US NEXT IN LINE
MURAT YETKÄ°N
Wednesday,January 25 2012
It is not hard to tell what is going to happen next; I mean after
the Armenian debate in the French capital.
It is the Armenian debate in the U.S. capital.
It is almost an annual custom in Washington DC, like the cherry
blossom festival, heralding the month of April.
April 24 is the anniversary of a telegram by the Ottoman Interior
Minister, Talat PaÅ~_a who ordered the provincial governors and
commanders – especially in the Eastern region to which the Tsarist
Russian army was advancing – to forcibly deport the Armenian
population, because an Armenian faction was collaborating with the
Russians; that was in 1915, in the middle of the World War I.
Before and during that deportation campaign hundreds and thousands
of citizens of Turkey under the Ottoman Sultanate were killed or
died from neglect; not only Armenian Christians, Muslim Turks and
Kurds as well. But it is that unfortunate telegram which caused the
Armenian community deported from the Ottoman Turkey to ask from the
Republican Turkey (who overthrew the Sultanate) to recognize that
grand human disaster as a genocide and pay the dues.
Turkish governments’ attitude up until the ruling Justice and
Development Party (AK Parti) could be summarized as: “Turks didn’t
do it, Armenians did;” naive and could not convince most of the
governments and parliaments who recognized the disaster as genocide.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan followed a different line, to
acknowledge the human sufferings and trying to bridge political ties
with Armenia as a goodwill gesture, but could not go all the way up;
if you ask to advisers in Ankara it is mainly because of seeking to
find a compromise from the opposite end.
So almost every February or March for decades, the Armenian lobby,
which is among the most active in U.S. Congress when it comes to
affairs with Turkey, finds a way to submit a bill to the House of
Representatives in order to mark April 24 as “Armenian genocide day.”
As of itself, it may only be a credibility blow to Turkish politics.
But it is more than that; it has political and legal consequences. It
is a fact that the Supreme Court has turned down a federal court’s
ruling which said Turkey should compensate the losses of an insurance
company’s clients due to the acclaimed genocide; the Supreme Court
cannot make decisions contradictory to the state policies of the U.S.,
said the Supreme Court judges.
This is because it was President Barack Obama, like his predecessors
who stopped the process at the Senate level with the justification of
protecting U.S. interests in the whole region where Turkey lies. This
important ally has been supporting many U.S.-led international
operations from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Kosovo to Somalia after all,
has been a “Plural democracy and free economy in a Muslim society”
example for the Arab Spring and recently agreed to host a U.S.-operated
NATO radar site as a vital part of a global Missile Shield system to
which Iran and Russia react.
This is election year in the U.S., the Israeli lobby is not likely to
support Turkey against the Armenian and Greek ones and Obama might
have a more difficult time this year than before, despite declaring
Erdogan among his best political friends.
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