Armenian genocide vote losing to cynical calculations

It was a grand and appropriate gesture, befitting statesmen, by the US House of Representatives to officially dub the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks as “genocide”. The US need not have made the first move on this, but it did it in line with its assumed role as a global leader, as a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, reality hit the House representatives, real hard. It is not the truth that prevails, even if it is a genocide. Usually it are the hard, cynical ground realities that win.

Turkey understood that well when it warned the US that its special relationship with Turkey was at stake if the resolution was passed. That would mean loss of Turkish logistical support for the US war in Iraq. That could also mean that Turkey would go ahead, despite pleas for restraint from the US, and invade Iraq to flush out its Kurd rebels.

Worried about antagonizing Turkish leaders, House members from both parties have begun to withdraw their support from a resolution backed by the Democratic leadership that would condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians nearly a century ago, reports The New York Times.

Earlier President George Bush had asked the House to reconsider passing the resolution, because of its repercussions on relations with Turkey.

A brave effort by the House seems now doomed. Bush seems to understand global realities and play them better than the House representatives. The US does not have the moral leadership of the world, nor should it try to adopt that posture.

In the months to come, the US will bluff and bluster, rant at Russian and Iran, say it is promoting democracy, justice and freedom around the world. But as the folks in the White House already know, this is only propaganda. The folks in the House were naïve enough to take it seriously, and tried to be genuine promoters of good causes around the world.

Turkey has promised to turn over documents and support a conference to determine whether there was a genocide of Armenians. That conference would take years to convene, and maybe years to arrive at any conclusion. But it may now provide the House of Representatives a fig-leaf of an excuse to get out of the embarrassment their idealism got them into.

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The Armenian genocide, and Turkish denials

The Armenian genocide, and Turkish denials

Despite the evidence, Turkey denies the genocide of the Armenians during the first World War.
Like the Germans after World War II, Turkey should accept that there was a genocide on its soil, apologize for it, make reparations where required, and move forward. Then only can it claim to be part of the civilized world.

As the successor to the Ottoman empire, the modern Turkish state has instead spent millions of pounds on public relations and lobbying to dissuade western governments from labeling the events of 1915 - 1917 a genocide, according to The Guardian. It cancelled defense contracts with France last year when its national assembly voted to make denial of the Armenian holocaust a crime.

Against the protests of US President George Bush, who is worried about retaliation from Turkey, the US Congress is planning to officially recognize as a genocide the forced deportations and massacre of Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey does not accept that there was a genocide against the Armenians arguing instead that the Armenians were killed in widespread fighting.

But critics within and outside Turkey insist that the country come to terms with this gory and controversial element of its past. Turkish author, and Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted in Turkey after he referred to the Armenian issue. "What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo," he told the BBC in 2005 after he returned to Turkey to face charges against him.

Turkey’s reign of terror against the Armenians was an attempt to destroy the race, and the Armenian death toll was almost a million and a half, according to Robert Fisk in his book “The Great War for Civilization.” On September 15, 1915, Fisk writes, the then Turkish interior minister Talaat Pasha, cabled an instruction, of which a carbon copy still exists, to his prefect in Aleppo, telling him that he had already been informed that the government “had decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey”.

Fisk found from eyewitness that in Margada on the Turkish-Syria border over 50,000 Armenians had been killed. Turks tied together Armenian men, women, and children, starved and sometimes naked, and pushed them off the hill of Margada into the river, and shot one of them, according to Fisk. The body of the person shot then dragged the others down into the water, at the expense of a single bullet.

There are innumerable parallel that can be drawn between Margada and Auschwitz, and between the Ottoman Empire and Nazi Germany. Where the paths differ is that while Germany acknowledges and repents for the Holocaust, the Turks insist that there wasn’t a genocide of the Armenians. It resorts to blackmail of countries that would refer to the killings as genocide.