Author: Chavushian

COURT KEEPS UNCHANGED ARREST CHOSEN TO CO-OWNER OF ROYAL ARMENIA COMPANY, GAGIK HAKOBIAN

Noyan Tapan
Oct 16 2007

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 16, NOYAN TAPAN. Gagik Hakobian, the co-owner of
the Royal Armenia company, who had arrived in Armenia on October 3,
came to the October 15 sitting of the RA Criminal Appeal Court on case
against the Royal Armenia company. The court published the decision
made on October 8, according to which the case against G. Hakobian
was withdrawn from suspension and was joined with the case against
Aram Ghazarian, the company’s Deputy Director. The defence party
expressed discontent that though the October 8 sitting was open,
the defence party had not been informed about the sitting. Defender
Ashot Sargsian also expressed discontent that the above mentioned
decision does not mention that G. Hakobian, who was undergoing medical
treatment in Spain, came to Armenia of his own free will.

The lawyer also mediated to change arrest, preventive
punishment to the defendant: by the August 29 decision, a
search was declared to G. Hakobian and arrest was chosen as a
preventive punishment. A. Sargsian introduced ratified documents
to the court proving that he was in Spain for the purpose of
treatment. Nevertheless, the court dismissed the petition: according
to court’s decision, the defendant can hide, hamper the examination
of the case.

The court also dismissed the challenge declared by the defence party
against presiding judge Suren Ghazarian, with the motivation of its
being ungrounded. As a ground for the challenge the defence party
mentioned that the three decisions of the court of dismissing the
petition of choosing arrest as preventive punishment, convening a
court sitting without informing the defence party, and changing the
preventive punishment show that the presiding judge is directly or
indirectly interested in passing an accusatory sentence. According
to the defender, after Justice Council’s decision to Pargev Ohanian,
who had passed a decision of aquittal on the case against the company,
judge S. Ghazarian can not be unbiassed for remaining on his post. It
should be mentioned that the Justice Council had introduced a mediation
to the RA President with the request to stop P. Ohanian’s commissions.

The case is examined at the Criminal Appeal Court on the basis of the
appeal complaints of the prosecutors and the representative of the
aggrieved party, Federal Investment Group. They appeal against the
aquittal sentence of the first instance court of Yerevan’s Kentron
and Nork-Marash communities demanding finding the defendant guilty
on all the points of the accusation, forging the bills, deliberately
avoiding tax paying, smuggling, legalizing revenues gained by the
criminal way, seizing Federal Investment Group’s property by a deceit.

ARMENIAN DEBACLE
By Tulin Daloglu

Washington Times, DC
Oct 16 2007

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she believes that "the biggest ethical
challenge facing our country is the war in Iraq." Therefore, she
must believe that passing a resolution declaring the mass killings of
Armenians at the end of World War I a genocide will restore America’s
moral authority. Rep. Tom Lantos, California Democrat, chairman of
the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, "I feel that I have a
tremendous opportunity as a survivor of the Holocaust to bring a
moral dimension to our foreign policy." The resolution passed last
week by a 27"21 vote.

However, while Mr. Lantos speaks so forcefully about the resolution
now, he has opposed similar measures in the past, arguing that what
happened to Armenians is not technically a genocide. In fact, he
argued this right up until Turkey refused to give the United States
a northern front to invade Iraq in 2003. According to congressional
sources, Mrs. Pelosi urged Mr. Lantos to support the resolution,
or else risk his chairmanship. In addition, Mr. Lantos was seriously
troubled when the Turkish government invited the newly elected Hamas
leadership of the Palestinian Authority to Ankara, and by what appears
to be Turkey’s strengthening relationship with Iran.

