Turkish Forum

Category: Southern Caucasus

  • US Azerbaijanis campaign for elimination of funding for Nagorno-Karabakh

    US Azerbaijanis campaign for elimination of funding for Nagorno-Karabakh

    [ 25 Mar 2010 07:24 ]
    Washington. Isabel Levine–APA. US Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. along with 27 pro-Armenian members of Congress sent a letter to the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs, Azerbaijani Diaspora in US (USAN) told APA’s Washington DC correspondent.

    The congress members want to influence the State-foreign operations and related programs appropriations bill for the Fiscal year of 2011. They request that the subcommittee supports Congress’s funding request for US assistance to Armenia. Their argument is that Armenia is a very special partner of US and the bilateral relations will expand.

    They also continue to push for parity in military assistance between Armenia and Azerbaijan, opening contacts between the US and Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as increasing funding for Nagorno-Karabakh for humanitarian and developmental aid.

    Funding in the Fiscal Year 2010 Omnibus bill provided US$41 million for Armenia and US$8 million for Nagorno-Karabakh.

    In order to prevent this, the US Azerbaijanis Network decided to hold their own campaign, according to which every Azerbaijani American and whoever else, who wishes to support them, writes a letter to Congress members asking to eliminate the Fiscal Year 2011 funding for Nagorno-Karabakh and reduce aid to Armenia. Azerbaijanis also demand increasing the amount of the US funding for Azerbaijan.

  • IMPLICATIONS OF THE FAILED TURKISH-ARMENIAN NORMALIZATION PROCESS

    IMPLICATIONS OF THE FAILED TURKISH-ARMENIAN NORMALIZATION PROCESS

    Turkey Analyst,
    vol. 3 no. 5
    15 March 2010

    Svante E. Cornell

    In spite of great hopes and much foreign pressure, the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process can be said to have failed to bring about its intended result. Under current circumstances, the likelihood of the ratification of the Protocols signed in August 2009 is close to nil, barring some major turn of events. It is therefore time to reflect on the reasons that the process failed; and the implications for Turkey and the wider region. The process itself is in fact illustrative of the erroneous assumptions that Western political leaders appear to have harbored about regional realities.

    BACKGROUND: The Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process got serious on the inter-governmental level in 2008. (See Turkey Analyst, 10 April 2009 for background) Following Turkish President Abdullah Gül’s historic visit to Yerevan, Swiss mediation helped produce Protocols that would lead to the establishment of diplomatic relations and the opening of the common border. The Protocols, originally intended for signing in April 2009, were nevertheless not endorsed formally until August that year.

    Enormous external pressure – primarily from the White House – appears to have been the main reason that the Turkish and Armenian Foreign Ministers signed the Protocols. The presence at the signing ceremony of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana was indicative of the level of pressure on Ankara and Yerevan. Yet even then, the process almost broke down at the last minute, as differences on the ceremony itself led to a three hour long delay, which was only solved by shelving the intended declarations of the two signatories.

    This very delay suggested the lack of enthusiasm that had already begun to grip the Turkish and Armenian governments. Indeed, in the months that followed, it is difficult to avoid the perception that both governments – the Turkish perhaps slightly more than the Armenian – took steps to distance themselves from a process that neither felt comfortable with. In Yerevan, while the government asked the Constitutional Court for an interpretation, leading parliamentarians spoke of the need for an “exit strategy.” In Ankara, the government handed the Protocols to the parliament, but appeared perfectly happy to have it languish there rather than bring them to a vote of approval. As time passed, mutual incriminations ensued: Ankara seemed to seize on the Armenian Constitutional Court’s interpretations of the Protocols as an excuse to delay the process, while Yerevan threatened to shelve it entirely.

    By the spring of 2010, the process was hanging by a thread. Then came the passage (by a single vote’s margin) of a bill to recognize the 1915 massacres of Armenians as Genocide in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. As in previous years that this had happened, visceral reactions ensued in Turkey, including the recall of the Turkish Ambassador to Washington. More unexpected was the introduction and passage of a similar bill in the Swedish Parliament. That bill also passed by a single vote’s margin. In fact, both the ruling coalition government and the leadership of the main opposition Social Democratic Party were opposed to the bill. But because it had been pushed through as a binding resolution at the Social Democratic Party’s yearly Congress, and because four members of the ruling parties split ranks, it eventually passed. Taken together, these two resolutions stirred up emotions in the region – particularly in Turkey – adding what may have been the last two nails in the coffin of the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process.

