U.S. LAWMAKERS DEFECT FROM GENOCIDE RESOLUTION
NPR
Oct 17 2007
All Things Considered, October 17, 2007 · Turkey continues to voice
its opposition to a resolution circulating through the U.S. House.
The resolution would recognize the 1915 mass killing of more than a
million Armenians as genocide.
Now that the Turkish government has threatened to curtail military
ties with the U.S., nearly a dozen lawmakers have withdrawn their
support of the controversial resolution.
U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, talks with Melissa
Block about why he changed his mind.
& A: But Was It Genocide?
by Corey Flintoff
Enlarge The bodies of dead Armenians lie in a grove of trees in
eastern Turkey. The deaths are a result of what is now being called
genocide. Bettmann/CORBIS
What Is Genocide?
The term – from Greek and Latin roots meaning "the massacre of a
family, tribe or race" -was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish
legal scholar from Poland. In the 1930s, Lemkin sought unsuccessfully
to get the League of Nations to recognize such killings as an
international crime. As examples, he cited the massacre of Armenians
during World War I and the slaughter of Assyrians in Iraq in 1933.
After World War II, Lemkin’s idea of genocide as an international
crime became one of the legal bases for the Nuremberg trials of Nazi
war criminals.
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the modern definition of genocide,
listing "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Those acts included:
~U killing or causing serious physical or mental harm to members of
the group,
~U forcing the group to live in conditions calculated to bring about
its physical destruction
~U Forcibly preventing births among the group, or forcibly sending
its children to be reared by members of another group.
The U.N. convention on genocide didn’t become law until 1951, after
20 U.N. members had signed it. The United States was the last of
the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to sign it –
in 1988 – and it didn’t begin to be enforced until the 1990s, with
prosecutions for genocide in Kosovo and Rwanda.
German Fuhrer and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during a speech. Hulton
Archive/Getty Images
Political Figures Speak About Genocide
"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations,
they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they
understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made
no particular attempt to conceal the fact…"
– Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire,
in a 1919 memoir.
"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
– Adolph Hitler in 1939, before the invasion of Poland. He was
defending his order to massacre Poles.
"The United States has a compelling historical and moral reason to
recognize the Armenian Genocide, which cost a million and a half people
their lives, but we also have a powerful contemporary reason as well:
How can we take effective action against the genocide in Darfur if
we lack the will to condemn genocide whenever and wherever it occurs?"
– Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), during the 2007 debate on the Armenian
genocide resolution.
NPR.org, October 11, 2007 · Some say it was the first genocide of
the 20th century – tens of thousands of Armenian men, women and
children killed by Turkish troops, and hundreds of thousands more
dead of starvation or exposure to the weather on forced marches and
in concentration camps.
Turkey and its supporters say the Armenians were killed in battle or
by harsh conditions that both sides suffered equally.
The controversy revived as the House Foreign Relations Committee
approved a measure that would officially declare the deaths to be
genocide. Here are some of the key questions on the issue:
How many people died?
No one denies that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in
the Ottoman Turkish Empire from 1914 to 1917. The modern Turkish
government says about 300,000 Armenians died – mostly, it says,
in fighting that was part of World War I. Armenians says the number
reached as high as 1.5 million, as part of a deliberate, systematic
effort to destroy the Armenian population.
How did it start?
Animosity between Turks and Armenians stretches back over centuries.
A key factor is religion: Armenians are mostly Christian, Turks
mostly Muslim. During the Ottoman Empire, Christians were treated as
second-class citizens, and when the empire began to crumble in the
19th century, an Armenian resistance movement took hold in what is
now eastern Turkey. Armenian nationalists sided with Christian Russia
during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 and later formed separatist
groups.
Turkish accounts of the situation sound eerily like U.S. military
accounts of the insurgency in Iraq. They say the resistance was
incited by outsiders, Armenians from the Russian side of the border
who wanted to undermine the Ottomans by stirring up unrest.
When Turkey and Russia faced off again during World War I, many Turks
saw the Armenians as terrorists and traitors. Turkish accounts of the
run-up to the war claim that Armenian guerrillas, armed by Russia,
attacked Muslim villages and massacred their inhabitants.
In 1915, the Turkish government passed a law allowing it to deport
Armenians from eastern Turkey as a national security risk. Turkish
troops killed resisters and herded tens of thousands of Armenians on
forced marches to camps in northern Syria and Iraq. Accounts by U.S.
and British diplomats of the time say the Turkish troops and
paramilitaries robbed, raped and murdered deportees along the way,
leaving the survivors to die without food or shelter in the desert.
Turks counter that these allegations were wartime propaganda by the
countries arrayed against Turkey and its World War I allies, Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.
What determines whether an act can be called genocide?
In the eyes of some scholars, the question of genocide comes down
not to how many Armenians died, but whether the Turkish government
actually set out to annihilate them because of their ethnicity.
Bernard Lewis, an emeritus professor of Near Eastern Studies at
Princeton, says it may well be likely that a million Armenians died,
but he asserts that there’s no evidence that the Turkish government
made a "deliberate preconceived decision" to carry out massacres. In
an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, Lewis instead called
the deaths a "brutal byproduct of war."
A French court later found Lewis guilty of denying the Armenian
genocide and fined him a symbolic one franc.
Turks and others who deny that genocide occurred have also used the
courts to make symbolic gestures. In 2005, Turkish novelist Orhan
Pamuk was charged with "insulting Turkishness" for complaining in
an interview that "a million Armenians were killed in these lands
and nobody dares to talk about it." The case against the Nobel Prize
winner provoked an international outcry from free-speech advocates,
and the charges were eventually dropped.
Why is Congress taking this issue up now?
Congressional committees have voted repeatedly on similar resolutions
in the past (the last time, in 2005, the vote was 40-to-7 in favor).
The reason it’s gotten so much attention this time is that the new
Democratic leadership in the House promised to bring it to a floor
vote if it passed in committee. That’s something the former speaker,
Republican Dennis Hastert, had refused to do, in order to spare the
Bush administration from the awkward position of having to oppose it
for the sake of maintaining good relations with Turkey.
What’s next?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will determine whether the Foreign Affairs
Committee resolution comes to a vote on the House floor. She comes
from California, a state with a large Armenian population, and she’s
on record as favoring the resolution.
President Bush is strongly opposed to the idea of the U.S.
proclaiming that there was an Armenian genocide, saying it would hurt
U.S. relations with Turkey, and possibly reduce Turkey’s cooperation
in the war in Iraq. More than 20 countries have officially declared
that genocide was practiced against the Armenians, including France,
Greece and Russia, which have significant ethnic Armenian populations.
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