YEREVAN SLAMS U.S. OPPONENTS OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RECOGNITION
By Emil Danielyan
Radio Liberty, Czech Republic
Sept 28 2007
Armenia condemned on Friday eight former U.S. secretaries of state
for jointly speaking out against the passage of a congressional
resolution that refers to the 1915-1918 mass killings of Armenians
in Ottoman Turkey as a genocide.
In a joint letter on Tuesday, the former officials urged the speaker
of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to keep the
resolution from reaching the House floor, saying its adoption
would jeopardize America’s national security and further strain
Turkish-Armenian relations. While recognizing the "horrible tragedy"
suffered by Ottoman Armenians, the signatories — among them Colin
Powell, Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger — emphasized Turkey’s
"geo-strategic importance" for the United States.
"Passage of the resolution would harm our foreign policy objectives
to promote reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia," they said. "It
would also strain our relations with Turkey, and would endanger our
national security interests in the region, including the safety of
our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."
"It is quite unfortunate that eight experienced diplomats would buy
into Turkish manipulation," Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian responded
in an extraordinary statement.
Oskanian specifically denied the former state secretaries’ claim
that there are now "some hopeful signs" of a Turkish-Armenian
rapprochement. "I regret to say that there is no process in place to
promote normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey.
Expressing concern about damaging a process that doesn’t exist
is disingenuous," he said, adding that Ankara is sticking to its
preconditions for establishing diplomatic relations with Yerevan.
One of those preconditions has been an end to the decades-long Armenian
campaign for international recognition of the genocide.
Ankara also makes the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations
conditional on a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that
would satisfy Azerbaijan. Successive Turkish governments have refused
to drop these preconditions despite pressure from the current and
previous U.S. administrations.
Oskanian said he has written to Pelosi to "express our deep concerns
and to dismiss as unfounded any implication that a resolution that
addresses matters of human rights and genocide could damage anyone’s
bilateral relations."
The ex-secretaries’ letter was also condemned by Armenian-American
lobby groups that were behind the genocide resolution’s introduction in
the U.S. Congress early this year. "We are, as Americans, especially
troubled that, in warning Congress not to make a simple anti-genocide
statement for fear of upsetting Turkey, these officials would outsource
our nation’s moral conscience to a foreign government," Aram Hamparian,
executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America,
said in a statement.
The draft resolution calls on President George W. Bush to "ensure
that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate
understanding" of the Armenian genocide and to "accurately characterize
the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as
genocide." It has already been co-sponsored by most members of the
House of Representatives. Pelosi, who has backed similar bills in
the past, is expected to put it to the vote this fall.
The Bush administration strongly opposes the bill’s passage with
arguments similar to the ones made by the eight former secretaries
of state.
In his annual messages to the Armenian-American community, Bush has
described the 1915 slaughter of more than one million Armenians
as one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century but stopped
short of calling it a genocide. He has at the same time cited a
2002 international study which concluded that the massacres meet the
internationally accepted definition of genocide.