TURKEY UP IN ARMS OVER HOUSE RESOLUTION AGAINST ARMENIAN ‘GENOCIDE’
Eli Lake -, Staff Reporter Of The Sun
The New York Sun
February 22, 2007 Thursday
Turkey was so alarmed by a proposed House resolution calling the
mass slaughter of Armenians by Turks during World War I a "genocide"
that it dispatched its foreign minister to persuade American Jewish
leaders to lobby against it.
At a suite at the Willard Hotel in Washington on February 5, Abdullah
Gul met with representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, American
Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, Friends of Lubavitch, Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, and United Jewish Communities. According to one
participant in the meeting, the Turkish foreign minister "made a hard
sell," against House resolution 106, whose short title is "Affirmation
of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution."
This participant, who asked not to be named, said Mr. Gul appealed
to the assembled Jewish representatives by noting the singularity
of the German genocide against the Jews and warning that the House
resolution, if passed, would rupture American-Turkish relations.
The Turks have reason to be worried. Although the resolution has
faced opposition from the House leadership in previous congressional
sessions, the current speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of
California, is said to support it. Indeed, Ms. Pelosi has supported
similar resolutions in the past. The resolution is now before the
House Committee on Foreign Affairs, whose chairman, Rep. Tom Lantos of
California, has supported the Armenian genocide resolution in recent
sessions, though he opposed it in the past.
"In the past, the speaker was a very strong obstacle, Speaker
Hastert. He was a strong opponent of genocide recognition," one of
the resolution’s authors, Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California,
told The New York Sun. "We start with a new speaker and a new slate
this time."
Another original sponsor of the resolution, which now counts 176
co-sponsors, Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat of California, said: "In
the past some Jewish organizations or elements thereof or prominent
individuals have come out against this kind of resolution. … Aipac
is neutral on this; they see this as controversial and not all that
related to Israel. An awful lot of Jewish groups are supportive
of recognizing the Armenian genocide. They are for genocide
acknowledgement rather than genocide denial."
Mr. Lantos’s office would not offer a comment on the resolution
yesterday.
The committee chairman is in a difficult position. While he is a
champion of human rights and a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Lantos is also
a strong supporter of Israel, which prizes its strategic friendship
with Turkey.
The Turkish government denies that its military campaign between 1915
and 1917 against the Armenians was a genocide. The Turks contend that
the Armenian families they force-marched and shot were effectively a
fifth column, often armed and working on behalf of the Russian army
in World War I.
The Turkish account, however, is at odds with that of the American
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry Morgenthau, who
wrote in his 1919 memoir, "I am confident that the whole history of
the human race contains no such horrible episode as this." The orders
for the deportations of the Armenian families in 1915 "were merely
giving a death warrant to a whole race," he wrote.
Morgenthau’s grandson, Robert Morgenthau, said yesterday that he
thought the passage of the resolution in this Congress was "extremely
important."
"You know in 1939, just before the Poles were invaded by Hitler,
it was August 21, 1939, Hitler met with his generals and told them,
‘I want every man, woman, and child in the paths of our armies killed.’
For people who say, ‘What will the world say?’ I say, ‘Who remembers
the Armenians?’" Mr. Morgenthau, the district attorney of New York
County, said.
Mr. Morgenthau also said he believed that Jews in particular had an
obligation to acknowledge the Turkish campaign against the Armenians
as genocide. He recalled a conversation he had with Prime Minister
Sharon when he was the Jewish state’s foreign minister. Mr. Sharon
said he had read "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh," the 1934 novel by an
Austrian Jew, Franz Werfel, that was based on the unsuccessful efforts
of some Armenian partisans to defend themselves from the Ottoman army.
"There ought to be protests from the Jews," Mr. Sharon said, according
to Mr. Morgenthau.
Some Turkish diplomats have threatened American bases in Turkey with
closure if Congress passes an Armenian genocide resolution.
A pro bono attorney for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations,
David Saltzman, said the mere introduction of the resolution "brings up
strains in Turkish-American relations. It is really a grand diversion
from the more important issues that our countries work on together."