A delegation of Turkish Parliament members visiting Washington
was disappointed by the vote. "What bothered me was that those
[U.S. representatives] who supported the Turkish side, 21 of them said
loud and clear that the events of 1915 amounted to genocide," said
Gunduz Aktan, a former ambassador and member of the Turkish Parliament
from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). "Despite this, because
of Turkey’s strategic importance, because of the national interest
of the U.S., they are voting no. This was unbearable." Turks share
Mr. Aktan’s opinion. But they should also know who lobbies on Turkey’s
behalf. Former House Minority leader Richard Gephardt, hired by the
Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to lobby for Turkey,
actively worked in support of such resolutions in the past. When a
last-minute intervention by President Bill Clinton stopped a similar
resolution before a vote in 2000, Mr. Gephardt wrote to the then-House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican, to tell him that he was
"committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the
Armenian genocide."

Although Egemen Bagis, one of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
chief foreign policy advisers, said that Turkey has done everything
in its power to avert the resolution’s passage, it also made many
mistakes. Not only did the Turkish government hire Mr. Gephardt,
but it also placed too much stock in the perception that Turkey’s
geographically strategic position would ensure such a measure’s defeat.

Evidently, President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Defense Secretary Robert Gates did all they could to try to defeat
the bill in committee. Now Turkey must face this failure – it lost
the propaganda war on this issue long ago. In fact, not only did the
Turkish government fail, but Turkish Americans who did not take this
issue as seriously as the Armenian Americans failed as well.

Mrs. Pelosi may think that a House resolution will finally close the
issue. But Turks are convinced that it will begin a new chapter and
spur reparations claims. U.S. officials advise Turkey to deal with
the issue as plain historical fact. That’s easily said. But Turks
wonder what the connection is – and why the United States has done
nothing to prevent the Kurdish separatist PKK from gaining strength in
northern Iraq and increasing its attacks on Turkey. They are convinced
that America wants to enforce the Treaty of Sevres which would allow
Kurds and Armenians to lay claim to Turkish land.

Many in the United States believe the Kurds have a legitimate right
to their own state. Recently the Senate passed a resolution calling
the partition of Iraq into three self-governing regions for Shiites,
Sunnis and Kurds. Turks are worried that such a plan will lead some of
its Kurdish citizens to seek independence as well. However, Sevres did
not promise Kurds an independent state; it promised "the formation of
an autonomous region which would have the right to elect for complete
independence one year after the formation of the autonomous area."

David McDowell, in "A Modern History of the Kurds, " explains that
"[t]he terms were flawed"by the failure to demarcate Kurdistan’s
boundary with Armenia. This was foreseeably bound to outrage either
the Kurds or the Armenians, as President Wilson’s pro-Armenian
proposed boundary accompanying the treaty clearly showed." Wilson
set the Armenian borders to include Kurdish areas of Turkey, but he
was unable to finalize them.

Turks look at their history and wonder why the president refuses
to act against a Kurdish terrorist organization attacking them from
northern Iraq, and why a Democratic Congress is considering an act
that happened nearly 100 years ago. Ultimately, what everyone needs
to do is move on – but the war in Iraq and the possibility of its
breakup seem to haunt the present.

Tulin Daloglu is a freelance writer.

OWNING UP TO ITS HISTORY
By Edward Schumacher-Matos

Miami Herald, FL
Oct 16 2007

ISTANBUL — Self-righteousness feels good, but before Congress meddles
this week in the question of Armenian genocide in Turkey a century ago,
members should take a slow boat down the Bosporus.

More than just the stunning glories here of 1,500 years of Byzantine
and Ottoman empires — the massive domes of the Haga Sophia, the
soaring magic of the Blue Mosque, the splendor of Topkapi Palace —
members would see something more fundamental to mankind today.

They would see a muscular, dynamic Muslim country in the midst of an
extraordinary transition whose success is far from certain but will
influence the direction of the conflicted Muslim world.

They would see a country conflicted by its 84-year history of
authoritarian secular governments being led for the first time by
a Muslim party that, instead of imposing sharia, is writing a new
democratic constitution and negotiating to take the country into the
European Union, a technologically advanced country of skyscrapers,
malls and fashionable people, the women with or without head scarves.

