OPEN FORUM: SCRAP THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESOLUTION
By Fred Gedrich
San Francisco Chronicle
March 22 2010
The House Foreign Affairs Committee recently presented the Obama
administration with a major foreign policy headache by needlessly
resurrecting and passing a nonbinding Armenia genocide resolution. The
committee vote ignited a firestorm that threatens U.S.-Turkey
relations, U.S. national security, and a recent Armenian and Turkish
agreement to normalize relations.
President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton have publicly identified with the Armenian view
of events. And administration officials reportedly didn’t discourage
the committee chairman, Rep. Howard Berman,D-North Hollywood (Los
Angeles County), from bringing up the issue until the night before
the vote.
The resolution — which passed the committee 23 to 22 (with 17
Democrats and 6 Republicans voting for it) — accuses Turkey’s former
Ottoman Empire of killing 1.5 million Armenians and displacing 500,000
others from 1915 to 1923 — and calls upon President Obama to publicly
label the act genocide.
The resolution doesn’t discuss the alternative views of Turkey’s
government and of some historians who claim that between 250,000
to 500,000 Armenians, and as many Muslims, died in civil strife and
war-related deaths when Armenians sided with Russian invaders against
the country during World War I.
During the Cold War, Christian Armenia was an enslaved Soviet Union
member while secular Muslim Turkey allied itself with the United
States and its allies against Soviet tyranny and hegemony.
Today, Turkey is an important diplomatic and security player in
Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. It also hosts an important U.S. air base,
is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member and has a nonpermanent
U.N. Security Council seat.
The committee’s action infuriated Turkish leaders and citizens.
Turkey’s Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, immediately recalled
the country’s new ambassador to the United States, Namik Tan, for
consultations and stated the resolution "will greatly harm bilateral
relations, interests and visions."
Chairman Berman quoted the International Association of Genocide
Scholars as a basis for the committee vote, "As crimes of genocide
continue to plague the world, Turkey’s policy of denying the Armenian
Genocide give license to those who perpetrate genocide everywhere."
However, the United States already has a solid record on this issue.
The United States’ Ottoman envoy, Henry Morgenthau, organized and led
protests against the alleged Armenian persecution; 132,000 Armenian
orphans became American citizens as a result of congressional
assistance and action; and Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Bush
acknowledged the forced exile and annihilation of Armenians in 1981,
1998 and 2004 proclamations.
Notwithstanding pressures brought by powerful Armenian American
and Greek American lobbies and others to pass the resolution, it’s
unnecessary, irresponsible and dangerous for the Congress to do so —
especially since the event occurred nine decades ago, the Ottoman
government no longer exists and the perpetrators are dead.
President Obama spoke before the Turkish Parliament in early 2009
asking Turks to "help bridge the gap between Muslim and Western
worlds." The resolution, if presented to and/or passed by the full
House of Representatives, stands to blow-up the bridge between America
and Turkey.
The Obama administration should convince House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
to scrap the resolution, as she did when it came up in 2007. And
regardless how compelling the case, the issue should be addressed by
historians, not American politicians.
Fred Gedrich is a foreign policy and national security analyst. He
served in the Departments of State and Defense and visited Armenia
and Turkey on official assignments.