    IMPLICATIONS: Time has thus come to evaluate why this process went wrong, and what implications are likely to emerge from this failure. The deeply negative effect of foreign parliaments’ meddling in historical truths exacerbated the difficulties in the process and may have helped kill it – if nothing else, given Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reaction to threaten to expel 100,000 Armenian migrant workers living in Turkey. (In fact, the real number  is believed to be lower.) But as deplorable as the role of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Swedish Parliament may have been, they were not the root causes of the failure of the normalization process.

    One key reason, however, was that the process was allowed to proceed on the basis of divergent and erroneous assumptions. First, the tragedy of 1915 was a main cause of the discord between the two countries, and intimately connected with the normalization process. Ankara, rejecting the label of genocide, interpreted the Protocols as having moved that issue to a commission of historians to be created following ratification. Perhaps naively, Turkish leaders therefore expected the Diaspora Armenian push for genocide recognition to be eased – an unlikely prospect given Yerevan’s limited influence on the Diaspora, and the latter’s deep misgivings about the Protocols. But as the Armenian Constitutional Court made clear, Armenia interpreted the Protocols as in no way hindering the push for international recognition. As Armenian and allied groups kept pushing for recognition in both the U.S. and Europe, it became clear that the normalization process would not even temporarily relieve Turkey of that headache.

    The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict posed an even larger problem – but also one whose importance the Western powers fundamentally misunderstood. Turkey had originally closed its border with Armenia as a result of the Armenian occupation of the Azerbaijani province of Kelbajar – one of seven districts outside of the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabach that Armenian forces occupied and ethnically cleansed during the war. To most Turks, therefore, some form of progress in the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations was a prerequisite for opening the border. In fact, Turkish leaders appear to have embarked on the process in the belief – entertained by American and Russian diplomats – that there was indeed a serious prospect for a breakthrough in the Armenian-Azerbaijani talks. As the AKP had not been closely involved in the conflicts in Caucasus prior to 2008, its leaders overlooked the fact that such imminent breakthroughs in the negotiations had been predicted frequently during the past fifteen years, without results. In other words, it was clear from the AKP leadership’s moves that it gambled on a breakthrough in negotiations that was never to be. (See Turkey Analyst, 14 September 2009 issue for background)

    If the Turkish government miscalculated, the West’s behavior was unrealistic. Egged on by NGOs such as the International Crisis Group, American and European leaders urged Ankara to de-link the Turkish-Armenian normalization process from the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Positive ties between Turkey and Armenia, they argued, would lead Armenia to feel more secure, thereby more likely to make difficult concessions over Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet de-linking the two conflicts was both politically and practically impossible.

    To begin with, the Western logic did not play out. Having signed the Protocols, Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian lost a nationalist coalition partner and a good deal of domestic public support. Sarkisian thus moved to harden rather than soften Armenia’s negotiating stance in talks with Azerbaijan, putting those talks in peril.

    Secondly, whether one liked it or not, de-linking Turkish-Armenian ties from the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict was impossible in the Turkish domestic context. This has often been blamed on Azerbaijan’s supposed “lobbying” in Turkey. Reality is much simpler: most of the Turkish population and a significant share of the AKP voters and politicians (though not the top leadership) are strongly wedded to Turkic solidarity. Thus, the AKP leadership faced vehement nationalist opposition from within the party (not simply the nationalist opposition) to ratifying the Protocols without some progress on the Karabakh conflict. Given the close linguistic ties between Turkey and Azerbaijan, the AKP leadership knew that a single camera crew, filming from Azerbaijani refugee camps to which 800,000 people had been confined by Armenian conquests, could generate a public outcry against the government should it open the border without Armenian concessions. Rather than understanding this reality and putting serious efforts behind the diplomatic endeavors on Nagorno-Karabakh, the Western powers pushed harder for Ankara to de-link the two processes.

    Stuck in the Mountains of Karabakh?

    This was all the more remarkable given the recent history of the South Caucasus. Indeed, if there was one lesson to be learned from the Russian-Georgian war, it was that the conflicts in the Caucasus were not “frozen”. They were dynamic and dangerous processes that the West had willfully ignored, thereby contributing to allowing the tensions between Russia and Georgia to spiral out of control. The Russian-Georgian war having rocked the foundations of the European security structure, the lessons for Nagorno-Karabakh were clear: left to its own devices, the conflict was at great risk of re-erupting, an event that could pull in regional powers including Russia, Iran and Turkey. Substantial revamping of efforts to resolve that conflict was in order, but the West instead decided to push it even deeper into the “freezer”.