They would see a country that has long been the only Muslim one in
NATO, a strategic crossroads of shipping and oil pipelines and a loyal
U.S. ally. Huge bases here are the staging point for U.S. supplies
into neighboring Iraq and — when the time comes — evacuation from it.

This also is a country complicated by its own Islamic fundamentalists,
a politically touchy military, nationalist opposition to the EU
demands and, biggest wild card of all, a separatist uprising.

Streak of anti-Americanism

Some 30,000 people have died fighting with ethnic Kurdish separatists
during the last 23 years. Thought to be largely resolved, the conflict
has flared again as terrorists raid from sanctuaries across the
border in Iraq’s Kurdish zone. Fifteen Turkish soldiers were killed
last week alone.

The attacks are stoking a streak of anti-Americanism here shared
right to left, secular and cleric. On top of anger for the Iraq
war making their neighborhood more violent, there is a widely held
belief that the United States is passive, if not complicit, in the
Kurdish raids. Unnamed Turkish military commanders grumble darkly
in the press that the United States, in supporting Iraq’s Kurds,
is arming the Turkish separatists.

Using the popular nickname for the ordinary Turkish soldier, a
banner raised by students last week at Istanbul University read,
"The murderer of Mehmetcik is America."

Now stepping blithely into this bubbling stew is the Democratic-led
U.S. Congress.

Last week the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution
branding as "genocide" the Turkish slaughter in World War I of what
most historians say was between 650,000 and 1.5 million Armenians.

Looking to please Armenian Americans and take a humanitarian high
road, a majority of the full House signed on as cosponsors. House
passage this week looks probable.

Most Turks are livid. "We’re fed up with the U.S.," wrote one columnist
in a typical reaction. Anti-American spite now puts Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a moderate Islamist, under even more pressure
to send troops into Iraq to chase the Kurdish separatists.

He plans to ask parliament this week for permission to do
so. U.S. commanders say they are powerless to stop the Turks. Iraqi
Kurds may retaliate, pitting our allies against each other and
worsening the Iraqi chaos.

So, are the Turks right about the Armenians? No. Most just don’t know
it, and the bill offends their identity.

The brunt of the slaughter took place between 1915 and 1917, when
the British were invading at Gallipoli in the west and the Russians
were attacking in the east with the aid of Armenian guerrillas. The
Ottoman Empire was in its last desperate gasps. An order to move
Armenians out of the eastern zone somehow — historians differ how —
degenerated into an extermination campaign of executions and forced
marches in the Syrian desert.

Modern Turkey was created from Ottoman remnants. The country’s leaders
have been single-minded in building a new national identity that
sets religious and ethnic differences aside. Part of that has been
a sugar-coating of the Armenian massacres in textbooks as smaller
and part of a civil war in which both sides suffered. A law making
it illegal "to insult the Turkish national identity" enforces the
now commonly believed version. Just last week, two editors of the
Turkish Armenian weekly, Agos, were found guilty of violating the
law for reprinting a genocide article.

U.S. interests first

Turkey will have to live up to its past and is slowly doing so. The
sentence of the two editors was suspended, a political consensus
agrees to abolish the law, the EU is forcing further opening, and
the government itself recently proposed an international commission
to open secret state archives and review the record.

The passion of Armenian Americans is understandable, but a wise
Congress would put fundamental U.S. interests first. Stopping genocide
is a duty. History, especially someone else’s, is usually best left to
historians. What if other governments passed bills on our treatment of
American Indians? Go back far enough and we all live in glass houses.

Edward Schumacher-Matos is a former editor and reporter with The New
York Times and Wall Street Journal. He writes an occasional ombudsman
column for The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald.

Join the discussion at

Can the world stop genocide?

BBC
2007/10/13

A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways
to prevent genocide. BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle,
attending the meeting, asks whether this can be done.

The 75-year-old woman sat on stage in front of hundreds of United
Nations officials, legal experts and academics.

The day before, Marika Nene had travelled from Hungary to Canada – the
first plane she had ever taken on her first journey outside Hungary.

