New York Times
March 5 2010
Turkey Criticizes House Committee Vote on Armenian Killings
By SEBNEM ARSU and SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: March 5, 2010
ISTANBUL ‘ Turkey’s foreign minister said Friday that the vote by the
House Foreign Affairs Committee condemning the mass killing of
Armenians early in the last century as genocide would damage ties with
the Obama administration and set back reconciliation efforts between
Turkey and Armenia.
At least twice before, the House committee has passed similar
resolutions, but that was before Turkey and Armenia were in the midst
of an internationally mediated reconciliation process.
`Each interference by a third party will make this normalization
impossible,’ Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in a televised news
conference. `If an adviser had whispered `no’ instead of `yes’ in the
ear of a member of the House of Representatives, the vote would have
come out differently. Can history be treated in such an unserious
manner?’
The vote on the nonbinding resolution was 23 to 22.
In recent years, Turkey has sought to play a bigger regional role,
re-establishing ties with nearby Arab countries and reaching out to
Armenia, whose border with Turkey has been closed since the 1990s,
when Armenia was at war with its neighbor, Azerbaijan, a Turkish ally.
In 2008, Turkey’s president paid the first visit by a Turkish leader
to Armenia in the two nations’ history.
The attempts at normalization began last October with a series of
agreements, whose signing was blessed by the Obama administration and
attended by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hard-line
Turkish nationalists strongly oppose the rapprochement, and analysts
in Turkey said the additional pressure from the United Sates in the
form of Thursday’s vote will make proceeding more difficult for the
Turkish government.
`It’s a big blow to the process,’ said Yavuz Baidar, a columnist with
the English language daily, Today’s Zaman. `This means it will drag on
for at least another year.’
At the same time, he said, Turkey had been slow to move forward in the
agreements with Armenia, causing the process to idle even before the
committee vote.
The resolution is less likely to hurt relations with the United States
unless it is brought to the floor and passed by the full House ‘ an
unlikely possibility, analysts say.
In 2007, the Bush administration, fearful of losing Turkish
cooperation over Iraq, lobbied forcefully to keep the resolution from
reaching the House floor.
The Obama administration had urged the committee to forgo a vote.
After the vote Thursday, Turkey reacted sharply, recalling its
ambassador, Namik Tan, from Washington for consultations.
Turkey’s newspapers featured the news of the vote ‘ and of Turkey’s
diplomatic response ‘ on their front pages.
`We called the ambassador back,’ proclaimed Hurriyet, the largest
circulation newspaper. `A vote crisis with the United States,’
Milliyet, another daily, said. `A vote like a comedy,’ read the
headline in the newspaper Sabah.
Historians say as many as 1.5 million Armenians died in a forced
migration by the Ottoman Turks during World War I. Turkey denies that
this was a planned genocide, and the topic had long been taboo in
Turkey, with no mention of it in history books. Writers and
intellectuals, including the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, have faced
criminal charges for airing the debate.
But in recent years, Turkish intellectuals had made some progress at
pushing it out into the public debate, and ethnic Armenians in Turkey
fear that passage by the full House ‘ which would be unprecedented ‘
would seriously harm those efforts.
Mr. Davutoglu, the foreign minister, criticized the Obama
administration’s efforts to halt Thursday’s vote, saying it had not
adequately explained the strength of cooperation between Turkey and
the United States, NATO partners. He said that in absence of more
effective efforts, `the picture ahead will not be a positive one.’
Some Turkish analysts said Ankara might put up diplomatic obstacles
for Washington’s broader regional policies, but it seemed unlikely
Turkey would respond strongly unless the resolution won broader House
support.
`On one side of the scale, there is the Congress under the influence
of ethnic lobby groups, and on the other, there are the greater United
States’ interests in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Caucasus,’ said Sedat
Ergin, a foreign policy analyst at the Hurriyet newspaper. `It is up
to the American administration to come up with the best choice between
the two.’
Sebnem Arsu reported from Istanbul, and Sabrina Tavernise from Washington.