TURKEY HIKES THE PRESSURE ON U.S.

Montreal Gazette
+hikes+pressure/2664101/story.html
March 10 2010
Canada

Crucial ally; Atrocities against Armenians weren’t genocide: Ankara

By PETER O’NEIL, Canwest News ServiceMarch 10, 2010 The U.S. was
reminded again yesterday why it does not have nearly the latitude
enjoyed by countries like France, Germany and Canada to denounce the
almost century-old atrocities committed by the old Ottoman Empire
against Armenians.

Turkey, which last week withdrew its ambassador to Washington to
protest a congressional bid to declare the First World War-era
persecution by Ottoman Turks of Armenians a genocide, issued a
statement aimed at heightening the pressure on President Barack
Obama’s administration to block the move.

"We will not send our ambassador back unless we get a clear sign on the
outcome of the situation regarding the Armenian bill," Prime Minister
Tayyip Erdogan said, according to the state news agency Anatolian.

According to one of the top U.S. analysts of Turkey, the
Washington-Ankara showdown couldn’t come at a worse time because of
growing anti-West sentiment in Turkey, for decades a crucial U.S.

military and diplomatic ally in the Islamic world and a member of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

More than 90 per cent of Turks, already bruised by German and French
opposition to their membership in the European Union, reject any
suggestion their nation is guilty of genocide, said Soner Cagaptay
of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"It will be seen as yet another slap in the face of the Turks by the
West, and therefore it will only help fuel the Turks’ slide away from
the West," Cagaptay told Canwest News Service.

"Regardless of the merits of the case, if there was one really wrong
time to pass such a resolution, this would be that time."

Turkey’s ambassador was withdrawn last week after a U.S. House panel
narrowly approved a non-binding measure condemning the genocide.

While Obama campaigned in favour of acknowledging the genocide, his
officials now say that this "personal" position doesn’t clash with
his administration’s view that Turkey and Armenia should resolve the
matter bilaterally.

It will be left to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and especially
Defence Secretary Robert Gates, to lobby Congress to block the measure
from advancing further, according to Cagaptay.

Gates is particularly motivated because of demands by a nationalist
opposition party, the MHP Party, that Parliament deny the U.S. access
to the Incirlik air base on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

Incirlik plays a vital logistical role for U.S. soldiers stationed
in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Several international organizations and about 20 governments, bowing
to lobbying efforts by Armenian diaspora communities, have recognized
the genocide of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

In all cases, Turkey has vehemently objected, though the geopolitical
ramifications of Ankara’s retaliatory measures have been marginal.

Canada’s House of Commons adopted that position in a free vote in
2004, reversing the Liberal government’s position that the deaths
constituted a "tragedy" rather than an extermination of a people.

Then-prime minister Paul Martin didn’t participate in the vote.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper explicitly endorsed the position that
the deaths constituted genocide when the Conservatives took power
two years later.