LOOKING FOR A WAY FORWARD ON ARMENIA
Nichole Sobecki
Global Post
421/armenia-genocide-turkey-anniversary-us-relatio ns
April 23 2010
How the efforts of a small but effective Armenian lobby helped bring
the US and Turkey to diplomatic blows.
VAN, Turkey — Beyond Turkey’s borders, the Armenian diaspora have been
fighting for years to have the forced deportations and massacres of
Armenians in the early 21st century officially recognized as genocide
— a response to Ankara’s persistent refusal to acknowledge the crimes
of its predecessors.
The approval in March by the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee of
a resolution calling on President Barack Obama to "characterize the
systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as
genocide" was a small victory for the lobby. It was also a warm up for
a full House vote that would formalize the official U.S. recognition
of the genocide.
But many worry that the Armenian lobby’s efforts are doing great
damage to the Obama administration’s attempts to rescue a fragile
Turkey-Armenia reconciliation — dealt yet another blow this week
when Armenia suspended ratification of the historic peace accords
with Turkey.
The battle to have these atrocities recognized as genocide is the
raison d’etre for the Armenian diaspora, some of whose grandparents
were marched across Turkish soil to their deaths.
"All Armenians worldwide are descendants of the survivors of the
Armenian genocide," said Harut Sassounian, an Armenian-American
writer, public activist and publisher of The California Courier,
an English-language Armenian weekly newspaper. "The government of
Armenia, however, due to external pressures, has to take a more
cautious position on relations with Turkey."
Read about how, as Armenians worldwide stop to reflect on Ottoman-era
mass killings on April 24, a survivor quietly moves on.
Jeroen Moes, co-founder of the website Mediated Memories, a virtual
museum dedicated to the Armenian genocide, explains that collective
memories of genocide are transmitted from generation to generation
and help to shape the attitudes, opinions and behaviors of individuals.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Moes’ research shows that collective
memories of atrocities such as these can become more important to
later generations than to those who experienced them.
"First-hand experience, however gruesome, is usually more nuanced and
less black-and-white than the story being retold from generation to
generation and from medium to medium," he said.
In an article in Foreign Policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national
security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and a professor at Johns
Hopkins University, ranks the Armenian-American Lobby as one of the
most effective — right up there with the Cubans and Israelis. From
1992 to 2007, Armenia received almost $2 billion worth of assistance
from the United States, while Azerbaijan came away with about a
billion less.
And despite their numbers — there are fewer than 2 million
Armenian-Americans living in the United States, a country with
a population of nearly 300 million — Armenian political action
committees contributed nearly $200,000 to various races across
the U.S. in the 2008 election cycle, according to Federal Election
Commission documents.
Still, the community’s rallying cry of support for official U.S.
recognition of the Armenian genocide has always been frustrated.
Turkey plays a solid defense, always managing to dissuade the U.S.
from going through with the resolution by a series of diplomatic
temper tantrums and blunt reminders that the U.S. has few friends
like Turkey in the Muslim world.
More recently, the Turkish Culture Ministry gave approval for a
religious service to be held once a year in the recently restored
Armenian Holy Cross Church on the island of Akhtamar in Lake Van.
Protest flared in 2007 when the church — possibly the most precious
symbol of the Armenianâ~@ â~@¬presence in Turkey — was reopened as
a museum and religious services banned. The decision came amid mutual
recriminations between Turkey and Armenia over the lack of progress
on the historic accords signed last October to restore diplomatic
relations and put in motion a process to examine the past.
Barack Obama’s election raised hope that the word genocide might
finally make it past the congressional floor. As a senator in 2008,
Obama had been quoted as saying that "the Armenian genocide is not
an allegation … but rather a widely documented fact."
The president seems to have chosen pragmatism over personal beliefs,
and in all likelihood this diplomatic ritual will play out like it
always has.
The U.S. administration will persuade legislators to avoid a vote in
the full House, for fear of further weakening their relationship with
Ankara and worsening the fading prospects for reconciliation between
Turkey and Armenia.
Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993, during Armenia’s war
with Turkey’s ethnic cousins in Azerbaijan. Protocols signed last
year — laying out a plan to re-establish diplomatic relations and an
opening of the border — brought a brief warming in relations. Then
Armenia’s highest court declared that the protocols were in line with
Armenia’s constitutionally mandated policy that foreign affairs conform
to the Armenian view of the genocide. Turkey responded with fury and
the protocols were put on ice. Although both sides say they aren’t
ready to give up just yet, experts fear that the U.S. House resolution
may have dealt the death blow to an already faltering peace process.
In an incendiary interview with BBC’s Turkish-language service
last month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went as
far as threatening to expel thousands of Armenians living illegally
in Turkey as a result of the recent Armenian genocide resolutions
passed in Sweden and the United States. "There are currently 170,000
Armenians living in our country," Erdogan told the BBC. "Only 70,000
of them are Turkish citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining
100,000. If necessary, I may have to tell these 100,000 to go back
to their country because they are not my citizens. I don’t have to
keep them in my country."
While it doesn’t look like Turkey is planning to lend action to its
threats any time soon, the disturbing connotations of the threat were
not missed.
"For my people, such unacceptable comments evoke memories of the
genocide," responded Armenian President Serge Sarkisian in an interview
with Der Spiegel. "Unfortunately, these comments don’t surprise me,
coming from the mouth of a Turkish politician."
The opening of the border matters immensely to Armenians, whose GDP
is 50 times less than Turkey’s. Loans to Armenia from the U.S. since
1993 exceed $1.1 billion, about the same amount as the annual financial
loss caused by blockades on the Turkish and Azeri borders, according
to World Bank estimates. Eighty-five percent of ground access to the
outside world is cut off.
"The Turks, Armenians and the United States all dilute the meaning of
the word genocide by playing politics with it," wrote Henri Barkey,
professor of international relations at Lehigh University, in a recent
op-ed in the Washington Post. "But the U.S. alone has the power to
help broker an agreement that would make a meaningful difference in
Armenians’ lives, by ending their economic isolation."
Much has been said of the need to pump life back into the Turkish
and Armenian reconciliation process, but how to best put to rest the
ghosts of the past is an issue that still rankles both sides.
"Such atrocities become very potent and politically crucial symbols,"
Moes said. "All too often, though, they are used as political
ammunition rather than remembered for the loss of human lives."
Amid talk of looking for a path for both countries to move forward,
all sides seem caught up in a political and emotional tug-of-war
between recognizing past horrors and rectifying present inequalities.
"What we need is to sit down, look at the evidence together and set
out the facts with a view to learn common lessons and make this memory
the common legacy of two people," said Guenael Mettraux, the author of
"The Law of Command Responsibility" and representative of defendants
before international criminal tribunals. "Easily said, I realize."