TURKEY STILL ANGRY
by James Morrison
Washington Times
embassy-row-62525063/
March 10 2010
Turkey remains angered over a congressional resolution recognizing
the killings of Armenians in 1915 as genocide, threatening this week
to keep its new ambassador to the United States at home until the
measure is defeated.
"We will not send our ambassador back unless we get a clear signal
of the situation, regarding the draft law of the Armenian claims,"
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters this week
on a visit to Saudi Arabia, mistakenly referring to the nonbinding
resolution as a law.
Mr. Erdogan recalled Ambassador Namik Tan after the House Foreign
Affairs Committee voted 23-22 on March 4 to approve the resolution
and send it to the full House for a vote. Mr. Tan had arrived in
Washington only days before his recall.
The Turkish government apparently is not assured by the Obama
administration’s strenuous objections to the resolution. Secretary
of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters last week that the
White House "strongly opposes" the resolution.
"We will work very hard to make sure it does not go to the House
floor," she promised.
The resolution accused the old Ottoman Turkish Empire of deliberately
trying to exterminate Armenians in a genocidal campaign from 1915 to
1923. The government of the modern Turkish republic, which replaced the
Ottoman regime in 1923, objects to the characterization of the massacre
as genocide and insists that Armenia has inflated the casualties. The
House resolution refers to 1.5 million Armenians killed and 500,000
expelled from their homes.
Turkey has relied on its membership in NATO and its strategic
importance to the West to defeat similar genocide resolutions in
the past.