TURKEY STILL FROSTY WITH U.S. OVER ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MOVE

CNN International
rope/03/09/turkey.us.genocide.debate/
March 9 2010

(CNN) — Turkey will not send its U.S. ambassador back to Washington
until it receives "clarity" on a measure that recommends the United
States recognize the 1915 killings of ethnic Armenians as genocide,
Turkey’s prime minister said Tuesday.

"As long as we don’t see clarity in the situation about the Armenian
bill, we won’t send our ambassador (back)," Recep Tayyip Erdogan said
at a lunch with journalists in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The ambassador was recalled last week to protest the House Foreign
Affairs Committee’s passage of the measure on a 23-22 vote Thursday.

The nearly century-old issue has placed both Congress and the White
House in the middle of a political minefield. The Obama administration
had urged the committee not to pass the resolution, warning it could
damage U.S.-Turkish relations and jeopardize efforts to normalize
relations between Turkey and its neighbor, Armenia. The two do not
share formal diplomatic relations.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters Friday that "the
Obama administration strongly opposes the resolution that was passed
by only one vote in the House committee, and we’ll work very hard to
make sure it does not go to the House floor."

Following the vote, Erdogan condemned the measure in a statement on
his Web site, saying it "accuses the Turkish nation of a crime it
has not committed. The people who support this bill have adopted a
wrong and unfair attitude, ignoring the differences of opinion of
expert historians and historical facts. The bill has been prepared
with tangible historical mistakes regarding the 1915 incidents and
with a completely subjective attitude."

However, Armenia’s foreign minister has expressed appreciation for
the vote.

Turkey officially denies a genocide took place in the last days of
the crumbling Ottoman Empire, saying that Muslim Turks and Christians
massacred each other on the killing fields of World War I.

Historians have extensively documented the Ottoman military’s forced
death-march of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians into the
Syrian desert in 1915. Every April 24, Armenians worldwide observe a
remembrance day for those killed. The deaths decimated the Armenian
population in what is now eastern Turkey.

The government in the Armenian capital of Yerevan and influential
Armenian diaspora groups have been urging countries around the world
to formally label the 1915 events as genocide.