TURKISH FURY AS US CONGRESS PANEL LABELS ARMENIAN MASSACRE ‘GENOCIDE’
Giles Whittell
The Australian
March 5 2010
WASHINGTON: One of the worst massacres of 20th-century history came
back to haunt international politics today when a poweful Washington
panel voted to call the murder of about 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey
"genocide".
By a knife-edge vote, after more than three hours of debate, the
House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved a resolution calling on
President Barack Obama to "characterise the systematic and deliberate
annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide".
The vote went ahead despite last-minute pleas from the White House
and State Department and triggered a furious reaction from Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister.
"We condemn this resolution, which accuses the Turkish nation of a
crime it has not committed," Ankara said.
As Armenian observers applauded the vote on Capitol Hill, the Turkish
Ambassador to Washington was recalled.
The Obama administration may still be able to prevent a full vote
in the House of Representatives but today’s resolution threatened to
poison America’s relations with its closest Muslim ally. Washington
depends on Turkey for access to northern Iraq and in its regional
efforts to isolate Iran.
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The vote, with 23 congressmen in favour and 22 against, will also
jeopardise historic efforts begun last year to create normal diplomatic
relations between Turkey and Armenia. The resolution "would harm
the normalisation process, and it is wrong," Burak Ozugergin, of the
Turkish Foreign Ministry, had warned before the vote. "The substance
is wrong."
Mr Obama promised as a candidate to break with longstanding US practice
and start calling the First World War era killings genocide if elected
to the White House. He broke the promise last year, refusing to use
the word on a visit to Ankara, where he praised Turkey as a model
Muslim democracy.
He telephoned his Turkish counterpart this week to thank him for
working towards a rapprochement with Armenia, while Hillary Clinton,
the Secretary of State, had implored the Foreign Affairs Committee
not to go ahead with the vote.
The committee chairman, Howard Berman, refused to be swayed. At
the start of the hearing he called Turkey a vital and usually loyal
ally but insisted that nothing justified "turning a blind eye to the
reality of the Armenian genocide".
Mr Berman, a California Democrat who counts powerful Armenian emigres
among his Los Angeles constituents, said that Turkey’s duty to face
up to its past compared to that of Germany to face up to the Holocaust
and South Africa to acknowledge the full horror of apartheid.
Ankara accepts that many thousands of Christian Armenians living in
what was then eastern Anatolia died in blood-letting by Muslim Ottoman
troops in 1915. It rejects the term "genocide" and says that the 1.5
million figure for the final death toll is exaggerated, but experts,
including some of Turkey’s own most respected historians, disagree.
Taner Akcam, a professor at Clark University in Massachusetts,
became the first Turkish specialist to call the killings genocide in
his comprehensive study A Shameful Act, published in English three
years ago.
Since then Turkish and Armenian leaders have begun a normalisation
process that included a football match in Turkey between the two
countries’ national teams last year, attended by the Armenian
President.
The last time a resolution on the events of 1915 was debated in
Congress it was approved by the House committee but never voted
on by the full House of Representatives after Bush Administration
officials urged congressional leaders not to table a vote for the
sake of US-Turkish relations. Even so, Turkey temporarily withdrew
its Ambassador to Washington.
In a sign of the power of historical consensus to yield concrete
restitution, the French insurance giant Axa began making 8000-euro
payments to families of Armenian victims of the 1915 killings who
bought policies from companies that Axa has since taken over.
France and Canada have classified the killings as genocide. Britain,
like the US, has not.
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