More on the resolution

[Joseph]

TURKEY'S PAST VICTORIES SPAWN TODAY'S DEFEATS

Washington Post

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/nikos_konstandaras/2007/10/turkeys_past_victories_spawn_t.html

Oct 15 2007

Athens - It should be the obligation of every individual, every
country and every transnational organization to try to prevent - or,
failing that, to condemn - a crime of such magnitude as the organized
extermination of Turkey's Armenian population. You are either on the
side of right or you are not. So, on the face of it, this should be
a simple issue for the United States and for every other country.

Reflecting this, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Resolution
106 claims, "Despite the international recognition and affirmation of
the Armenian Genocide, the failure of the domestic and international
authorities to punish those responsible for the Armenian Genocide is
a reason why similar genocides have recurred and may recur in the
future." It concludes that, "a just resolution will help prevent
future genocides." (That remains to be seen: The Holocaust, though
it was officially recognized and its perpetrators were punished, was
followed by genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda and "ethnic cleansing,"
genocide's little brother, in several other instances.)

The complications in condemning genocide begin when countries begin
to consider their own present interests and when we try to untangle
the web of grievances, victories and defeats that constitute nations'
conflicting histories. And all this is complicated further by the
great length of time that has passed since that dreadful time in the
Middle East, whose aftershocks are still at the center of dramatic,
historical events.

There is no doubt that there was a concerted military effort at the
end of the Ottoman Empire to remove the Armenians from Anatolia.

Whether this was prompted by Armenian collusion with the Russian
enemies of the Turks or the execution of an old wish to rid eastern
Turkey of the Armenians is for historians to decide. What actually
happened - the massacre of an ancient nation and its extermination
from its ancestral homeland - is not up for debate.

The massacres and deportations were not unprecedented, as it was
general practice throughout human conflict for conquerors to remove
unruly subject peoples or defeated neighbors from their homes through
deportation or extermination, or both. An obvious instance is the
removal of the Jews to Babylon. The Armenians were the victims of
massacres as recently as 1894, 1895, 1896 and 1909. So when Russia
attacked the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians were more likely to side
with the invaders than with the Turks. That's where the Turkish
authorities base their argument that there was no genocide: that
the deaths resulted from the general turmoil in the Ottoman Empire's
dying days, and that there were many victims on both sides.

The problem for the Turks is that they were executing a tried and true
method of solving historical problems in an era when, for the first
time, there were enough foreign witnesses and international interests
involved to seize on the slaughter and portray it for what it was in
terms of modern sensibilities: a crime of monumental proportions.

The Turks of the time got away with it, even though the crimes
hardly went undetected, because most of the Western World was already
chin-deep in blood shed in the Great War. Since then, Turkey, always
of great strategic importance, has, through judicious alliances,
sharp business acumen and wily neutrality, managed to keep friends
and enemies by tiptoeing around its past. For the Turks, their
country's modern history begins with the establishment of a secular,
Westward-looking republic in 1923, after Kemal Ataturk's forces
defeated an ill-judged Greek military campaign in Asia Minor. The
years before that, during which the Ottoman Empire collapsed, are seen
as a glorious struggle to save the Turks' honor from the ignominious
defeats that the Empire suffered at the hands of foreign invaders,
and to create a nation out of many disparate parts. This is the
mythic underpinning of the Turks' identity, which, like all nations,
arises out of a benevolent reading of great victories and unjust
defeats. Demanding that the Turks acknowledge that their forefathers
were the perpetrators of genocide, in effect, demands that they
undermine their very identity. After denying the Armenian genocide
for so long, which government (indeed, which individual?) can accept
accountability for such a crime without putting up stiff resistance?

But this is where the Turks, who have never seemed to accept the fact
that military might is not the automatic answer to every problem,
have met their match. Yesterday's victory spawned today's defeat. The
remnants of the crushed Armenia spread out all over the world, reliving
the horror of slaughter and dispossession in their collective memory
without respite. They raised their children to demand recognition
of the horror that removed the Armenians from their ancestral
homeland. The genocide drove them to America, to Canada, to France,
to other great democracies. And as their wealth and influence grew,
so did their political power. They have proved themselves implacable
foes. This, too, is part of the genocide's legacy: the Armenians
have had nothing to lose and everything to gain from their demand
for historical restitution.

