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Congress weighs Armenian genocide resolutions
Turkey's opposition prompts caution
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By Karoun Demirjian
Washington Bureau
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. xxxx 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."
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Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
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