She was not intimidated by the gathering. Her long hair was lit up by
a stage light and her facial features were strong.

But the strongest thing about Marika Nene, a Roma – or Gypsy – woman
who was trapped in the anti-Gypsy pogroms during World War II, was her
determination to tell her story.

"I had no choice. I had to give myself up to the soldiers," Marika
Nene said through a translator.

"I was a very pretty little gypsy woman and of course the soldiers
took me very often to the room with a bed in it where they violated
me. I still have nightmares about it".

Many members of Marika Nene’s Roma family died in the work camps and
the ghettos.

She had travelled to Montreal to give a reality check to the experts
and UN officials at the "Global Conference on the Prevention of
Genocide".

She was joined by other survivors – from Rwanda, Cambodia and the
Jewish holocaust. They all told their horrific stories bravely.

But there was something especially extraordinary about the elderly
Roma who had transported herself from a village in eastern Hungary
into the glare of an international conference in one of the most
modern cities in the world.

It was an example of what Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning author Wole
Soyinka would later describe to me as one of those points where people
meet each other in a spirit of "egalitarian awareness".

Six million Jews or one million Tutsis are just numbers. But this
strong Roma woman was a human being who was not ashamed to tell her
story.

Betrayal

The Montreal conference drew personalities from the UN, academia and
the legal profession.

The general aim was to build pressure on politicians to take mass
killings – even in far-off places about which we know little and
sometimes care less – far more seriously.

If that sounds like a fuzzy and vague ambition, Canadian Gen Romeo
Dallaire, who commanded a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the
1994 genocide, begged to differ.

Gen Dallaire led a force in Rwanda which was betrayed by UN
headquarters in New York – his mission was starved of resources and so
forced to observe genocide rather than stop it.

Since that failed mission, he has made a career out of lobbying
politicians to do better on issues like peacekeeping, abolishing the
use of child soldiers and nuclear disarmament.

"This conference is aimed especially at young people," said Gen
Dallaire from a hotel surrounded by the campus buildings of McGill
University, which organised the conference.

"If these young people became politically active," he continued, "they
could dictate a whole new concept of what national interest should be
and what humanity should be."

What is genocide?

Payam Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill and a former
prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia
and Rwanda, said defining genocide mattered from a legal point of view
– but that analysing how it could be prevented was the real point.

"The legal definition of genocide is contained in the 1948 Genocide
convention," he told me.

"In simple terms, it is the intentional, collective destruction of an
entire human group based on national, racial, religious or ethnic
identity."

"But the key point", Mr Akhavan continued, "is that we do not need to
have a legal finding that genocide has been committed in order to take
preventive action."

That is because, of course, by the time the lawyers have decided a
mass killing fits their definition, it is usually too late to act.

The Iranian-born professor said it was necessary to think about the
ingredients of genocide, which he listed as:

* incitement to ethnic hatred
* demonisation of the target group
* radicalisation along ethnic or religious lines
* distribution of weapons to extremist groups
* preparation of lists of those to be exterminated

Similarities

As someone who personally witnessed and reported on the Rwandan
genocide, I found it quite disturbing to read about other mass
killings.

It was not the details which I found shocking, but the spooky
similarities that kept cropping up across the world.

The lists prepared by the Hutu extremists in Rwanda, for example, were
mirrored by the obsessive recording of the details of victims by the
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

The yellow identity stars Jews were forced to wear in World War II
were the equivalent of the ethnic identity cards every Rwandan had to
carry.

This is the grim opposite of Wole Soyinka’s "egalitarian awareness".
It is the social science of genocide, which appears to have common
features across history.

The conference aimed to isolate and analyse Mr Akhavan’s "early
warning" factors to raise awareness.

But what to do with the information?

As speaker after speaker reminded the Montreal conference, the US
government, among others, has asserted that genocide is being
committed right now in the Darfur region of Sudan.

It was continuing even as we sipped our coffee in softly carpeted
rooms and nibbled our Canadian canapes.