Today Turkey finds itself in a position where its value as an ally is
countered by the political clout of Armenians within its allies. So
time has run out. Turkey will, eventually, have to come to terms with
its history or face the prospect of turning its back on the world that
it set out to join in 1923. The only way that this can be achieved
is if the Armenians and their backers make clear that the matter is
moral and not political - because the issue is to honor the victims of
the past, and not to undermine the common future of Turks, Armenians,
Azeris and all the other nations of this troubled region.

As for Turkey's allies, including the United States, they need only
consider the simple part of the question: are you on the side of right,
whatever the cost - or are you not?

[Joseph]

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/16/genocide

Inside Higher Ed, October 16, 2007

Genocide Deniers

In the buildup to last week‚s vote by a House of
Representatives committee officially calling for U.S.
foreign policy to recognize that a genocide of
Armenians took place during World War I, at the behest
of the „Young Turk‰ government of the Ottoman Empire,
a flurry of advertising in American newspapers
appeared from Turkey.

The ads discouraged the vote by House members, and
called instead for historians to figure out what
happened in 1915. The ads quoted such figures as
Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, as saying:
„These historical circumstances require a very
detailed and sober look from historians.‰ And State
Department officials made similar statements, saying
as the vote was about to take place: „We think that
the determination of whether the events that happened
to ethnic Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire
should be a matter for historical inquiry.‰

Turkey‚s government also has been quick to point
American scholars (there are only a handful, but
Turkey knows them all) who back its view that what‚s
needed with regard to 1915 is not to call it genocide,
but to figure out what to call it, and what actually
took place.

Normally, you might expect historians to welcome the
interest of governments in convening scholars to
explore questions of scholarship. But in this case,
scholars who study the period say that the leaders of
Turkey and the United States ˜ along with that handful
of scholars ˜ are engaged in a profoundly
anti-historical mission: trying to pretend that the
Armenian genocide remains a matter of debate instead
of being a long settled question. Much of the public
discussion of the Congressional resolution has focused
on geopolitics: If the full House passes the
resolution, will Turkey end its help for U.S. military
activities in Iraq?

But there are also some questions about the role of
history and historians in the debate. To those
scholars of the period who accept the widely held view
that a genocide did take place, it‚s a matter of some
frustration that top government officials suggest that
these matters are open for debate and that this effort
is wrapped around a value espoused by most historians:
free and open debate.

„Ultimately this is politics, not scholarship,‰ said
Simon Payaslian, who holds an endowed chair in
Armenian history and literature at Boston University.
Turkey‚s strategy, which for the first 60-70 years
after the mass slaughter was to pretend that it didn‚t
take place, „has become far more sophisticated than
before‰ and is explicitly appealing to academic
values, he said.

„They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the
idea of Œon the one hand and the other hand,‚ ‰ he
said. „That‚s very attractive on campuses to say that
you should hear both sides of the story.‰ While
Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn‚t favor
censoring anyone or firing anyone for their views, he
believes that it is irresponsible to pretend that the
history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it
is important to expose „the collaboration between the
Turkish Embassy and scholars cooperating to promote
this denialist argument.‰

To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these
calls for debating whether a genocide took place are
coming at a time when emerging new scholarship on the
period ˜ based on unprecedented access to Ottoman
archives ˜ provides even more solid evidence of the
intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the
Armenians. This new scholarship is seen as the
ultimate smoking gun as it is based on the records of
those who committed the genocide ˜ which counters the
arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide
view relies too much on the views of Armenian
survivors.

Even further, some of the most significant new
scholarship is being done by scholars who are Turkish,
not Armenian, directly refuting the claim by some
denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe
a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars
have faced death threats as well as indictments by
prosecutors in Turkey.

Those who question the genocide, however, say that
what is taking place in American history departments
is a form of political correctness. „There is no
debate and that‚s the real problem. We‚re stuck and
the reality is that we need a debate,‰ said David C.
Cuthell, executive director of the Institute for
Turkish Studies, a center created by Turkey‚s
government to award grants and fellowships to scholars
in the United States. (The center is housed at
Georgetown University, but run independently.)

The action in Congress is designed „to stifle debate,‰
Cuthell said, and so is anti-history. „There are
reasonable doubts in terms of whether this is a
genocide,‰ he said.

