WHITE HOUSE AND TURKEY FIGHT BILL ON ARMENIA: GENOCIDE LABEL FOR WWI-ERA KILLINGS HAS HOUSE SUPPORT
by Glenn Kessler; Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post
October 10, 2007 Wednesday
Met 2 Edition
A proposed House resolution that would label as "genocide" the deaths
of Armenians more than 90 years ago during the Ottoman Empire has
won the support of a majority of House members, unleashing a lobbying
blitz by the Bush administration and other opponents who say it would
greatly harm relations with Turkey, a key ally in the Iraq war.
All eight living former secretaries of state have signed a joint letter
to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warning that the nonbinding
resolution "would endanger our national security interests." Three
former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably
would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government
of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications
specialists and high-powered lobbyists, including former congressman
Bob Livingston, to defeat the initiative.
Pelosi, whose congressional district has a large Armenian population,
has brushed aside such concerns and said she supports bringing the
resolution, for the first time, to a full vote in the House, where
more than half of the members have signed on as co-sponsors. The House
Foreign Affairs Committee, which has passed such a resolution before,
is set to vote on it today.
House Resolution 106, officially the Affirmation of the United
States Record on the Armenian Genocide, has been pushed doggedly by
a congressman whose Southern California district contains the largest
concentration of Armenian Americans in the country. Rep. Adam B.
Schiff (D) won his seat in 2000 after his Republican predecessor was
sandbagged when then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert reneged on a
pledge and pulled the bill from the floor after a last-minute plea
from President Bill Clinton.
Schiff, who defeated Rep. James Rogan after Hastert killed the floor
vote, said the deaths so long ago still resonate with Armenians. "It
is an insight you get when you have lots of Armenian constituents," he
said, saying it reminded him of conversations he had while growing up
Jewish. "But imagine losing the entire family and having the successor
state say it never happened."
Few people deny that massacres killed hundreds of thousands of Armenian
men, women and children during and immediately after World War I.
But Turkish officials and some historians say that the deaths resulted
from forced relocations and widespread fighting when the 600-year-old
Ottoman Empire collapsed, not from a campaign of genocide — and that
hundreds of thousands of Turks also died in the same region during
that time.
"This is the greatest accusation of all against humanity," said Turkish
Ambassador Nabi Sensoy, referring to genocide. "You cannot expect
any nation to accept that kind of labeling." He said the reaction in
the Turkish parliament would be one of fury, noting that the Turkish
military cut contacts with the French military and terminated defense
contracts under negotiation after the French National Assembly voted
in 2006 to criminalize the denial of Armenian genocide.
Pelosi had long been a co-sponsor of the resolution. The Armenian
National Committee, one of the many Armenian organizations that have
sought passage of the measure for years, has given her an "A" grade
for her stance on Armenian issues.
Now as speaker, Pelosi will face a choice between her role as a
national leader and her previous campaign pledges as a member of
Congress. U.S.-Turkish relations are already under some strain because
Kurdish militant groups have attacked Turkish targets from bases in
Iraq, with Ankara suggesting it may launch its own attack.
Turkey plans to hold a "neighbors" conference on Iraq pushed by the
United States later this month, but a recent poll by the nonpartisan
group Terror Free Tomorrow found that 83 percent of Turks would oppose
assisting the United States on Iraq if the Armenia resolution passed.
It is a problem that has caused other politicians to flinch. As a
presidential candidate in 2000, George W. Bush pledged to ensure that
"our nation properly recognizes" what he called "a genocidal campaign
that defies comprehension." But, angering Armenian groups, Bush refused
to use the term in the annual presidential statement on the subject
made on April 24, generally considered the beginning of the killings
in 1915. President George H.W. Bush and Clinton also refused to refer
to genocide in their annual statements, for fear of offending Turkey.
Among other things, the resolution calls on the president to use
his annual message to "accurately characterize the systematic and
deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide."
In the Senate, where one-third of its members are co-sponsoring
the resolution, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) supports
the measure, as do the two leading candidates for the Democratic
presidential nomination: Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and
Barack Obama (Ill.).
The State Department, which collected the signatures of the former
secretaries of state, has lobbied against the resolution, with
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Undersecretary of State R.
Nicholas Burns, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried and U.S.
Ambassador Ross Wilson calling lawmakers yesterday to "urge them not
to vote for this," according to an interview Fried gave the Anatolia
news agency.
The Turkish Embassy is paying $100,000 a month to lobbying firm
DLA Piper and $105,000 a month to the Livingston Group, and it
recently added communications specialists Fleishman-Hillard for
nearly $114,000 a month, according to records filed with the Justice
Department. Turkish lawmakers were on Capitol Hill yesterday, warning
that passage would put military cooperation with Turkey at risk.
Meanwhile, leading the charge for the resolution are grass-roots
groups such as the Armenian Assembly of America, with 10,000 members,
a budget of $3.6 million last year and phone banks that are running
on overtime calling members of Congress. The organization has signed
up 53 non-Armenian ethnic groups, including a number of Jewish groups,
to support the resolution.
Some Jewish groups have found themselves in a bind because Turkey is
one of the few Muslim nations to have diplomatic relations with Israel.