OBAMA, MAKE GOOD ON ARMENIA: COLUMN
USA Today
April 14 2015
Gregory J. Wallance 4:20 p.m. EDT April 14, 2015
Pope Francis stands brave against Turkey. Why can’t America follow
suit?
On April 24, 1915, in the midst of World War I, the Ottoman Empire
began systematically massacring its Christian Armenian subjects. At
Sunday’s Mass in Rome, Pope Francis described the massacres as “the
first genocide of the 20th century.” Turkey, which emerged from the
rubble of the defeated Ottoman Empire and has long fiercely denied
that a genocide took place, angrily recalled its ambassador to the
Vatican. “The pope’s statement, which is out of touch with both
historical facts and legal truths, is simply unacceptable,” tweeted
Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu.
Will President Obama follow Pope Francis’ lead?
Contrary to the foreign minister’s tweet, there is a solid factual
and legal foundation for calling the massacres a genocide, defined
as killing or other acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
At the outbreak of the war, there were approximately 2 million
Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Tens of thousands of Armenians
were serving in the army of the empire, then at war with Britain and
Czarist Russia. Seizing on the acts of a few Armenian sympathizers
with Russia, the Ottoman government began systematically eliminating
the Armenian leadership in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and sent
Armenian men, women and children, many orphaned by the slaughter, on
death marches into the Syrian desert, where they were left to die. One
of the Ottoman leaders, Talaat Pasha, wrote that by “continuing the
deportation of the orphans to their destinations (in the desert),
we are ensuring their eternal rest.” Ultimately, about 1.5 million
Armenians died in the massacres which, together with Armenians who
fled the Ottoman Empire, decimated the Armenian community.
In fact, as a senator, Barack Obama strongly supported the passage of
the 2007 Armenian Genocide Resolution, which called the massacres
a genocide. As a presidential candidate, he condemned the Bush
administration for dismissing John Evans, the U.S. ambassador
to Armenia, after Evans said the word “genocide” in public. “As
president,” vowed Obama, “I will recognize the Armenian genocide.”
Not even close. On his first major foreign tour, President Obama
visited Turkey and, while speaking in the Turkish Grand National
Assembly about how “each country must work through its past,” including
the “terrible events of 1915,” the word genocide did not then, and
has not since, been publicly used by the president or members of
his administration to describe the massacres. (As a senator, Hillary
Clinton supported the Armenian genocide resolutions, but as Obama’s
first secretary of State, she opposed them.)
The Obama administration has been hardly alone in its timidity. For
example, aside from a brief reference in a 1981 Holocaust proclamation,
the Reagan administration avoided calling the Armenian massacres a
genocide. The historic reason is rooted in the perceived strategic
importance of Turkey, first in the Cold War and now in the war on
terror. Turkey, a member of NATO, has threatened to curtail operations
at the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik in Turkey whenever momentum
built for a congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide.
For Turkey, its national identity is at stake. Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan has gone so far as to acknowledge the “shared pain”
and “inhumane consequences” of World War I, referring to the deaths of
both Ottoman Muslims and the Armenians, but he categorically disputes
that the Armenians died in a genocide by the Ottomans.
Erdogan, who seems to exist in a state of near clinical paranoia, has
warned against “new Lawrences of Arabia,” read, the Western countries
who he claims are working to destroy the Middle East. He can hardly
afford to admit that modern Turkey was built on the greatest crime
a government can commit.
There are important U.S. interests at stake in relations with Turkey,
but there is also something unseemly in a president breaking a firm
campaign pledge rooted in moral considerations. Confronting a terrible
past is essential to avoiding a repetition in the future. Or as the
pope said Sunday, “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a
wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it.”
President Obama, who has prided himself on breaking foreign policy
orthodoxy, as witness his opening to Cuba and nuclear negotiations
with Iran, should do likewise with the Armenian genocide and finally
make good on his own campaign pledge.
Gregory J. Wallance, a lawyer and writer in New York City, is a board
member of Advancing Human Rights.
From: Baghdasarian