respectable organizations like the Congress
of the United States to say, in effect, that the Turks committed a
genocide, then they can get others in Europe and so on to do the
same thing and their next step is going to be pressure to
compensate. See that’s territory so we can have our own homeland
and this will never happen to us again." The man we were talking to
said, "Oh, that’s ridiculous." I said, "Why? It happened before,
didn’t it?"

Q: Well, you know, speaking about the word genocide, I was
watching public broadcasting yesterday, last evening, the Lehrer
Report which is the sort of the preeminent public broadcast in TV.
They were talking about problems in the western province of the
Sudan called Darfur and there was a discussion of I know that
you’re not using the word genocide. I can’t remember what it got
sort of esoteric about why they weren’t using genocide, but were
using ethnic cleansing and I think it’s the same thing. Genocide is
a term that everybody is very careful about because all sorts of
things get kicked in if you use genocide.

KARAER: Yes, that’s right.

Q: You know, it strikes me that one of the problems in congress
has happened in the last 30 or 40 years or so is there’s no adult
minding the store there anymore. It used to be that you’d have the
speaker of the house or something to take a look and say, look this
is affecting our military ability to resist the Soviet Union. It
doesn’t get anywhere. Kids knock it off, but there’s nobody to do
that at this point I take it.

KARAER: In fact it came to the floor of the House for a vote, and
I’m telling you this was one of the most exciting days of my life.
We were sitting in the Department in somebody’s office who had a
nice big television watching CSPAN and our guys stood up and said
what they had to say and they did and we got Steven Solarz to speak
against the bill. He was great because he got up and said, speaking
as a Jew, that he had great sympathy for peoples who had suffered
in this way, but there was a serious question as to whether this
could accurately a) be called a genocide and b) about the effect
such an action would have on our foreign policy. Anyway, they took
a vote on an amendment to the bill, which was a stalking horse to
see how many votes they had that might be for or against this
resolution. When they saw how it was going, the person in charge of
the floor called it off and removed it from consideration. There
never was an up and down vote on that resolution, but we did manage
to stop it for the time being. They got another one through a few
years later.