Everyone has known about it for several years but virtually nothing
had been done to stop it.

A dissident voice

So all the talk about "early warnings" and "United Nations
peacekeeping forces" and "the will of the international community"
could be said to amount to little.

At this point, a controversial scholar intervened with comments which
challenged the entire conference.

French author Gerard Prunier, like the proverbial ghost at a wedding,
said genocides could not be prevented by the international community.

"When you see a dictatorial regime heating up, everyone starts
talking, talking, talking … and by the time the talking stops,
either matters have quietened down or they have happened."

And that is the crux of the matter, according to Mr Prunier – it is
difficult for politicians or the military to intervene in a situation
that has not yet evolved into a crisis.

Give war a chance?

So what is Mr Prunier’s solution?

"Genocides can only be stopped by the people directly involved – and
usually that means people involved in the war that accompanies most
mass killings."

And if it is the government committing the genocide, the solution is
"arm the rebels", he says.

"It won’t be clean – it will be messy," the French author said, "but
it is more likely to stop the mass killing than international
intervention."

To a large extent, Mr Prunier has history on his side. The Holocaust
only ended when the allies destroyed Hitler’s regime.

The killing fields of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge were only stopped when
the Vietnamese army moved in. And the genocide in Rwanda only ended
when the Tutsi rebels overthrew the extremist Hutu regime.

Against this, it could be argued that some interventions have worked –
for example the Nigerian intervention in Liberia, which was followed
up by a UN peacekeeping mission.

It seems that resolving dramatic human rights abuses may require some
of the diplomacy and the "international good will" that flowed so
freely in Montreal.

But as well as what Winston Churchill called "Jaw Jaw", some
situations, it seems, may only be resolved by "War War".

Published: 2007/10/13 18:25:03 GMT

(c) BBC MMVII

Source:

The Age, Australia
Oct 14 2007

US urges calm as Turkey threatens to strike Kurds

Email Printer friendly version Normal font Large font Molly Moore and
Robin Wright
October 15, 2007

US OFFICIALS have begun intense lobbying to defuse Turkish threats to
launch an attack on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

The US is also troubled by Ankara’s threats to limit access to
crucial air and land routes, which have become a lifeline for US
troops in Iraq.

"The Turkish Government and public are seriously weighing all of
their options," the Assistant Secretary of State, Daniel Fried, said
after meeting officials in Ankara. "We need to focus with Turkey on
our long-term mutual interests."

But as Mr Fried appealed for restraint, Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, speaking at a political rally in Istanbul, urged
Parliament to declare a mobilisation against Kurdish rebels and the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

In the border region, witnesses said Turkish artillery fired seven to
eight shells into a village in northern Iraq late on Saturday – the
latest bout of regular shelling of the mountainous border area where
separatist guerillas are believed to hide.

Fears of a new frontier of instability in the Middle East sent oil
prices soaring on Friday to a record high of $US84 a barrel.

US military officials predicted disastrous consequences if Turkey
carries out a threat to strike northern Iraq, and warned of serious
repercussions for the safety of American troops if Turkey reduced the
supply lines it now permits.

The confluence of two seemingly unrelated events could not have come
at a worse time. The bodies of 13 Turkish soldiers killed last
weekend had barely been buried in towns across Turkey when the House
Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington approved a resolution that
labelled as genocide the mass killings of Armenians during the final
decades of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey does not deny the deaths but argues that they occurred as part
of a war in which Turks were also killed. "This is not only about a
resolution," said Egemen Bagis, a member of the Turkish Parliament
and a foreign policy adviser to Mr Erdogan. "We’re fed up with the
PKK – it is a clear and present danger for us. This insult over the
genocide claims is the last straw."

Domestic politics in both countries – the Armenian lobby that pushed
for the genocide resolution in the US Congress, and growing pressure
on the Turkish President to stop Kurdish rebel attacks – collided to
create an international crisis.

"It’s a difficult time for the relationship," US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said on Saturday, noting that Mr Fried had gone to
Turkey to reassure the Turks "that we really value this
relationship".

