HEED EXPERTS ON TURKEY RESOLUTION
Charleston Post Courier, SC
Oct 17 2007
The role of a long-defunct Turkish government in perpetrating the
Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 is well established. But the timing
of a U.S. House resolution condemning the genocide, which comes
to a vote Thursday, is dangerously unfortunate. All eight living
former secretaries of state and three former secretaries of defense
recently agreed with incumbents Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates,
and the White House, that now is not the time for another resolution
on the Armenian Genocide.
The House deplored the Armenian genocide in 1975 and again in 1984.
Turkey has since become an important, if touchy, ally in the war on
terror. "It is our view," said our nation’s former top diplomats in
a statement, "that passage of this resolution … could endanger
our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and damage efforts to promote
reconciliation between Armenians and Turkey."
Turkey is a key link for supplies going to the war zones. The Turkish
population and military are also deeply angered by terrorist attacks
coming from Kurdish separatists based in Iraq. The democratically
elected Turkish government has threatened to invade Iraq to stop
them if Iraq and the United States do not. On Tuesday the Iraqi
government called for "urgent negotiations" over Turkey’s threat and
sent Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi to meet with Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Turkish officials. A rupture in
Turkish-U.S. relations at this point could have tragic consequences.
Turkey’s leading Armenian advocate, newspaper editor Hrant Dink,
strongly agreed with the diplomats’ second point shortly before he was
assassinated this year by a Turkish fanatic. He argued in a December
2006 interview with Nouvelles d’Armenie that repeated attempts by
Armenians living in other nations to remind the world of the genocide
actually made life in Turkey harder for the Armenians who remain there.
Unfortunately, the House Foreign Affairs Committee decided not to
listen to our current and former secretaries of state and defense, or
to Mr. Dink. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose California district
has an outspoken Armenian expatriate community, is compounding this
error by insisting that the resolution be brought to a record vote
on the House floor.
This is not Ms. Pelosi’s first misguided foray into foreign policy.
Last spring she traveled to Syria and pronounced – in the face of
strong evidence to the contrary – that the road to peace in the Middle
East runs through Damascus. She leads efforts in the House to force
the United States to leave Iraq. She seems determined to the point
of stubbornness to shape American foreign policy.
Her latest and most untimely intervention in this volatile region will
hinder efforts to reconcile the Turks and Armenians and exacerbate
the tension on the Turkish border with Kurdish Iraq.
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