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Congress weighs Armenian genocide resolutions
Turkey’s opposition prompts caution
By Karoun Demirjian
Washington Bureau
Published April 24, 2007
WASHINGTON — Every April 24, U.S. presidents commemorate the official
day of remembrance of the Armenian genocide with a speech or statement
carefully crafted to avoid use of the word "genocide."
U.S. officials have avoided the word because Turkey, a key ally,
strongly opposes the characterization to describe the early 20th
Century deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of
Ottoman Turks.
In the past, members of the House and Senate have proposed resolutions
calling on the president to utter the phrase "Armenian genocide," but
the efforts have run aground in the face of political concerns voiced
by both Democratic and Republican administrations.
In the past year, however, the struggle over the word "genocide" has
received international attention through a series of high-profile news
events, commencing with the passage of a bill in the lower house of
the French parliament criminalizing denial of the Armenian genocide
and extending to the political murder of a prominent Turkish-Armenian
journalist.
The issue has caught the attention of many U.S. lawmakers, and with
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sympathetic to the cause,
advocates are hopeful that by next year’s commemoration survivors and
their descendants will find closure to a 92-year struggle to gain
official recognition for the mass killings that took place in the
Ottoman Empire in World War I.
Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee
of America, a Washington-based lobbying group, said that if the
resolutions came to a vote in the full House and Senate, they would
pass. "It’s time to let public policy catch up with the truth," he
said.
The House version is co-sponsored by 190 lawmakers, with 29 senators
supporting the nearly identical Senate version presented by Sen. Dick
Durbin (D-Ill.).
Should the measures reach the floor, it would be the first time since
2000, when then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) responded to a
request from the Clinton administration by pulling a resolution on the
use of the word "genocide" only minutes before a scheduled vote.
Bill stays in committee
The bill’s advocates had hoped that Pelosi, a longtime advocate for
recognition of the Armenian genocide, would bring the bill to a floor
vote by Tuesday.
Yet the bill still is lingering in the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, where it has not been scheduled for a vote.
As a member of NATO and a key transit link for oil, Turkey has long
been an important U.S. ally, and officials at the highest levels of
the Bush administration are wary of straining that relationship.
In a letter to Pelosi and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom
Lantos (D-Calif.) last month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote that Turkey — which borders
Syria, Iraq and Iran — is "a linchpin in the transshipment of vital
cargo and fuel" to U.S. troops in the Middle East.
A negative reaction from Turkey to a resolution on the Armenian
genocide "could harm American troops in the field, constrain our
ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
significantly damage our efforts to promote reconciliation between
Armenia and Turkey," Rice and Gates wrote.
Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian
affairs, added to the alarm in March when he told Lantos’ committee
that Turkey could respond to a genocide bill by blocking U.S. access
to Incirlik air base, a transit point in southeastern Turkey for
nearly three-quarters of all military cargo headed for Iraq.
But some legislators see the administration’s warnings as misapplied
fear-mongering.
"You can essentially sum up the argument against recognition in one
word: expediency," said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is author of
the House resolution and represents a district with the largest ethnic
Armenian population in the country.
"I don’t see how we can speak with moral authority on the genocide in
Darfur if we’re unwilling to speak with clarity about the genocide
against the Armenians," Schiff said. "It cannot be our policy that
we’ll recognize genocide when it’s committed by the politically weak,
as in Sudan, but not the politically strong, as in Turkey."
Advocates of the bill add that a negative reaction from Turkey would
not be crippling.
"Each time we discuss this, Turkey has predicted the end of the world,
or threatened to cut off all ties," Hamparian said.
But since Turkey refused to let the U.S. use its territory as an
entry point into Iraq during the 2003 invasion, he said, American
dependence on Turkey has waned.
"Turkey has relationships with the U.S. because it makes sense for
Turkey," Hamparian said. "So these doomsday threats are really just
threats to punish themselves."
Turkey vehemently rejects the assertion that Armenian deaths during
World War I constituted genocide, maintaining instead that those
killed — which it numbers at 300,000 — were the unfortunate
casualties of widespread war.
Contentious issue in Turkey
Genocide — or lack thereof — is a contentious issue within
Turkey. Tension spiked in January with the murder of Hrant Dink, a
prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist who had been sentenced to jail
under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which makes it a crime to
insult "Turkishness."
Turkish officials have invoked his death — publicly mourned by
Armenians and Turks alike — as a rallying point to call for more
academic and historical dialogue between the two ethnic groups. That
same call is being echoed by those attempting to stymie debate over
the genocide issue in Congress.
But Schiff questioned calls for dialogue from a country that he says
is still campaigning to censor parts of the debate."There’s really no
denying that the murder of a million and half Armenians constituted
genocide," he said. "Iran is in the business of hosting conferences
denying the Holocaust. We shouldn’t be in the business of supporting
conferences to debate undeniable facts of genocide."