A recent poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United
States, a trans-Atlantic public policy organisation, found that
Turkish attitudes towards the US were becoming increasingly hostile.

Using its 100-degree thermometer scale, the fund found that Turkish
"warmth" towards the US had plunged from 28 degrees in 2004 to 11
degrees in 2007.

"Each time we have a soldier killed, many people look at Washington
and they believe that Americans are responsible for this because they
prevent us from stopping the infiltration into Turkey," said Onur
Oymen, deputy chairman of the opposition Republican People’s Party.

Mr Erdogan is feeling increased heat from his military, which is
suspicious of his Islamic roots and acquiescence to Washington in
taking no action against Kurdish rebels in Iraq.

His public is angry over the genocide vote, frustrated with a
European Union that is unwilling to admit Turkey to its club, and
outraged that the US has turned its back on what Turks consider their
own fight against terrorism, a 23-year-long war with the Kurdish
separatists.

WASHINGTON POST

PanARMENIAN.Net

Rice and Gates called on Pelosi not to put H.Res.106 on vote
13.10.2007 15:01 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice and
Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates sent a letter to House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi with a request to refrain from allowing the Armenian
Genocide resolution to reach the House floor for a vote.

`This House resolution could harm American troops in the field,
constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and
significantly damage our efforts to promote reconciliation between
Armenia and Turkey at a key turning point in their relations,’ said
Rice and Gates in the letter, Yerkir reports.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is searching for alternative ways for
supplying its troops in Iraq if Turkey restricts U.S. use of Incirlic
base. U.S. military can be deployed in Jordan and Kuwait.

As to the harm the resolution can do to the Armenia-Turkey relations,
RA President Robert Kocharian said in Brussels, `it’s impossible to
damage relations which do not exist.’

DeFacto Agency, Armenia
Oct 12 2007

NEW HEAD OF NKR SOCIAL INSURANCE STATE FUND APPOINTED

Today Nagorno-Karabakh Republic PM Ara Harutyunian signed an
enactment on Vasily Avetissian’s dismissal from the post of the head
of NKR Social Insurance State Fund.
According to the information DE FACTO got at the NKR government’s
press office, Mikael Virabian had been appointed the new head of NKR
Social Insurance State Fund.

Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Oct 12 2007

The MFA of Azerbaijan is against U. S. Congress decision

[ 12 Oct 2007 21:49 ]

The U.S. House of Representative’s Foreign Affairs Committee adopted
the draft Resolution 106, which characterizes the events of 1915 in
Ottoman Empire related to relocation of the part of the Armenian
population collaborating with invading forces, as `genocide’.

The Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan condemns this decision as wrong
and biased and considers it harmful for the developments in the
region and globally.

Azerbaijan supports the Turkish call to examine the archival
documents related to the World War I tragedies in this part of the
world. It is crucial to learn all details before taking steps.

Azerbaijan suffered itself from notorious ethnic cleansing by
Armenia, vivid example of which is genocide in Azerbaijani town of
Khojaly, where hundreds of women, kids, and elderly people have been
killed. Azerbaijan, which is also a victim of numerous terrorist acts
and occupation of territories by Armenia, knows well how Armenian
diaspora and Government hide their own misdoings through the
aggressive propaganda.

MFA of Azerbaijan strongly urges the U.S. House of Representatives to
refrain from adopting the Resolution 106 in order to demonstrate that
the United States Congress is impartial and not under the pressure of
ethnic lobbies. /APA/

The Irish Times
October 12, 2007 Friday

US genocide claims prompt angry protests in Turkey

Turks took to the streets yesterday in protest at an American
decision to continue with a bill which describes the 90-year-old mass
killings of Armenians as genocide.

Despite intense lobbying by Turkish officials and opposition by US
president George Bush, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the
bill by a 27-21 vote.

Mr Bush had warned that it could harm US-Turkish relations, which are
already tense with Turkey considering a military offensive into Iraq
against Kurdish rebels. The US fears that could destabilise one of
the few relatively peaceful areas in the country.

