GENOCIDE VOTE POISONS TURKEY-US TIES

Asia Times Online
March 8 2010

WASHINGTON – Last Thursday’s vote by a United States congressional
committee condemning the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians during
World War I as "genocide" is almost certain to complicate US ties
with Turkey, a long-time strategic ally and increasingly influential
player in the Middle East and Central and Southwest Asia.

The 23-22 vote by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of
Representatives prompted the immediate recall of Turkey’s ambassador
here and an announcement by Ankara that ratification of a pending
US-backed treaty with Armenia would be frozen.

And the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which
sent several senior Turkish lawmakers and hired a high-priced public
relations firm as well as a former house speaker to

lobby against the resolution is likely to take much stronger measures
if it reaches the house floor later this year, according to both US
and Turkish analysts.

"We are seriously concerned that the adoption of this draft resolution
… will harm Turkey-US relations and impede the efforts for the
normalization of Turkey-Armenia relations," the Turkish Embassy said
in a release after the vote.

"This decision, which could adversely affect our cooperation on a
wide common agenda with the United States, also regrettably attests
to a lack of strategic vision," it added.

After maintaining silence about the resolution for several weeks,
the administration of President Barack Obama came out against it
just hours before the vote – apparently too late to affect the final
outcome, according to a number of lawmakers.

"We do not believe that the full congress will or should vote on that
resolution and we have made that clear to all the parties involved,"
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during a press conference
in San Jose, Costa Rica, on Thursday morning in the administration’s
first official statement on the issue.

The administration, which needs Turkey’s support on a slew of key
issues, ranging from Arab-Israeli peace to Iran and Afghanistan,
is likely to lobby hard against any effort by lawmakers to bring the
resolution to the floor, despite the fact that both Obama and Clinton
promised to support some version of it during their 2008 presidential
primary campaigns.

At least half a million US citizens, many of them concentrated in
the electorally powerful state of California, claim Armenian ancestry.

The Armenian-American community, which is among the wealthiest and
best organized of the many US ethnic minorities, has long sought
recognition of the 1915 death toll as a genocide. In 1975 and again
in 1984, it succeeded in getting such resolutions passed by the house,
although never in the senate.

In 2007, the Foreign Affairs committee approved a similar "genocide"
resolution. However, it was never referred to the floor of the house
due to intense opposition by the administration of president George
W Bush backed by the powerful "Israel Lobby", which has frequently
intervened in congress on Turkey’s behalf since the late 1980s when
Ankara and Israel began building a strategic alliance.

But Israeli-Turkish ties have become increasingly strained in recent
years, particularly since Israel’s "Cast Lead" military campaign
in Gaza, which Erdogan strongly denounced in a heated exchange with
Israeli President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in late
January last year, just days after the offensive had ended.

A number of subsequent incidents, most recently the apparently
deliberate televised humiliation in January by Israel’s deputy foreign
minister of Ankara’s ambassador in Tel Aviv, have added to the strains.

Indeed, some analysts in the US and in Turkey suggested that the
resolution’s passage was due as much to the Israel Lobby’s failure
to oppose it, as to the Obama administration’s delay in coming out
against it. Several key lawmakers who are considered close to the
Lobby, notably Gary Ackerman, Brad Sherman and committee chair Howard
Berman, spoke in favor of its approval.

"In the past, the pro-Israel community has lobbied hard against
previous attempts to pass similar resolutions, citing warnings from
Turkish officials that it could harm the alliance not only with the
United States but with Israel …," noted the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency on Friday.

"In the last year or so, however, officials of American pro-Israel
groups have said that while they will not support new resolutions,
they will no longer oppose them, citing Turkey’s heightened rhetorical
attacks on Israel and a flourishing of outright anti-Semitism the
government has done little to stem," it asserted.

The resolution, which was introduced by a California Democrat, calls
on the president to use the annual presidential statement on the 1915
mass deaths next month to "accurately characterize the systematic
and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide".

Turkey has argued that the Armenian deaths were a great tragedy played
out under the chaotic conditions of World War I when the collapsing
Ottoman Empire was under attack on many fronts, including internally
in the form of a Russian-backed Armenian insurgency.

Unlike most of its predecessors, the Erdogan government has indicated
a willingness to review the events of that time, possibly even in
cooperation with Armenia with which it agreed only last September
to establish diplomatic relations and re-open borders that have been
closed since 1993.

It was hoped that that agreement, which was mediated by Switzerland
with strong backing from Washington, would be quickly ratified by
both countries and lead to the resolution of the territorial dispute
between Armenia and oil-rich Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of
Nagorno Karabakh.

Despite US urging – most recently in a conversation between Obama and
Turkish President Abdullah Gul last Wednesday – Erdogan has insisted
that implementation of the treaty is dependent on progress in resolving
the territorial dispute. Ankara’s decision to freeze the ratification
process in the wake of Thursday’s committee vote here could deal a
lethal blow to the treaty’s prospects.

In the four years since the committee last voted out a genocide
resolution, Turkey’s strategic importance to Washington has
significantly increased.

In addition to having the largest army among the European members
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and having recently
increased its troop contribution to US-led forces in Afghanistan,
Turkey continues to permit the US access to key military bases on
its territory, provides critical supply routes to Iraq and acts as
an increasingly important transit route – bypassing both Russia and
Iran – for Caspian and Central Asian oil and gas.

Ankara’s influence and involvement in the Arab world, particularly in
Iraq and Syria, have grown sharply in recent years, and its friendly
ties with Iran have positioned itself as a potential mediator between
Tehran and the West.

Turkey has thus far resisted US pressure to host a radar base that
would be part of larger regional defense network designed to intercept
Iranian missiles and to vote for stronger economic sanctions against
Tehran on the United Nations Security Council, of which it is a member.

Some sectors, particularly those most closely associated with Israel
here, have become increasingly concerned about Turkey’s growing
orientation toward the Muslim world under Erdogan, who heads the
Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), in both its foreign
and domestic policies.

Indeed, neo-conservatives, whose views often reflect those of Israel’s
Likud Party, have been attacking Erdogan and the AKP with growing
fervor in recent months, accusing them of a systematic effort to
weaken Turkey’s traditionally secular institutions, notably the
once-dominant armed forces.

In a column coincidentally published on Friday by the neo-conservative
Wall Street Journal Friday, Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish-born specialist
at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, accused Erdogan of
transforming Turkey into a "police state".

At the same time, hard-line neo-conservatives, such as the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs and the Journal’s editorial
board, opposed the genocide resolution precisely because of fears
that it will serve only to further poison bilateral relations with a
country whose geostrategic importance to Washington and its Israeli
ally is simply too great.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress