WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . . .

Wall Street Journal
March 18 2010

. . . Armenia doesn’t need enemies.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week told the BBC he
could deport 100,000 undocumented Armenian immigrants. The cue for his
threat was the recent U.S. and Swedish "nonbinding resolutions" saying
the mass expulsions and serial murders of Armenians by Ottoman forces
95 years ago ought to be called a genocide. Not content to have done
more damage to Turkish-Armenian relations than anything Ankara has done
recently, the U.S. House of Representatives has not ruled out taking
up the declaration by the Foreign Affairs committee in a full vote.

Mr. Erdogan’s diatribe was most likely a bluff. Ankara tends to
inflate its numbers of illegal Armenian workers, either to display its
goodwill toward that country’s nationals, or to threaten them–whatever
seems most opportune at the time. But that’s not to say that the
increasingly heavy-handed Turkish premier can’t make life difficult
in other ways for however many Armenians live and work in his country,
whether they’re within the law or not.

For now, bluster is begetting bluster. The feel-good meddling from
Stockholm and Washington, and Mr. Erdogan’s bombastic reaction, has
drawn equally unhelpful rhetoric from Yerevan, where officials are
branding his threat a potential abuse of human rights, and saying
his words smack of the Ottomans’ World War I-era atrocities against
Armenians. The two countries in October struck a landmark deal to
normalize relations and open their common border, though the pact has
yet to be ratified. Given the recent tumult courtesy of American and
Swedish lawmakers, that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Moscow is reportedly eyeing the U.S.-Turkish and
Turkish-Armenian spats and wondering how it can benefit. Hooray for
Congressional exercises in statecraft.

It remains to be seen how the American declaration will affect
Turkey’s heretofore stalwart support in Afghanistan, not to mention
its reluctance to back sterner action against Iran’s nuclear program.

But in the meantime, other lawmakers eager to set other countries’
nearly 100-year-old records straight might reflect on the hazards of
empty-gesture diplomacy.

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