     In general terms, this failure  may have left the region in an even more precarious position than it was before its inception. Turkish and American policies have alienated Azerbaijan – damaging Western interests in that crucial country and in the broader Caspian region. The energy partnership between Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan – which formed the cornerstone of Western policies toward the region since the Clinton Administration’s times – is in tatters, as seen in the difficulties Baku and Ankara are experiencing in achieving a transit agreement for Azerbaijani gas sales to Europe. Turkey’s ties with Armenia have also been greatly damaged. It remains unclear if the bilateral relationship can muddle along, or whether it will revert to pre-2008 levels.

    Turkey’s relations with the U.S. and Russia have also suffered. With Washington, Ankara is frustrated with the Obama administration’s  refusal to seriously try to achieve progress on Nagorno-Karabakh, and especially with its failure to prevent the genocide resolution passing in the House Foreign Relations Committee. With Moscow, Ankara had hoped for support in resolving the Karabakh conundrum; but as senior Turkish officials have stated, Moscow instead grew unhelpful, seconding the American view that the two processes should not be linked. This in turn led Ankara to doubt whether Moscow really wanted either of the two processes to see progress. Finally, Armenia’s weakened leadership is now highly unlikely to make concessions on Karabakh in the near future.

    CONCLUSIONS: What lessons does the failure of the Turkish-Armenian normalization process hold for the future? Several are in order. First, the resilience of nationalist sentiment and traditional allegiances – such as that between Turkey and Azerbaijan –should not be underestimated. Second, Western and in particular American leaders cannot expect to ignore regional realities and strong-arm local leaders into compliance with their agendas without taking a long-term and serious interest in the deeper problems of the region.

    Third, the unresolved conflicts of the Caucasus have once more showed their powerful role as an impediment to progress and stability in the entire wider Black Sea region. For a decade and a half, the Western powers have sought to achieve policy goals in the region by willfully circumnavigating these conflicts, rather than seriously working to resolve them. Ironically, relatively limited progress toward a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would likely have sufficed to allow the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process to go forward. Instead, that conflict was the key element that derailed the process.

    In the final analysis, the failure of the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process has helped reiterate one useful conclusion. Should Western leaders truthfully seek to stabilize the Wider Black Sea region, they should know the place to start: A serious and long-term engagement to resolve rather than to freeze the region’s conflicts.

    Svante E. Cornell is Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center.

    © Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center, 2010. This article may be reprinted provided that the following sentence be included: “This article was first published in the Turkey Analyst (www.turkeyanalyst.org), a biweekly publication of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center”.

  • Armenian President To Visit Syrian Site Of 1915 Tragedy

    Armenian President To Visit Syrian Site Of 1915 Tragedy

    AC06DCD2 A1A0 4A52 A701 C9D71CA77870 mw270 sArmenian President Serzh Sarkisian

    March 24, 2010
    PRAGUE — Armenia’s President Serzh Sarkisian is due to visit an area of Syria that was the final destination in what Armenians consider the first genocide of the 20th century, RFE/RL’s Armenian Service reports.

    Sarkisian, who held talks on March 23 with Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, was scheduled to visit the northeastern city of Deir-el-Zor later today.

    The desert surrounding the city proved the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Armenians forced out of their homes in the final years of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago.

    Those who did not die en route met their death in camps such as Deir-el-Zor.

    In 1990, the Armenian community in Syria built a memorial complex there dedicated to the victims.

    For decades, survivors and descendants have been campaigning for the World War I-era mass killings to be recognized as genocide — a label Turkey rejects.

    On March 23, Sarkisian suggested in a newspaper interview that Turkey’s reluctance to unconditionally normalize relations with Armenia is only facilitating a broader international recognition of the killings as genocide.

    Sarkisian spoke to the Syrian daily “Al Watan” during an official visit that began on March 22.

    He was asked specifically to comment on a resolution recognizing the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide that was adopted by a U.S. congressional committee on March 4.

    “One thing is obvious to me,” he replied. “The longer the process of normalizing our relations [with Turkey] lasts, the larger the number of states adopting such resolutions may become.”

    Turkish leaders link the ratification of the normalization protocols with a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that would satisfy Azerbaijan.

    They also say that the genocide resolutions adopted by the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee as well as Sweden’s parliament this month have further complicated Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.