The term „genocide‰ was coined in 1944 by Raphael
Lemkin, a Jewish-Polish lawyer who was seeking to
distinguish what Hitler was doing to the Jews from the
sadly routine displacement and killing of civilians in
wartime. He spoke of „a coordinated plan of different
actions aiming at the destruction of essential
foundations of the life of national groups, with the
aim of annihilating the groups themselves.‰ Others
have defined the term in different ways, but common
elements are generally an intentional attack on a
specific group.

While the term was created before 1915 and with the
Holocaust in mind, scholars of genocide (many of them
focused on the Holocaust) have broadly endorsed
applying the term to what happened to Armenians in
1915, and many refer to that tragedy as the first
genocide of the 20th century. When in 2005 Turkey
started talking about the idea of convening historians
to study whether a genocide took place, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars issued
a letter in which it said that the „overwhelming
opinion‰ of hundreds of experts on genocide from
countries around the world was that a genocide had
taken place.

Specifically it referred to a consensus around this
view: „On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I,
the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began
a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens ˜ an
unarmed Christian minority population. More than a
million Armenians were exterminated through direct
killing, starvation, torture, and forced death
marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into
permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was
expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.‰

Turkey has put forward a number of arguments in recent
years, since admitting that something terrible did
happen to many Armenians. Among the explanations
offered by the government and its supporters are that
many people died, but not as many as the scholars say;
that Armenians share responsibility for a civil war in
which civilians were killed on both sides; and that
the chaos of World War I and not any specific action
by government authorities led to the mass deaths and
exiles.

Beyond those arguments, many raise political arguments
that don‚t attempt to deny that a genocide took place,
but say that given Turkey‚s sensitivities it isn‚t
wise to talk about it as such. This was essentially
the argument given by some House members last week who
voted against the resolution, saying that they didn‚t
want to risk anything that could affect U.S. troops.
Similarly, while Holocaust experts, many of them
Jewish, have overwhelmingly backed the view that
Armenians suffered a genocide, some supporters of
Israel have not wanted to offend Turkey, a rare Middle
Eastern nation to maintain decent relations with the
Israel and a country that still has a significant
Jewish population.

Dissenters or Deniers?

Probably the most prominent scholar in the United
States to question that genocide took place is Bernard
Lewis, an emeritus professor at Princeton University,
whose work on the Middle East has made him a favorite
of the Bush administration and neoconservative
thinkers. In one of his early works, Lewis referred to
the „terrible holocaust‰ that the Armenians faced in
1915, but he stopped using that language and was
quoted questioning the use of the term „genocide.‰
Lewis did not respond to messages seeking comment for
this article. The Armenian National Committee of
America has called him „a known genocide denier‰ and
an „academic mercenary.‰

The two scholars who are most active on promoting the
view that no genocide took place are Justin McCarthy,
distinguished university scholar at the University of
Louisville, and Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of
political science at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst. Both of them are cited favorably by the
Turkish embassy and McCarthy serves on the board of
the Institute of Turkish Studies.

McCarthy said in an interview that he is a historical
demographer and that he came to his views through „the
dull study of numbers.‰ He said that he was studying
population trends in the Ottoman Empire during World
War I and that while he believes that about 600,000
Armenians lost their lives, far more Muslims died.
„There‚s simply no question,‰ he said, that Armenians
killed many of them.

The term genocide may mean something when talking
about Hitler, McCarthy said, „where you have something
unique in human history.‰ But he said it was „pretty
meaningless‰ to use about the Armenians. He said that
he believes that between the Russians, the Turks and
the Armenians, everyone was killing everyone, just as
is the case in many wars. He said that to call what
happened to the Armenians genocide would be the
equivalent of calling what happened to the South
during the U.S. Civil War genocide.

So why do so many historians see what happened
differently? McCarthy said the scholarship that has
been produced to show genocide has been biased. „If
you look at who these historians are, they are
Armenians and they are advancing a national agenda,‰
he said. Cuthell of the Institute for Turkish Studies
said that it goes beyond that: Because the Armenians
who were killed or exiled were Christians (as are many
of their descendants now in the United States), and
those accused of the genocide were Muslims, the United
States is more sympathetic to the Armenians.

