>From the Los Angeles Times
EDITORIAL
It was genocide
March 22, 2006
JOHN EVANS IS THE U.S. ambassador to Armenia, as of this writing. But he
probably won’t be for long. Evans, a career diplomat who was selected to
receive an American Foreign Service Assn. award last year for his frank
public speaking, irked his superiors at the State Department by uttering
the following words at UC Berkeley in February 2005: “I will today call
it the Armenian genocide.” For that bit of truth-telling, Evans was
forced to issue a clarification, then a correction, then to endure
having his award rescinded under pressure from his bosses, and finally
to face losing his job altogether.
What happened in Armenia in 1915 is well known. The Ottoman Empire
attempted to exterminate the Armenian population through slaughter and
mass deportation. It finished half the job, killing about 1.2 million
people. Yet the State Department has long avoided the word “genocide,”
not out of any dispute over history but out of deference to Turkey,
whose membership in NATO and location between Europe and Asia make it a
strategic ally.
It is time to stop tiptoeing around this issue and to accept settled
history. Genocide, according to accepted U.N. definition, means “the
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group.” Armenia is not even a borderline case. Punishing an
ambassador for speaking honestly about a 90-year-old crime befits a
cynical, double-dealing monarchy, not the leader of the free world.
Turks point out that their Ottoman ancestors considered it treason to
side with Russia at the outbreak of World War I, as many Armenians did.
But the massacres were also fueled by Muslim animosity toward a
Christian minority. When then-U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
Henry Morganthau protested the bloodletting, he received a telling
response from Mehmed Talaat, the interior minister in charge of the
anti-Armenian campaign. “Why are you so interested in Armenians anyway?
You are a Jew, these people are Christians,” Talaat said. “Why can’t you
let us do with these Christians as we please?”
For Armenians who escaped the killing and came to this country,
inadequate recognition of their history is crazy-making. Rep. Adam B.
Schiff (D-Burbank), whose district includes the heart of the Armenian
diaspora, keeps introducing a bill to officially recognize the genocide,
only to see congressional leadership quash it each year, under pressure
from the State Department.
Some nations, thankfully, are stepping where Congress fears to tread.
The European Parliament last year passed a nonbinding resolution asking
that Turkey acknowledge the genocide as a precondition for joining the
European Union. The Turkish government, typically, was infuriated, yet
it still desperately wants to join the EU.
One day, the country that was founded as a direct repudiation of its
Ottoman past will face its history squarely, as part of a long-overdue
maturing process. Some day before then, we hope, the State Department
will too.
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Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times