ARMENIAN GENOCIDE VOTE IN DOUBT
Associated Press
Guardian Unlimited
Thursday October 18, 2007
Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, said it is
uncertain whether a vote will be held on a proposal to label the
killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.
Several congressmen have pulled their support of the proposed
resolution because of fears it would cripple US relations with Turkey,
which says the death toll has been inflated and the Armenians died
during civil unrest, not organised genocide.
"Whether it will come up or not, or what the action will be, remains
to be seen," Ms Pelosi told reporters yesterday.
The remark signals a weakening of Ms Pelosi’s previous position. Both
she and the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, earlier pledged
that if the resolution should clear the foreign affairs committee,
the full House would vote on it by year’s end.
Support for the nonbinding resolution deteriorated this week after
Turkey summoned its US ambassador to Ankara and several lawmakers
spoke out against it. Ms Pelosi is expected to hold off on a vote until
she gets a better idea of how many House members would support it.
A member of Nato, Turkey is a rare Muslim ally of the US in George
Bush’s international campaign against terror. A US-run air base in
Turkey has facilitated the flow of most cargo to American troops
fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and enforced no fly zones that
kept former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s warplanes on the ground
for years.
In a White House news conference yesterday, Mr Bush warned lawmakers
against further inflaming US relations with Turkey. On the same day,
Turkey’s parliament approved a possible offensive in northern Iraq
against fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK; Mr Bush said
he opposes any such military action.
Considering pressing responsibilities facing the US, Mr Bush said,
"One thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical
record of the Ottoman Empire."
Geoff Morrell, Pentagon press secretary, said yesterday that two
to three battalions of Turkish forces have amassed just across the
border in Iraq.
That presence, he said, goes back to the late 1990s, and has been
widely known by the US and the Iraqis.
Mr Morrell said the Turkish troops are limited to information gathering
and are largely confined to their base with only limited travel. Their
movements, he said, are coordinated with the US and the Iraqis.