Sunday’s Zaman, Turkey
March 7 2010

Counting the votes and counting the cost

by ANDREW FINKEL

`Anger’ was the way the BBC described the Turkish reaction to the US
congressional committee’s vote to call for the recognition of the
deaths of the Armenians under Ottoman rule as genocide. The Wall
Street Journal said Ankara was `riled.’ However, whatever rage there
was, not much of it was on display. The Sabah newspaper dismissed the
whole voting procedure of the august House Committee on Foreign
Affairs as `farcical.’ The Turkish foreign minister displayed
dignified nonchalance, calling the session in which the vote was kept
open so that stragglers could roll up as `lacking in seriousness.’ He
complained of a lack of vision in Washington, suggesting with
schoolmasterly disapproval that the American government wasn’t really
up to the job of running an alliance.

Even the Taraf newspaper — some of whose columnists have been on the
firing line for expressing the unpopular view that Turkey must atone
for its misdeeds in 1915 — was mocking of the whole affair. `This
year’s genocide season has begun,’ its headline ran. While the world
waits for Turkey to snarl at the congressional committee’s decision,
public opinion has simply looked away in dignified contempt. `The old
genocide film is making the rounds again,’ yawned Mehmet Ali Birand in
his syndicated column.

Of course, this sangfroid is predicated on the assumption that the
resolution will never make its way to the floor of the House for a
final tally. That is what happened in previous years when the vote
committee was far closer than last Thursday’s 23-22. However, in
previous years the administration was far less conflicted. Barack
Obama’s Hamlet-like deliberations can be heard from a long way off.
Does he do what he thinks is right, or what he knows to be expedient.
`It’s not anger that Ankara is experiencing; its fear,’ a diplomat
told me from one of those countries which has already passed a
genocide resolution. Once America concedes the existence of genocide,
it will become the received wisdom.

Through the miracle of Internet streaming, I followed the committee’s
debate. The `ayes’ had no reservation that the tragedy befalling the
Armenian people was the first genocide of the 20th century, that
survivors and their offspring had a right to have this truth
recognized. Some congressman were sorry that this had to be at the
expense of a trusted ally but that it was in Turkey’s own interests to
face up to the past. Some were less apologetic. Brad Sherman, a
California Democrat, labeled Turkey a `paper tiger’ and that it was
high time to call its bluff. Those against the motion said it was not
the business of Congress to judge the past, particularly if that meant
damaging US interests in the present. It was not the business of
government to adjudicate between the claims of one set of `hyphenated
American’ against another, according to Texan Republican Ron Paul,
which is as close as anyone got to accusing the other side of
barnstorming to their electorate. However, no one used the crib-sheet
provided by the Turkish Historical Society (TTK) that the genocide
never happened.

The debate wended its way to a cliffhanger finish — and before he
knew it, poor Namık Tan, Turkey’s envoy in Washington, was being
recalled onto the next plane home for consultations. The message he
should bring is that Turkey can win the battle and it can win the war,
but that it has lost the argument.

`Look at our allies,’ my neighbor told me during my efforts to conduct
an impromptu vox populi poll. His list included pretty much the whole
of the American defense industry: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon,
United Technologies Corp, Northrop Grumman. With friends like that,
who needed enemies, he suggested, and added that lots of countries had
recognized the genocide without the sky over Ankara falling down. I
don’t suppose his is the majority view in Turkey and, should the
resolution pass, Ankara may not spin off into a frenzy of self-harm,
but it will hardly shrug the matter off. Rapprochement with Armenia
will move from its current position on the back burner off the stove
entirely.

07.03.2010