FORMER DIPLOMAT REVEALS SECRET STATE DEPT. ATTACKS ON 1980’S GENOCIDE RESOLUTIONS
Armenian Weekly
December 9, 2009
WASHINGTON-A retired Foreign Service officer, U.S. Ambassador Arma
Jane Karaer, recently revealed a series of shocking revelations about
the State Department’s behind-the-scenes efforts on behalf of Turkey
during the 1980’s 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, the 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."
***
>>From the Library of Congress, Historical Collections (American
Memory) Manuscript Division, the Foreign Affairs Oral History
Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
An interview with Ambassador Arma Jane Karaer by Charles Stuart
Kennedy, 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
years 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 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.