US officials try to limit damage caused by vote over genocideGiles
Whittell, Washington

The Times/uk
Giles Whittell, Washington

March 6, 2010

US officials tried to limit the damage to relations with Ankara
yesterday after the Turkish Government condemned the Obama
Administration’s failure to prevent a vote labelling the murder of 1.5
million Armenians as genocide.

The Turkish Ambassador to Washington arrived back in Ankara after
being recalled in protest over the vote, as while theWhite House
issued a strong warning to Congress to drop its effort to force the US
to change its official position on the 1915 killings.

`Any further congressional action is an impediment to ongoing efforts
to normalise relations between Turkey and Armenia,’ a senior
administration official told The Times. `We have a broad and strategic
relationship with Turkey and continue to support its efforts to
improve relations with Armenia.’

A regional backlash against Thursday’s vote was already brewing in
Azerbaijan, where President Aliyev joined Turkey to condemn what a
spokesman called `a unilateral decision… accepted under pressure
from pro-Armenian congressmen’.

The spokesman repeated Azerbaijan’s demand that Turkey and Armenia
shelve their efforts at diplomatic rapprochement until Armenia has
resolved its dispute with Baku over the mainly-Christian enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh. Though within Azerbaijan’s borders, the enclave has
been administered by Armenia since a war in the early 1990s that left
nearly 30,000 people dead.

The Turkish Ambassador to Washington arrived back in Ankara after
being recalled in protest over the vote and Ahmet Davutoglu, the
Turkish Foreign Minister, summoned the US Ambassador to Ankara for
talks.

He said that the White House could have prevented the vote, which
calls on President Obama to refer to the massacres as genocide in his
annual speech to Armenians in the US.

`If an adviser had whispered `No’ instead of `Yes’ in the ear of a
member of the House of Representatives, the vote would have been
different,’ Mr Davutoglu said.

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved the resolution by 23
votes to 22. Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, can refuse to call a
vote by the full chamber, but has shown sympathy for the Armenian
position in the past.