SYMBOL OF ARMENIAN SUFFERING GETS BRIEF DISPLAY
Associated Press International
November 19, 2014 Wednesday 2:22 AM GMT
BY KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press
WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON (AP) – To Armenian-Americans, the display Tuesday of a
hand-woven rug at the White House Visitor’s Center represented a
hard-fought victory in their push for official recognition of the
killings of their ancestors experienced nearly a century ago.
“It’s a silent, beautiful rebuttal to those who deny the murder of
a million-and-a-half people,” said Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.
Schiff was one of several members of Congress at the event. The
lawmakers represent districts with thousands of Armenian-Americans.
The rug, hand-woven by orphans and delivered to President Calvin
Coolidge in 1925, has mostly sat in storage since the Coolidge family
returned it to the White House in 1982 as a gift. It measures 11.5
feet by 19 feet (3 by 6 meters), took 18 months to complete and
contains more than 4 million knots.
Armenian-Americans want the U.S. government to acknowledge that
the deaths of their ancestors constituted a genocide, a term used
to describe violence intended to destroy an entire group based on
ethnicity, race or religion.
Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by
Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by
scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey, however,
denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been
inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
The United States does not call the deaths genocide; doing so could
risk U.S. relations with Turkey, an important ally. Turkey withdrew
its U.S. ambassador four years ago when a House panel approved
a resolution branding the killing of Armenians as genocide. The
resolution eventually stalled.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama pledged to recognize the
deaths as genocide. But in a 2012 event, as president, he stopped
short of using that term, calling it “one of the worst atrocities of
the 20th century.”
Mark Stroh, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security
Council, said the president and other senior administration officials
have repeatedly acknowledged as historical fact that 1.5 million
Armenians were massacred or marched to their deaths in the final days
of the Ottoman Empire
“(They have) stated that a full, frank and just acknowledgement of
the facts is in our all interests, including Turkey’s, Armenia’s and
America’s,” Stroh said.
The rug was previously displayed in nonpublic settings as a result of
extraordinary requests, Stroh said. In one instance, in the 1980s,
for a member of Congress, and in the other, in the 1990s, to allow
it to be seen in the White House by a woman involved in its making.
Among the first visitors to view the rug Tuesday was John Marshall
Evans, who served as ambassador to Armenia for two years under
President George W. Bush. Evans said he was replaced as ambassador 18
months after he described the Armenian deaths as genocide and that
the U.S. needs to recognize the facts. He’s not satisfied with the
Obama administration’s approach, either.
Lawmakers began a letter-writing campaign to the White House last
year after reports that the display of the rug at the Smithsonian
Castle had been cancelled. Stroh said the rug was not lent to the
Smithsonian in that instance because its display for an afternoon
would have been in support of a book launch, which he said would not
have been appropriate.
Aram Hamparin, executive director of the Armenian National Committee
of America, said the display of the rug was progress but added,
“We’ve let a foreign country impose a gag rule on what Americans can
and cannot say on the Armenian genocide.”