(Kyodo) – Selected editorial excerpts from the U.S. press:
Kyodo News Service; Mar 22, 2006
IT WAS GENOCIDE (Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles)
JOHN EVANS IS THE U.S. ambassador to Armenia, as of this writing. But
he probably won’t be for long. Evans, a career diplomat who was
selected to receive an American Foreign Service Assn. award last year
for his frank public speaking, irked his superiors at the State
Department by uttering the following words at UC Berkeley in February
2005: “I will today call it the Armenian genocide.” For that bit of
truth-telling, Evans was forced to issue a clarification, then a
correction, then to endure having his award rescinded under pressure
from his bosses, and finally to face losing his job altogether.
What happened in Armenia in 1915 is well known. The Ottoman Empire
attempted to exterminate the Armenian population through slaughter and
mass deportation. It finished half the job, killing about 1.2 million
people. Yet the State Department has long avoided the word “genocide,”
not out of any dispute over history but out of deference to Turkey,
whose membership in NATO and location between Europe and Asia make it
a strategic ally.
It is time to stop tiptoeing around this issue and to accept settled
history. Genocide, according to accepted U.N. definition, means “the
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group.” Armenia is not even a borderline case. Punishing
an ambassador for speaking honestly about a 90-year-old crime befits a
cynical, double-dealing monarchy, not the leader of the free world.
For Armenians who escaped the killing and came to this country,
inadequate recognition of their history is crazy-making. Rep. Adam
B. Schiff (D-Burbank), whose district includes the heart of the
Armenian diaspora, keeps introducing a bill to officially recognize
the genocide, only to see congressional leadership quash it each year,
under pressure from the State Department.
One day, the country that was founded as a direct repudiation of its
Ottoman past will face its history squarely, as part of a long-overdue
maturing process. Some day before then, we hope, the State Department
will too. (March 22)