At the centre of the issue is a claim that up to 1.5 million
Armenians were killed in a systematic genocide between 1915-17,
before modern Turkey was born in 1923.

Turkey says the killings occurred at a time of civil unrest as the
Ottoman Empire was falling apart and that the numbers are inflated.

"Unfortunately, some politicians in the US have once again sacrificed
important matters to petty domestic politics despite all calls to
common sense," Turkey’s President Gul said after the US vote.

Mr Bush had urged Congress to reject the legislation and secretary of
state Condoleezza Rice and defence secretary Robert Gates also
expressed concern.

Passing the measure "at this time would be very problematic for
everything we are trying to do in the Middle East," Ms Rice said
before the vote.

The US embassy in Ankara meanwhile urged Americans to be alert for
possible violence after the vote.

US ambassador Ross Wilson said he regretted the committee’s decision
and said he hoped it would not be passed by the House.

The Moderate Voice
Oct 12 2007

Good Intentions, But Badly Directed
By Jeb Koogler

In most cases – and this one is no different – it’s better to leave
history to the historians. Via The Washington Post, it looks as
though a House panel has ignored that advice and passed a non-binding
resolution to recognize the label of `Armenian genocide.’ Turkey is
pissed, of course, and they’ve withdrawn their ambassador to
Washington.

While its goals are undoubtedly admirable ones, the panel’s decision
to choose now – of all times – to go ahead with this resolution is
absurd. With measures such as these, timing is everything and this is
definitely not the time. America does not need to threaten our
relationship with Turkey over a largely-symbolic Congressional
resolution. On the contrary, policymakers in Washington need to be
working to actively strengthen ties with Ankara.

There are obvious reasons for this: most importantly, Turkey has
shown itself to be a critical partner in encouraging a more moderate
form of Islam; and it has been a major military and strategic ally in
the Middle East for many decades. Unfortunately, mostly as a result
of disagreements over Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq, the past few
years have put increasing strain on American relations with Turkey.
As Washington and Ankara have grown more distant, the Turkish
government has turned away from the West and opened its arms to the
Middle East. Iran and Syria have strengthened ties with Turkey, and
Ankara has made overtures to Hamas in recent months. With Turkey busy
`rediscovering the Middle East,’ the West is finding it increasingly
difficult to work with Ankara and the population is growing more
radicalized and anti-Western.

This latest resolution threatens to strain the relationship even
further. There is already some talk of the US being kicked out of the
Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, as Prime Minister Recep Erdogan
has spoken out quite harshly against the resolution. Meanwhile,
America’s approval rating in Turkey (it was around 60% positive back
in 2000) has recently dropped to 12%. I imagine that, as of today,
12% has become an overestimate.

While I’ve long argued that the United States should be at the
forefront of promoting democracy and human rights, it must be done
strategically. This kind of meaningless Congressional resolution
isn’t likely to promote either of those ideals, but will merely harm
the important relationship that we have with Turkey. I basically
agree with Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino here:

`One of the reasons we opposed the resolution in the House yesterday
is that the president has expressed on behalf of the American people
our horror at the tragedy of 1915. But at the same time, we have
national security concerns, and many of our troops and supplies go
through Turkey. They are a very important ally in the war on terror,
and we are going to continue to try to work with them. And we hope
that the House does not put forward a full vote.’

Actually, I’d take it a step further than Perino, as the danger is
not just about American troop access or Turkish help in Iraq. More
importantly, we don’t want to strain our relationship with Turkey
because they’ve proved to be a tremendously powerful bulwark against
radical Islam. The ruling AKP party, in particular, has provided the
Islamic world with a peaceful, moderate form of Islam that, if
encouraged, can continue to be a model for the rest of the region. If
the United States jeopardizes its relationship with the AKP
government, however, we will forfeit our ability to promote this
trend.

/foreign-affairs/15562/good-intentions-but-badly-d irected/