March 06, 2010, 12:01 AM EST
By Peter S. Green and James Rowley
March 6 (Bloomberg) — Democratic lawmakers bowed to concerns expressed by the Obama administration and agreed not to schedule a full House vote on a resolution that labels as genocide the killing of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, a congressional aide said.
House leaders have no plans at this time for a chamber vote on the measure, which a House committee approved on March 4, the House Democratic leadership aide said yesterday. The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The resolution passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee on a 23-22 vote. Turkey responded by recalling its ambassador in Washington, Namik Tan, for consultations.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had spoken out against a full House vote on March 4 while attending a conference in Costa Rica. She reiterated yesterday that President Barack Obama’s administration “strongly opposes the resolution.”
A full House vote would “impede the normalization process between Turkey and Armenia,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington yesterday before word surfaced of the leadership’s decision. “The best way for Turkey and Armenia to address their shared past is through ongoing negotiations,” he said.
The measure says the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern-day Turkey, killed 1.5 million ethnic Armenians from 1915 to 1923. It asks the president to ensure that U.S. foreign policy reflects “appropriate understanding” of the atrocity and “the consequences of the failure to realize a just resolution.”
Similar Recall
Turkey, a U.S. ally and NATO member, had recalled its U.S. ambassador for a brief period in protest to a similar resolution passed by a House committee in 2007. That measure never came up for a full House vote.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul said on his Web site that the March 4 committee vote was “one-sided and remote from historical realities,” and would hurt talks with Armenia.
“We’ve worked at every level with the American administration on a variety of issues and we’ve always supported Mr. Obama’s vision of peace,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in Ankara yesterday. “We don’t expect this contribution of ours to be sacrificed to a few local political games.”
The resolution showed a lack of “strategic vision” on the part of U.S. lawmakers who supported it, Davutoglu said.
Iranian Trade
Turkey has been expanding trade with Iran and Obama in December called the country an “important player” in efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
Turkey’s border and its trade relationship with Iran makes Turkish support vital for U.S. efforts to use sanctions to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, said Bulent Aliriza, Director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
While the Armenia-related resolution came from Congress and not the administration, Turkey may not see any difference, further hampering U.S. efforts to impose sanctions on Iran, said Henri Barkey, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
“What is clearly very likely is that on Iran we are going to get less cooperation from them,” Barkey said before the aide disclosed that the resolution won’t get a full House vote.
Turkey asserts that the resolution hurts Turkish and Armenian efforts to renew diplomatic relations that were broken over Armenia’s military intervention in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno- Karabakh region following the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
Clinton’s Intervention
Turkey and Armenia agreed in October to renew relations after Clinton helped the countries overcome a last-minute dispute before a signing ceremony in Zurich. Under the accords, which are waiting to be approved by Turkey’s parliament, a historical commission would investigate the killings.
After the French parliament in 2006 approved legislation making it criminal to deny that a genocide took place, Turkey said France had done “irreparable damage” to relations between the two countries.
The chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America, a lobbying group in Washington, praised the House committee shortly after it passed its genocide resolution. “You cannot have a relationship or a reconciliation based upon lies,” Kenneth Hachikian said in an interview after the vote. “Turkey can’t come to the table and say let’s reconcile but we deny what the rest of the world acknowledges.”
The House resolution noted that England, France and Russia called the killings a crime against humanity at the time, and that Turkey’s own government indicted the leaders of the massacres after World War I.
–With assistance from Hans Nichols in Washington and Steve Bryant in Ankara. Editors: Don Frederick, Mike Millard.
-0- Mar/06/2010 05:00 GMT
To contact the reporters on this story: Peter S. Green in Washington at psgreen@bloomberg.net; James Rowley in Washington at jarowley@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jim Kirk at jkirk12@bloomberg.net
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https://www.economist.com/united-states/2010/03/05/past-imperfect-present-tense
Past imperfect, present tense
From Economist.com
Congress reconsiders America’s official position on the Armenian genocide
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