Lewy said that before he started to study the issue,
he too believed that a genocide had taken place. He
said that intellectuals and journalist „simply echo
the Armenian position,‰ which he said is wrong. He
said that there is the „obvious fact‰ that large
numbers of Armenians were killed and he blamed some of
the skepticism of Turkey‚s view (and his) on the fact
that Turkey for so long denied that anything had taken
place, and so lost credibility.

In 2005, the University of Utah Press published a book
by Lewy that sums up his position, Armenian Massacres
in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. Lewy‚s
argument, he said in an interview, „is that the key
issue is intent‰ and that there is „no evidence‰ that
the Young Turks sought the attacks on the Armenians.
„In my view, there were mass killings, but no intent.‰
Lewy‚s argument can also be found in this article in
The Middle East Forum, as can letters to the editor
taking issue with his scholarship.

The Evidence for Genocide

Many scholars who believe that there was a genocide
say that Lewy ignored or dismissed massive amounts of
evidence, not only in accounts from Armenians, but
from foreign diplomats who observed what was going on
˜ evidence about the marshaling of resources and
organizing of groups to attack the Armenians and kick
them out of their homes, and the very fact of who was
in control of the government at the time.

Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National
Institute, called the Lewy book part of an „insidious
way to influence Western scholarship and to create
confusion.‰ He said it was „pretty outrageous‰ that
the Utah press published the book, which he called
„one of the more poisonous products‰ to come from
„those trying to dispute the genocide.‰

John Herbert, director of the University of Utah
Press, is new in his job there and said he wasn‚t
familiar with the discussions that took place when
Lewy submitted his book. But he said that „we want to
encourage the debate and we‚ve done that.‰

Notably, other presses passed on the book. Lewy said
he was turned down 11 times, at least 4 of them from
university presses, before he found Utah. While
critics say that shows the flaws in the book, Lewy
said it was evidence of bias. „The issue was clearly
the substance of my position,‰ he said.

Of course the problem with the „encouraging the
debate‰ argument is that so many experts in the field
say that the debate over genocide is settled, and that
credible arguments against the idea of a genocide just
don‚t much exist. The problem, many say, is that the
evidence the Turks say doesn‚t exist does exist, so
people have moved on.

Andras Riedlmayer, a librarian of Ottoman history at
Harvard University and co-editor of the H-TURK e-mail
list about Turkish history, said that in the ‚80s, he
could remember scholarly meetings „at which panels on
this issue turned into shouting matches. One doesn‚t
see that any more.‰ At this point, he said, the
Turkish government‚s view „is very much the minority
view‰ among scholars worldwide.

What‚s happening now, he said, outside of those trying
to deny what took place, „isn‚t that the discussion
has diminished, but that the discussion is more
mature.‰ He said that there is more research going on
about how and why the killings took place, and the
historical context of the time. He also said that he
thought there would be more research in the works on
one of „the great undiscussed issues of why successive
Turkish governments over recent decades have found it
worthwhile to invest so much political capital and
energy into promoting that historical narrative,‰ in
which it had been „fudging‰ what really happened.

Among the scholars attracting the most attention for
work on the genocide is Taner Akçam, a historian from
Turkey who has been a professor at the University of
Minnesota since 2001, when officials in Turkey stepped
up criticism of his work. Akçam has faced death
threats and has had legal charges brought against him
in Turkey (since dropped) for his work, which directly
focuses on the question of the culpability of Young
Turk leaders in planning and executing the genocide.
(Akçam‚s Web site has details about his research and
the Turkish campaigns against him.) Opposition to his
work from Turkey has been particularly intense since
the publication last year of A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish
Responsibility.

In an interview, Akçam said that his next book ˜
planned for 2008 ˜ may be „a turning point‰ in
research on the genocide. He is finishing a book on
what took place in 1915 based only on documents he has
reviewed in Ottoman archives ˜ no testimony from
survivors, no documents from third parties. The
documents, only some of which he has written about
already, are so conclusive on the questions Turkey
pretends are in dispute, he said, that the genocide
should be impossible to deny.

To those like Lewy who have written books saying that
there is no evidence, „I laugh at them,‰ Akçam said,
because the documents he has already released rebut
them, and the new book will do so even more. „There is
no scholarly debate on this topic,‰ he said.

