THE LOS ANGELES TIMES: PRESIDENT BUSH WILL NOT UTTER THE WORD "GENOCIDE" ON APRIL 24
PanARMENIAN.Net
23.04.2007 16:28 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ President Bush will be obliged, by law, to wrap
his double-talking mouth around one of the most curiously persistent
debates in modern geopolitics: Whether to call a 92-year-old genocide
a genocide. As The Los Angeles Times reports, the 2007 may be the
year that the cop-out finally blows up in a president’s face. "What
was once the obscure obsession of marginalized immigrants from a
powerless little Caucasus country has blossomed in recent years into
a force that has grown increasingly difficult to ignore.
In 2000, the Armenian issue helped fuel one of the most expensive
House races in U.S. history; two years ago, it turned a mild-mannered
career U.S. diplomat into an unlikely truth-telling martyr. Now the
question of how to address these long-ago events is having an impact
on next month’s elections in Turkey," analyst Matt Welch writes. He
thinks President Bush won’t say "genocide" on April 24. In the words
of Condoleezza Rice, the administration’s position is that Turks and
Armenians both need to "get over their past" without American help.
"But this issue won’t go away. Of all issues subject to realpolitik
compromises, mass slaughter of a national minority surely should
rank at the bottom of the list. Hitler reportedly said, just before
invading Poland, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation
of the Armenians?" It’s a chilling reminder that forgetting is the
first step in enabling future genocides. Yet Hitler was eventually
proved wrong. No temporal power is strong enough to erase the eternal
resonance of truth," The Los Angeles Times underlines.