ANALYSIS: CONGRESS DEBATES ARMENIA GENOCIDE
By Michael Scher
UPI Correspondent
Mar 21 2007
WASHINGTON, March 21 (UPI) — In 1896 former U.S. Minister to the
Ottoman Empire Oscar Straus convinced President Grover Cleveland
to ignore a controversial resolution passed by both the Senate and
the House of Representatives that would have called for the Ottoman
Sultan to stop his killing of ethnic Armenians.
More than 100 years later the U.S. Congress is at a similar crossroads
on the very same issue. House and Senate Resolutions 106 call for
American foreign policy to recognize the killings of Armenians by
the former Ottoman Empire as "genocide." The Republic of Turkey is
the official successor state to the Ottoman Empire because of the
Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
Being the official successor state is part of the reason for the
Turkish government wanting to deny that the Armenian killings were
a genocide, said Brian Kabateck, a senior partner in Kabateck,
Brown & Keller, a law firm that has represented about a half-dozen
Armenian-Americans in cases against U.S. insurance companies and
banks that have denied claims and accounts to relatives of deceased
Armenians who took out insurance and had accounts before they died in
the Armenian Genocide. Kabateck said that the Ottoman state seized
property and businesses and that Turkey would be responsible for
reparations to Armenians and the nation of Armenia if they admitted
that what the Ottoman state did was genocide.
Kabateck’s suits throw into light the fact that there are 1 million
or so Armenians living in the United States. The main sponsor of
Resolution 106 in the House is Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., whose
constituency has a large population of Armenians.
Schiff is sponsoring this legislation because he believes that the U.S.
cannot have the moral authority it’s projecting in the current Darfur
crisis without recognizing a genocide that happened 90 years ago. He
said it is important for the United States to recognize the killings
as genocide despite the fact that Turkey is a friend and an ally.
"More often with friends than foes you have to speak candidly,"
Schiff said.
"I happen to believe … that the final act of genocide is the denial
of genocide."
In 2004 a similar resolution, also sponsored by Schiff, was met with
resistance from the Bush administration because it feared it would
damage relations with Turkey, Schiff said. Schiff said that if the
current resolution passes it will affect U.S.-Turkey relations, but he
believes the Bush administration should spend less time appealing to
Congress not to pass the resolution and work on repairing the damage
it did to relations with Turkey because of the Iraq war.
"They keep saying now is not the time," Schiff said. "It’s been 90
years. If this is not the time, when is?"
A central tenet of this bill is to recognize that what happened was
genocide, Schiff said. This is something the Bush administration is
protesting fearing a negative impact on relations with Turkey. However,
in every letter the administration sends to Congress it recognizes
what happened was genocide, Schiff said.
Tuluy Tanc, the minister counselor at Turkey’s Embassy in Washington,
said that while this resolution will most likely not result in
restrictions on the U.S. military or hurt cooperation between Turkey
and the United States over security in Iraq, it will hurt the Turkish
people.
"There will be a reaction and Turkey will be deeply hurt," Tanc
said. "How the government will react I cannot say, but there will be
feelings of unfairness towards a friend and an ally. … This will
be like a little slap in the face."
Tanc said that the Armenian lobby’s presentation of facts to the U.S.
Congress was one-sided and that Congress was not taking into account
the Turkish side of the story.
For instance, Tanc provided Ottoman Empire census documents that showed
there were only 1.5 million Armenians living in Turkey at the time
of the killings. Historians claim 1.5 million Armenians were killed,
which Tanc said was part of the inaccuracies in the current resolution.
Mehdi Noorbaksh, an associate professor of international affairs at
the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania,
said that if this resolution passes it will have a negative impact
on U.S.-Turkey relations.
"It will be a disaster in a sense for Turkey," Noorbaksh said. "I
really do not think this administration is ready for a resolution
like this. … This will not help the United States."
It will be necessary for the current Islamist government in power in
Turkey right now to react strongly to this in order to remain in power,
Noorbaksh said.
Some 20 other nations have passed resolutions similar to Resolution
106 and have gotten similar threats of dissatisfaction from Turkey,
said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National
Committee of America. When France passed a similar resolution in 2001
it was met with a stern reaction from the Turkish government, however,
the very next year trade rose by 22 percent between France and Turkey.
The United States has a long history of weaker resolutions of the
genocide dating back to the 1980s that have not hampered relations with
Turkey, Hamparian said. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan recognized the
Armenian Genocide in a speech about the Holocaust. In 1984 Congress
passed a resolution setting April 24 as a day of remembrance of
the Armenian Genocide. In 1996 and 2004 resolutions were passed
that limited the usage of U.S. aid to Turkey that was being used to
fund the Turkish lobby in the United States. Throughout all of these
resolutions, trade with Turkey has steadily increased Hamparian said.
"U.S. relations with Turkey will certainly endure this (resolution
106)," Hamparian said.