The difficulty, he said, is doing the scholarship. In
the archives in Turkey, he said, the staff are
extremely professional and helpful, even knowing his
views and his work. But he said that he has received
numerous death threats and does not feel safe in
Turkey for more than a few days, and even then must
keep a low profile. As to legal risks, he said that
laws on the books that make it illegal to question the
Turkish state on certain matters, are inconsistently
enforced, so while he has faced legal harassment, he
generally felt that everything would work out in the
end. But Akçam is well known, has dual German-Turkish
citizenship, and a job at an American university, and
he said those are advantages others do not have.

He plans to publish his next book first in Turkey, in
Turkish, and then to translate it for an American
audience.

Another scholar from Turkey working on the Armenian
genocide is Fatma Müge Göçek, an associate professor
of sociology at the University of Michigan. Until she
came to Princeton to earn her Ph.D., Göçek said that
she didn‚t know about the Armenian genocide. For that
matter, she said she didn‚t know that Armenians lived
in Turkey ˜ „and I had the best education Turkey has
to offer.‰

Learning the full history was painful, she said, and
started for her when Armenians she met at Princeton
talked to her about it and she was shocked and angry.
Upon reading the sorts of materials she never saw in
Turkey, the evidence was clear, she said.

Göçek‚s books to date have been about the
Westernization of the Ottoman Empire, but she said she
came to the view that she needed to deal with the
genocide in her next book. „I have worked on how the
Ottoman Empire negotiated modernity,‰ she said, and
the killings of 1915 are part of „the dark side of
modernity.‰

So the book she is writing now is a sociological
analysis of how Turkish officials at the time
justified to themselves what they were doing. She is
basing her book on the writings these officials made
themselves in which they frame the issue as one of
„the survival of the Turks or of the Armenians‰ to
justify their actions. While Göçek will be focusing on
the self-justification, she said that the diaries and
memoirs she is citing also show that the Turkish
leaders knew exactly what they were doing, and that
this wasn‚t just a case of chaos and civil war getting
out of hand.

Göçek said she was aware of the harassment faced by
Akçam and others from Turkey who have stated in public
that a genocide took place. But she said scholars must
go where their research leads them. „That is why one
decides to become an academic ˜ you want to search
certain questions. If you do not want to, and you are
not willing to, you should go do something else.‰

˜ Scott Jaschik

[Joseph]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/10/16/armenian_genocide/?source=whitelist

