MARIE YOVANOVITCH REFUSES TO CALL 1915 EVENTS GENOCIDE
arminfo
2008-06-20 12:20:00
ArmInfo. "We were troubled by Ambassador Yovanovitch’s refusal to offer
any meaningful rationale for the Administration’s ongoing complicity
in Turkey’s denials", ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian said.
To note, debates were held yesterday in the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee on approval of Marie Yovanovitch as U.S. Ambassadorial
nominee to Armenia. As ANCA told ArmInfo, M. Yovanovitch said in her
opening testimony: "The US government – and certainly I – acknowledges
and mourns the mass killings, ethnic cleansing and forced deportations
that devastated over one and a half million Armenians at the end of
the Ottoman Empire". Following these remarks, Sen. Menendez, who had
placed two consecutive holds on previous ambassadorial nominee Dick
Hoagland for denying the Armenian Genocide, meticulously questioned
Yovanovitch by presenting historical State Department documents
from the time of the Genocide and comparing those statements with
her opening remarks. Juxtaposing the eyewitness accounts of these
U.S. officials with the definition of the crime as outlined by the
U.N. Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of
Genocide, Sen. Menendez asked whether the President’s annual April
24th remarks, Yovanovitch’s prepared statements, and her responses
regarding U.S. diplomatic reporting matched the U.N. Convention, to
which the U.S. is a party. Amb. Yovanovitch sidestepped this question,
stating instead that it is the President and the State Department
who set the policy of defining historic events. In her testimony,
she publicly confirmed that "It has been President Bush’s policy,
as well as that of previous presidents of both parties, not to use
that term", she said."
Sen. Menendez responded, "It is a shame that career foreign service
officers have to be brought before the Committee and find difficulty
in acknowledging historical facts, and find difficulty in acknowledging
the realities of what has been internationally recognized." He went on
to state, "And it is amazing to me that we can talk about millions,
a million and a half human beings who were slaughtered, we can
talk about those who were raped, we can talk about those who were
forcibly pushed out of their country, and we can have presidential
acknowledgements of that, but then we cannot call it what it is. It
is a ridiculous dance that the Administration is doing on the use of
the term genocide", he said.