The Moderate Voice
March 5 2010

Genocide is Genocide: Exposing the Truth About the Turkish Massacre of
the Armenians

Posted by MICHAEL STICKINGS, Assistant Editor in International, Politics, War

It was a close vote, 23-22, but the House Foreign Affairs Committee
voted yesterday, if I may quote the NYT, `to condemn as genocide the
mass killings of Armenians early in the last century, defying a
last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote that
seemed sure to offend Turkey and jeopardize delicate efforts at
Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.’

It’s a vote I applaud enthusiastically. And not for the first time.
Here’s what I wrote back in October 2007:

What happened to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1917 was
genocide ‘ an estimated 1.5 million killed, a brutal and systematic
process of deportation and slaughter aimed at wiping out the Armenian
population ‘ but you wouldn’t know it if you got your history from the
Turks, who committed the genocide (now known as the Armenian
Genocide, or Holocaust), or from their present-day apologists in the
Bush Administration, from Bush and Rice and Gates, the Holocaust
deniers who sit at the top of the U.S. government. The House Foreign
Affairs Committee passed a resolution last week, calling what happened
to the Armenians what it was, genocide, but the deniers wanted none of
it.

I wouldn’t describe Obama and those in his administration as deniers
(I’m sure they know and acknowledge privately what really happened),
but they’re certainly doing much the same thing the previous
administration did, namely, refusing to acknowledge publicly that what
happened in Armenia was genocide, and all because of those
ever-so-delicate, ever-so-important American-Turkish relations, which
apparently couldn’t survive an admission of truth.

For its part, Turkey has been waging a decades-long campaign to deny
the genocide, a shameful refusal not just to take responsibility for
one of the most horrendous massacres in history but even to admit that
it really happened. And its reaction when challenged, this time as
always, suggests a level of collective national immaturity that is
truly appalling. In response to the House vote ‘ which, again, was
just yesterday ‘ the Turkish ambassador to Washington was recalled and
the Turking prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, issued the following
statement: `We condemn this bill that denounces the Turkish nation of
a crime that it has not committed.’

Well, it did, whether it wants to admit it or not.

And while I understand the desire to maintain close and friendly
relations with Turkey, a valuable ally, there is simply no excuse for
the U.S. government, whether it’s Bush or Obama in the White House, to
play along with, and to lend credence to, such a lie. It might as well
deny that slavery ever happened.

Besides, the Turks are bluffing. Do they really want to cut off ties
with America? Hardly. They need America, just like they need the West
generally, and it’s about time their denials were puncutured and they
were held to account for one of the darkest events of the last
century.

Thankfully, 23 members of the U.S. House of Representatives agree. Not
thankfully, there are far too many, including at the highest levels of
the government, who are in cahoots with the Turks.

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