Genocide: An inconvenient truth
The Armenian genocide bill has been attacked by both the right and the left -- and it may make matters worse. But it's necessary.
By Gary Kamiya
Oct. 16, 2007 | It was the first holocaust, one of the worst crimes of the 20th century. In 1915, during World War I, the ruling political party under the Ottoman regime ordered the extermination of its Armenian subjects. At least 800,000 and as many as 1.5 million men, women and children were murdered or died of disease, starvation and exposure. The details of the genocide, as laid out in books like Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilization" <http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2005/12/16/fisk/index.html> and Peter Balakian's "The Burning Tigris," <http://www.arlindo-correia.com/burning_tigris.html> are harrowing. Lines of men, women and children were roped together by the edge of a river, so that shooting the first person caused all the rest to drown. Women were routinely raped, killed and genitally mutilated. Some were crucified. Children were taken on boats into rivers and thrown off.
The genocide was not carried out by the Republic of Turkey, which did not exist yet, but by the ruling party in the final years of the collapsing Ottoman regime. To this day the Turkish government has never acknowledged that what transpired was a monstrous and intentional crime against humanity. Instead, it claims that the Armenians were simply unfortunate victims of a chaotic civil war, that only 300,000 to 600,000 died, that Turks actually died in greater numbers, and that the Armenians brought their fate on themselves by collaborating with the Russians.
Most historians reject these arguments. The definitive case that what took place was a genocide has been made by Turkish historian Taner Akcam, who in the 1970s was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Turkey for producing a student journal that deviated from the official line. He sought asylum in Germany, and now is a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. In his 2006 book, "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility," <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/06/061106crbo_books2> Akcam offers overwhelming evidence that leaders of the ruling political party, the Committee of Union and Progress, planned the Armenian holocaust. There was no military justification for the genocide: Some Armenians did fight against the Ottomans, but relatively few. In fact, Akcam argues, the genocide was driven by the Ottoman thirst for revenge after devastating military defeats, the desire to end foreign interference by the great powers, and above all by the strategic purpose of emptying the Turkish heartland of Christians to ensure the survival of a Muslim-Turkish state. Akcam argues that had the Armenians not been exterminated, Anatolia, the heart of what is now Turkey, would probably have been partitioned after the war by the victorious (and rapacious) great powers. The modern state of Turkey was thus built in large part on the intentional destruction of an entire people -- a moral horror that combines elements of America's destruction of Indians and Germany's extermination of Jews.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the leading body of genocide researchers, accepts that the destruction of the Armenians fits the definition of genocide and has called on Turkey <http://www.anca.org/press_releases/press_releases.php?prid=747> to accept responsibility. Leading U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times, accept the genocide description. Twenty-three nations, including Argentina, Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Russia and Uruguay, have also formally recognized that what transpired was genocide.
For decades, Armenian-Americans and human rights advocates have tried to persuade the U.S. government to officially recognize that the mass killings constituted a genocide. But strategic and national security considerations have always stopped Washington from doing so. For decades, Turkey has been one of America's most important strategic allies -- first as a bulwark against the USSR during the Cold War, then as a key partner in George W. Bush's "war on terror." The only officially secular state in the Muslim world, it is the most politically moderate, economically advanced nation in the region. A NATO member, with close ties to Israel, home to a U.S. base through which most of the supplies to American forces in central Iraq are flown, it is an indispensable U.S. strategic asset.
For these reasons, Washington has never wanted to offend Ankara -- and if there is one sure way to do that, it's by bringing up the Armenian genocide. Although there has been some progress in opening up the subject, it remains explosive in Turkey. Those who assert that the genocide took place can be arrested under a notorious law (still on the books) that makes "insulting Turkishness" a crime. (Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk was convicted of violating this law.) In January 2007, the leading Turkish-Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hrant_Dink> was murdered because of his outspokenness on the issue, and state security officials were clearly involved. The genocide denial is not confined to official discourse: Most ordinary Turks, who have been taught a whitewashed official version of the slaughter, also deny it. Akcam and other historians say that because many of the Young Turks who founded the modern state were involved in the campaign, and the state was constructed on a mythical foundation of national unity and innocence, to bring up the Armenian horror is to threaten Turkey's very identity.
No American administration has ever dared to cross Turkey on this subject. But that may finally change. Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, defying pleas from the Bush administration and a letter signed by all living secretaries of state, voted 27-21 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071011/ap_on_go_co/us_armenia_genocide> for a resolution that would make it official U.S. policy to recognize that the slaughter of the Armenians was an act of genocide. The resolution is nonbinding, but after years of bitter lobbying, it is the closest the U.S. government has yet come to acknowledging the genocide. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated that she will bring it to a vote before the House, which is expected to pass it; the bill's fate in the Senate is less certain.
