CONGRESSMAN MILLER: RESOLUTION WON’T ACCOMPLISH MUCH
The New Anatolian, Turkey
Oct 16 2007
U.S. Representative Brad Miller says "Holocaust" denial is morally
repugnant but warns that the current genocide resolution passed in
the committee of which he is a member will only anger Turkey and will
not accomplish much.
Miller voted against the genocide resolution.
He is the only member of North Carolina’s congressional delegation on
the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which voted last week to declare
the Ottoman-Turkish killings of Armenians in 1915, in which as many
as 1.5 million people may have died, a "genocide."
Speaking to the press at the committee room sitting near three
survivors of the event, all of them women in their 90s, Miller said
he doesn’t think the U.S. has the international standing to offend
an important ally such as Turkey.
Miller, a Raleigh Democrat, told congressional committee meeting he
didn’t think the resolution would accomplish much.
"I wish we had the standing in the world that if we pass that
resolution, Turkey would stop and examine the history of what happened
and decide whether they should do something to come to terms with
it," Miller said. "But the reality is, in Turkey and the Muslim world
generally, they will simply see the resolution as an insult and will
be angry about it."
After the committee’s vote, Turkey recalled its ambassador for
consultations.
"There is a genocide going on now in Darfur. We need the support
of Turkey and other Muslim countries to try to bring it to an end,"
Miller said.
In the days leading up to the vote, Miller spoke with the Turkish
ambassador and a deputy U.S. secretary of state. He also heard from
members of North Carolina’s Turkish-American community.
Miller said he thinks that Holocaust denial is morally repugnant,
that he was glad Congress apologized for the internment of
Japanese-Americans in World War II and that he voted for a resolution
encouraging Japan to apologize for its treatment of "comfort women"
in the same war.
Still, he said, it’s difficult to know which points in history deserve
modern action.
"Over the course of human history, there’s been remarkable evil,"
he said. "And trying to sort through it all, to acknowledge it all,
I think requires the wisdom of a theologian, not just a politician,"
he concluded.