OBAMA’S NOMINEE FOR US AMBASSADOR TO ARMENIA REFUSES TO USE THE WORD ‘GENOCIDE’
arminfo
Thursday, July 14, 12:20
President Barack Obama’s nominee for US ambassador to Armenia told
Senators Wednesday he would not use the word “genocide” to describe the
killing of more than one million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire.
“As the president has said, the massacres and the forced deportations
leading to the death of 1.5 millions of Armenians is acknowledged and
recognized and deplored by President Obama, and yes sir, I believe
it as well,” nominee John Heffern said, responding to skeptical
questioning by Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
“The characterization of those events is a policy decision that is made
by the president of the United States and that policy is enunciated
in his April 24th Remembrance Day statement,” Heffern told Menendez
and other members of the Senate Foreign Affairs panel.
The issue is extremely sensitive in Turkey, a key US military and
economic ally, which rejects any suggestion that the massacres
constituted a genocide.
In April, Obama commemorated the 96th anniversary of the Armenian
massacre under the Ottoman empire, asking Turkey, the latter-day
successor to the empire, for a “full” acknowledgement of the killings.
Obama did not use the word genocide during his commemoration address,
although he had urged its use during his 2008 run for the presidency.
Menendez, however, told Heffern he found it “difficult to be sending
diplomats of the United States to a country in which they will go
(…) to a genocide commemoration and yet never be able to use the
word genocide.
“It is much more than a question of a word,” he added. “It is
everything that signifies our commitment to saying ‘Never Again’
and yet we cannot even acknowledge this fact and we put diplomats in
a position that I think is totally untenable.”