The mere fact that the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed it, however, was taken by the Turks as a gratuitous insult. As it has done every other time this subject has come up, Ankara -- and the country at large -- reacted with fury. Furious demonstrators took to the streets, shouting invective against the United States. Just-elected President Abdullah Gul said, "Unfortunately, some politicians in the United States have once more dismissed calls for common sense, and made an attempt to sacrifice big issues for minor domestic political games ... This unacceptable decision of the committee, like similar ones in the past, has no validity and is not worthy of the respect of the Turkish people." Turkey's ambassador to the United States warned that the resolution's passage would be a "very injurious move to the psyche of the Turkish people"; he was immediately recalled after the vote to show Ankara's extreme displeasure. Turkish officials warned that if the full House voted for the resolution, U.S.-Turkish relations would be gravely damaged, perhaps for decades. Considering that in a Pew global poll <http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/393.php?lb=brme&amp;pnt=393&amp;nid=&amp;id=> taken in June, a staggering 83 percent of Turks said they had a negative view of America, and an even more staggering 77 percent said they viewed the American people unfavorably, any further deterioration in relations would indeed be grave. The head of Turkey's military warned <http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2007-10-14-turkey_N.htm> that if the House passed the bill, "our military ties with the U.S. will never be the same again."
There is no doubt that the controversy comes at a delicate time, because of both internal Turkish politics and the situation in Iraq. The vote could trigger a Turkish response that would be highly injurious to American interests, not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. Turkey could close Incirlik Air Base, through which 70 percent of air cargo for U.S. troops in Iraq passes, and refuse to cooperate with Washington on the war.
But the most dangerous consequence would be a Turkish attack on northern Iraq. In a piece of exquisitely bad timing, the committee vote took place against the background of a mounting drumbeat of war talk from the Gul administration, which is under heavy domestic pressure to smash Kurdish militant group the PKK. Just days before the vote, Kurdish militants killed 13 Turkish soldiers <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7033075.stm> near the Iraq border, one of Turkey's heaviest recent losses in the decades-long war. Turkish anger at the U.S. is largely based on Turks' correct belief that the U.S., desperate to preserve good ties with the Kurds, is unwilling to confront the Kurdish guerrillas. A major Turkish invasion of northern Iraq could destabilize the only calm part of the country, pit two U.S. allies against each other, threaten the American project in Iraq and destabilize the entire region. The U.S. has been leaning heavily on Ankara not to invade; the genocide vote could tip Gul over the edge.
Given these geopolitical concerns, heightened by the fact that the U.S. is at war, it's not surprising that some Republicans have accused Democrats, who have taken the lead on the bill, of endangering national security. (Some right-wing bloggers have accused Democrats of using the bill as an underhanded way to sabotage the war.) But opposition to the bill has come not only from the right but from the left. Writing in the Nation, Nicholas von Hoffman mockingly asked, <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071029/howl> "What's next? A resolution condemning Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the slaughter visited on the Egyptians at the Battle of the Pyramids?" Von Hoffman attacked the bill's sponsors for self-righteous hypocrisy. British commentator Simon Tisdall made a similar charge <http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_tisdall/2007/10/righteousness_before_realism.html> in the Guardian, writing, "Imperial delusions die hard -- and once again the U.S. Congress is trying to legislate for the world."
Most Turkish academics toe the official line on the horrific events of 1915. But even some of those who accept that a genocide took place believe that passing the bill now is a bad idea. Yektan Turkyilmaz, <http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/issues/111205/yektan1.html> a graduate student at Duke University, has the distinction of having been arrested by the Armenian KGB because his research led them to assume he was a Turkish spy. In fact, he is part of a new generation of Turkish scholars who reject their country's propaganda about what happened to the Armenians. In a phone interview from Duke, Turkyilmaz said, "This bill strengthens the hand of the extremists in Turkey, the xenophobes, the extreme nationalists. Yes, Turkish society has to face its past, to prevent any sort of repetition in the future. If I believed that this bill would force the Turkish government to acknowledge the truth, I would support it. But it won't."
For his part, "A Shameful Act" author Taner Akcam acknowledges the force of these pragmatic arguments -- but rejects them.
"Look, we can make a list of reasons why this resolution will make matters worse," Akcam said in a phone interview from his office at the University of Minnesota. "First, it explicitly politicizes the problem. Second, it makes a historic problem a diplomatic fight between the United States and Turkey. Third, it increases the aggressive attacks of the Turkish government against those inside and outside the country. Fourth, it increases the animosity and hatred against Armenians generally in Turkey. Fifth, it can never solve the problem. It aggravates the problem.
"OK, so we've made this list," Akcam went on. "But what is the answer? Whoever is against the resolution must show an alternative to the Armenian people. Unless you give an alternative policy, saying 'Shut up and stop' is not a policy. The Armenians don't have any options. As long Turkey criminalizes the past, as long as Turkey kills journalists, as long as Turkey drags its intellectuals from court to court, as long as Turkey punishes the people who use the G-word, as long as Turkey doesn't have any diplomatic relations with Armenia, as long as Turkey threatens everybody in the world who opens the topic of historical wrongdoing, it is the legitimate right of a victim group to make its voice heard."
