BAD TIME TO PLACE STRAIN ON RELATIONS: ANALYST
BY: Peter O’Neil, Canwest News Service

The Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan)
March 10, 2010 Wednesday
Canada

The U.S. was reminded again Tuesday why it doesn’t 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 due to
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Turkey’s ambassador was withdrawn last week after a U.S. House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 last week 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 American soldiers stationed
in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cagaptay, who has written about Turkey’s slide from the West in
publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to the influential
U.S. journal Foreign Affairs, said the controversy won’t necessarily
help Erdogan in his current battle with the Turkish military.

"But it will help the government pacify any pro-western voices inside
the country. In other words, if this resolution passed, friends of
the U.S., and those who stand for a Turkey that’s a member of the
Euro-Atlantic community, would simply be told to shut up."

Erdogan’s Islamist-oriented government has taken a number of current
and retired senior military officers to court, charging them with
complicity in an alleged coup attempt after he became prime minister
in 2003.

The move is believed to be part of an attempt by the ruling Justice
and Development Party (AKP), which has distanced itself from Israel
and has started forming closer relations with anti-western countries
like Iran and Sudan, to discredit the military, long the defender of
Turkey’s status as a secular, pro-western state.

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.