97% OF ARMENIAN AMERICANS OPPOSE HOAGLAND NOMINATION
Yerevan, January 9. ArmInfo. 97% of Armenian Americans support
opposition to the confirmation of Richard Hoagland as U.S. Ambassador
to Armenia, according to a new Internet poll conducted by the
ANCA-Western Region over the past two weeks in nineteen Western U.S.
states.
This viewpoint is aligned with the policy position of the Armenian
National Committee of America (ANCA), which has been leading and
vigorously pursuing this issue in Congress and with the Administration.
The 97% figure is based on polling conducted between December 28,
2006 and January 8, 2007.
The controversy over the Hoagland nomination began with the firing of
his predecessor, John Evans, for speaking truthfully about the Armenian
Genocide. This firing, for breaching the State Department’s policy
of complicity in the Turkish government’s denial of this crime, was
compounded by Hoagland’s outright denial of the Genocide in response
to questions posed during and after his June 2006 confirmation hearing
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Based on growing reservations over the Evans dismissal and, later,
Hoagland’s deeply offensive responses, more than half of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee members and over 60 U.S. Representatives
formally raised their concerns on this matter with the Administration.
Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times reminds that nearly two years ago,
the former ambassador John Evans did something no U.S. ambassador to
Armenia before him had done: He used the word "genocide" – in public
– to describe the deaths of about 1.2 million Armenians at the hands
of Ottoman Turks.
It has long been a sore point with Armenian Americans that the U.S.
government does not refer to the killings that began in 1915 as
genocide, and Evans’ use of the word did not signal a change in that
policy. It did set off a slow-boiling controversy that eventually
cost him his job.
In a short interview, his first since leaving the State Department,
Evans declined to discuss his motives in making the genocide statement,
but said that "it wasn’t a slip of the tongue."
"I knew it was not the policy of the United States" to use the word
"genocide," Evans said.
"Ninety years is a long time," Evans added, referring to the decades
since the genocide began. "At some point you have to call a spade
a spade."