    By contrast, Yerevan has welcomed both resolutions.

    In other remarks to “Al Watan,” Sarkisian said that Azerbaijani territory currently held by Armenian forces could be returned in exchange for security and self-determination for the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

    Sarkisian reiterated Yerevan’s long-standing policy of Armenian forces withdrawing from seven Azerbaijani districts around Nagorno-Karabakh in the event of an agreement on its final status.

    Speaking at a joint news conference with Sarkisian on March 22, Assad offered Syria’s help in establishing cordial relations between Armenia and Turkey for the sake of regional security and stability.

    https://www.rferl.org/a/Armenian_President_To_Visit_Syrian_Site_Of_1915_Tragedy/1992548.html
  • Armenia: Key Beneficiary of Russian-Georgian Border Opening

    Armenia: Key Beneficiary of Russian-Georgian Border Opening

    March 23, 2010

    By: Emil Danielyan

    Verkhny Lars checkpoint

    Russia and Georgia have reopened their main land border crossing less than 18 months after fighting their brief, but bitter war and severing diplomatic relations. Armenia appears to have been the main driving force behind the development, and will likely become the key beneficiary of renewed commerce through the Kazbegi/Upper Lars narrow pass in the Caucasus Mountains.

    Upper Lars is the only Russian-Georgian border crossing located beyond Georgia’s Russian-backed breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It served as Armenia’s sole overland commercial conduit to Russia and Europe until being controversially closed by Moscow in June 2006 at the height of a Russian-Georgian spy scandal. Armenian exporters of agricultural produce and other perishables were particularly reliant upon it, accounting for much of the cargo traffic through Upper Lars in the summer and fall each year. Its closure, ostensibly due to an upgrading of Russian border control facilities, forced them to re-route their supplies through the more expensive and time-consuming rail-ferry services between Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.

    Hence, the Armenian government’s strong interest in seeing the border crossing re-opened as soon as possible. It has for several years pressed the Russians to complete the checkpoint repairs on their side of the frontier and repeatedly secured corresponding reassurances from them. Some pro-government Armenian lawmakers exposed Yerevan’s frustration with the apparent Russian blockade of Georgia in late 2006, when they publicly accused Moscow of disregarding the interests of Russia’s main regional ally in its escalating standoff with Tbilisi. The August 2008 war in South Ossetia served to dash Armenian hopes that the border would re-open anytime soon.

    Yet, despite remaining technically at war, Moscow and Tbilisi subsequently engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomacy on Upper Lars. Armenia is known to have arranged and mediated at least one round of the Russian-Georgian proxy negotiations reportedly held in Yerevan in October 2009. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced two months later that he saw no “particular obstacles” to re-opening Upper Lars and resuming direct flight services between Russia and Georgia, despite the Kremlin’s continued refusal to do business with the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili (Regnum, December 9). Later in December, the Russian and Georgian governments announced that they had agreed to resume passenger and cargo traffic through the mountain pass from March 1, 2010 (RIA Novosti, December 24, 2009).

    Both sides honored that agreement, drawing praise from not only Armenia, but the United States and the European Union. The US Ambassador to Georgia, John Bass, hailed the development as “a positive step that will further the improvement of international relations and the economic status of the region’s population.” For his part, Spanish Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, inspected the border crossing during his March 3 visit to Georgia (www.rferl.org, March 5).

    “I can confirm that [Russian-Georgian] negotiations indeed took place in Armenia and with Armenia’s mediation,” Armenian Foreign Minister, Edward Nalbandian, told journalists on March 2. He called the resulting agreement “a big success” for all three countries involved (www.armenialiberty.org, March 2).

    The deal could not have come at a better time for Armenia, whose economy has long been hamstrung by closed borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan, and still reeling from the 2009 global financial crisis. Local entrepreneurs say that the positive impact of re-opening the Upper Lars on the domestic economy and its agricultural sector, in particular, will be felt as soon as this summer.

    Arsen Ghazarian, the Chairman of the Armenian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, forecast that transportation costs incurred by exporters will fall by at least 25 percent. According to Ghazarian, who also owns a cargo shipment company, a single truck laden with Armenian agricultural products takes at least 23 days to reach Russia through a Black Sea rail-ferry link. Going through Upper Lars will reduce shipping time by almost half, he said (Kapital, March 2).