Akcam dismisses the argument that the time was not yet ripe for the resolution. "You can use the timing argument forever and ever. Who will decide when the timing is right?"
But Akcam argues that a long-term solution requires much more than a U.S. resolution. He says two steps are necessary: Turkey and Armenia must establish normal relations, and Turks must learn that confronting their history does not threaten their Turkish identity, but strengthens it. This means that Turks should look at the conflict not as a zero-sum game in which any Armenian gain is a Turkish loss, but as a necessary part of the process of becoming a democratic nation. It's an approach to resolving bitter historical grievances called "transitional justice," <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_Justice> and it has been effective in helping resolve historical grievances between Germany and the Czech Republic, within South Africa and in other places.
The Armenians, too, need to rethink their approach, Akcam said. In the new paradigm, the Armenian diaspora would present its policy not as being totally against Turkey, but for a new democratic Turkey. "Until now this was a conventional war between Turkey and Armenian diaspora, and congressional resolutions were the effective weapon in this conventional war," Akcam said. "What I'm saying is we should stop thinking in these conventional ways."
The U.S. could play an important role in helping both parties break the impasse, Akcam said, but it is hampered by its lack of credibility in the Middle East. He points to what he calls a "stupid distinction between national security and morality. If you follow the whole discussion in Congress, on the one side you have the moralists, who say that Turkey should face what it did. This doesn't convince most of the people in the Middle East because we know that these are the guys torturing the people in Iraq, these are the guys killing the Iraqi civilians there, these are the guys who haven't signed the International Criminal Court <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court> agreement.
"On the other side are the realpolitikers," Akcam went on, referring to the Bush administration and the foreign-policy establishment, like the secretaries of state who signed the letter opposing the resolution. "They say the bill jeopardizes the national interests of the United States, Turkish-U.S. relations, interests of U.S. soldiers in Iraq."
Akcam argues that both elements must be present to have an effective foreign policy. "The fact is that realpolitik, the U.S. national interest in the Middle East, necessitates making morality, facing history, a part of national security. The basic problem between Turks and Armenians is that they don't trust each other because of their history." Akcam's point is that unless the U.S. is willing to look unflinchingly at the region's history, and try to broker deals that address legitimate grievances, it will not be able to achieve its realpolitik goals.
"If America really has a strong interest in its national security and the security of the region, it should stop following a national security concept that accepts human rights abusers," Akcam said. "It doesn't work, it makes things worse in the region. And it supports perpetrators who have committed crimes in the past and are committing crimes today."
In the end, the debate over the Armenian genocide bill boils down to two questions: Is it justified, and is it wise? The answer to the first question is an unambiguous "yes." It is both justified and long overdue. The Armenian genocide is a clear-cut case of genocide, and the fact that the U.S. has avoided calling it by its rightful name for decades is shameful. Crimes against humanity must be acknowledged. Hitler infamously said, with reference to the Poles, "Who, after all, is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?" Historical memory must not be sold away for a few pieces of silver. No one would countenance allowing Germany to deny its guilt for killing 6 million Jews. Why should Turkey be let off the hook for a slightly earlier holocaust that took the lives of as many as 1.5 million Armenians?
The second question is trickier. As opponents argue, and even supporters like Akcam acknowledge, the bill may backfire in the short run. That outcome could be acceptable, as long as it doesn't backfire in the long run. Which raises the central question: What policies should the U.S. adopt to prevent the resolution from having long-term negative consequences?
It comes down to a question of moral credibility, something the U.S. is in notably short supply of in the Middle East. One of the stranger reversals wrought by Bush's neoconservative foreign policy has been the rejection by much of the left of a morality-based foreign policy. Angry at the failure of the neocons' grand, idealistic schemes, some on the left have embraced a realism that formerly was associated with the America-first right. But by throwing out morality in foreign policy because of the neocon debacle in Iraq, these leftists are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The problem with Bush's Middle East policy hasn't been that it's too moralistic -- it's that its morality has been flawed and incoherent.
As Akcam argues, what is really needed are not just moral congressional proclamations, but actions that back them up. Of course the U.S. cannot and should not resolve all the problems of the world. But like it or not, we are the world's superpower, and we have the ability to use that power for good as well as ill. What is needed is active U.S. engagement to broker fair resolutions to the festering conflicts in the region -- between Turks and Armenians, Turks and Kurds, and Israelis and Palestinians. If the resolution was part of a new U.S. approach to the Middle East, one in which we acknowledged and acted to redress the historical injustices suffered by all the region's peoples, not just by our allies, the Armenian genocide bill could stand as an example not of American grandstanding but of American courage.

-- By Gary Kamiya