Corriere della Sera, Italia
March 5 2010

If Washington asks Ankara to take stock of its past

by Antonio Ferrari

History, which is almost always written by the winners, can sometimes
cause embarrassment and spark a desire to revise it. Sometimes history
really does inspire fear, particularly when it clashes with the
interests of realpolitik. The US Congress’s Foreign Affairs Committee
approved a resolution yesterday recognizing the genocide of the
Armenian people in the early part of the last century. A crisis so
serious has broken out between age-old allies Turkey and the United
States that Ankara has even recalled its ambassador.

The fact that the motion was put forward by the committee chairman, a
Democrat who belongs to the same party as Barack Obama, is fuelling
tension in Washington, anger in Ankara, and satisfaction in Yerevan.
The problem is quite simple in its complexity: Turkey, which has set
in motion negotiations with Armenia with a view to normalizing
bilateral ties, is also the United States’ most important ally in an
area stretching from the Balkans, to the Middle East, and to the
Caucasus. Now Congress’s vote is in danger of triggering a diplomatic
and political earthquake. While Ankara has taken a few timid steps
towards overcoming what it considers to be a taboo – the genocide of
1.5 million Armenians – it has already warned that the resolution is
going to freeze the normalization process with its neighbouring
country and cast a shadow over its alliance with the United States.
The effort made by Hillary Clinton to urge prudence on Congress, and a
phone call between Obama and his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul have
not managed to prevent the crisis, which looks set to be a
particularly thorny one.

Of course it is bizarre, as a Republican Party member said, that
Germany has acknowledged its responsibility for the Sho’ah, that South
Africa is probing the crimes of apartheid, and that the United States
accepts its guilt in connection with what the native Americans
suffered, while Turkey obstinately continues not to want to come to
terms with its past. Sarkozy’s France, which recognized the Armenian
genocide, paid a high price in contracts that went up in smoke, but
now with the United States the consequences are unpredictable.

[translated from Italian]