Robert Fisk: Someone remembers this atrocity at last – to Obama’s dismay

Saturday, 6 March 2010
Independent/uk

George W Bush spinelessly caved in to the Turkish generals. And now
our favourite Nobel prize winner – another brave president who
promised to acknowledge the Armenian genocide if he was elected and
then declined to do so – went whinging and whining to the House
Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington and pleaded with them not to
tell the truth about the savage rape and murder of 1.5 million
Armenian civilians by the Turks in 1915. Good for the committee that
it did not give in. But it will do no good.

Sure, the Turkish ambassador has been recalled from Washington in a
huff. But equally certain is that there will be no vote on the
genocide by the full House of Representatives. And if there is,
there’ll never be a vote in the Senate. Obama will help see to that.
The man who wanted change doesn’t want change on the little matter of
a genocide that led directly to the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews.

The events in Washington prove a few things. The Armenian American
community have a more powerful and wealthier lobby than ever before.
More seriously – for the Turks – is that this year Turkey did not have
the Israeli lobby behind it. In the past, Israel, which disgracefully
claims that the Armenian Holocaust was not a genocide, has supported
its close ally Turkey. But this year, Israel and Turkey have fallen
out and the Israelis are still miffed at Turkey’s condemnation of the
bloodbath in Gaza.

The Turks sent their generals to bully Bush last time round. This
time, the Turkish Foreign Minister warned that "Turkish-US ties are
going through a very important phase in which they need strategic
co-operation at the highest level in their history." The message is
simple. Acknowledge the genocide, and the US will lose its airbases in
Turkey and the Turkish roads its military convoys use into Iraq.

The fact, unfortunately, is that these roads are the very highways
down which the Armenians were sent on their death marches in 1915.
That’s not mentioned, of course. Our faithful Turkish ally might even
pack up its support for the US in Afghanistan, where they are helping
fight "Obama’s war". But Robert Gates is still in Washington to remind
congressmen what he said last year; that America needed "those roads
and so on". Well, let’s just hope the American troops don’t halt their
convoys and dig in the fields around those roads in the coming years.
The skeletons are still there in their tens of thousands.

One wonders what would happen if Germany suddenly decided that the
Nazi Holocaust was not a genocide. Would Chancellor Merkel get away
with it? Would Obama lobby that Germany should be allowed to get away
with such an obscenity? Perhaps it’s worth remembering that in 1939,
Hitler asked his generals – before setting off into Poland to murder
the millions of Jews in eastern Europe – a simple question: "Who now
remembers the Armenians?" Well, Hitler got the answer he would have
wanted from Obama this week.