    With Russian-Georgian trade having been reduced by Moscow to a trickle in recent years, the border re-opening is of lesser economic significance to Georgia, at least in the short term. The Saakashvili administration’s willingness to restore commercial links with Georgia’s arch-enemy resulted, among other things, from its warm rapport with Armenia’s current leadership. Even after the Russian-Georgian war, the two South Caucasus neighbors managed to reconcile their differing geopolitical orientations and focus instead on common interests.

    Saakashvili said that the Georgian-Armenian relationship is as “cloudless” as ever, as he greeted his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, in the Georgian port of Batumi on February 27. Their two-day informal talks reportedly centered on economic issues, with both presidents pledging to foster Georgian-Armenian economic “integration.” “We are dependent upon each other and we should use this circumstance for good,” the Georgian leader told journalists (Armenian Public Television, February 28).

    The venue of the talks was also symbolic. Batumi and Georgia’s other major Black Sea port, Poti, process at least two-thirds of freight shipped to and from Armenia. Use of Georgian territory by Armenian trading companies should expand not only as a result of the Upper Lars re-opening, but also the ongoing reconstruction of roads in southern Georgia leading to the Black Sea coast. The Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) agreed last September to support the project with a $500 million loan. An additional $500 million loan approved by the ADB at the time will finance the planned expansion of Armenian highways stretching from the border with Iran to southern Georgia. The funding, requested by the Armenian government, is a further indication that the landlocked country will regard Georgia and, to a lesser extent, Iran, as its most reliable supply line even in the unlikely event of the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border.

    https://jamestown.org/program/armenia-key-beneficiary-of-russian-georgian-border-opening/

  • Talking Turkey about the Armenian Genocide, Tim Gannuzzi, Column, March 18, 2010

    Talking Turkey about the Armenian Genocide, Tim Gannuzzi, Column, March 18, 2010

    KANADA: Calgary Herald’da yayinlanan “Talking Turkey about Armenian genocide” baslikli yaziya cevaben CTC’nin editor’e gonderdigi mektubu asagida gorebilirsiniz.

    Banu

    RE: Talking Turkey about the Armenian Genocide, Tim Gannuzzi, Column, March 18, 2010

    While Tim Gannuzzi is certainly entitled to his own opinion, he is not entitled to his own facts (“Talking Turkey about the Armenian Genocide” March 18, 2010). Turkey  has no intention of making “everyone forget” about its history – neither its good nor its bad. There is no debate that hundreds of thousands of Armenians fell victim to war time chaos and widespread violence during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. However, to claim that this was an organized attempt at mass extermination is to play  fast and loose with the facts.  It is not just Turkey’s government that objects to this label. The ‘genocide’ label is also rejected by respected Western scholars such as Professor Bernard Lewis, who teaches history at Princeton University and was the recipient of the National Humanities Medal in 2006. Contrary to what Gannuzzi takes as uncontested truth, there is a legitimate scholarly debate around this matter.


    Mr. Gannuzzi’s understanding of the facts is not only limited when it comes to history. While he may think that Canada and Turkey compete for market share in the international oil market, he demonstrates a poor geopolitical understanding of the dynamics around Turkey, including the energy sector. Regardless of Turkey’s geostrategic importance, claims of genocide is a serious matter of legal and moral nature which requires a language of knowledge, not armchair conjectures. Turks reject being accused of a crime which they believe, on the basis of information available, they have not committed. Even in the 20 Parliaments where the Armenian ethnic lobbying proved successful, significant numbers of parliaments voted against pro-Armenian bills in any bills. In any case, are we to write history according to how parliaments vote? Who needs historians then? Are we to leave crimes to be ascertained in parliaments, rather than courts?


    Curiously, Mr. Gannuzzi’s article fails to point out that Turkey and Armenia have made serious steps towards reconciliation and normalization of their relationship. Last year, both countries agreed to set up a historic commission to address the issue of Armenian-Turkish relations during World War I – this includes the opening of Turkish and Armenian archives. Canada could play a vital role in providing support towards reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia. Reproducing a one-sided narrative and disregarding legitimate concerns, on the other hand, is not helpful at all.


    Best regards,

    Kevser Korhan
    President, Council of Turkish Canadians
    2706 Alta Vista Drive, Suite 801
    Ottawa, ON
    K1V 7T4

    =========================================================

    It was chaos, but not genocide

    By Kevser Korhan, Calgary HeraldMarch 23, 2010

    Read more:

    Pro-Turkish protesters wave Turkish flags during a demonstration in Stockholm on Sunday against the decision by Sweden’s parliament to call the killing of Armenians under Ottoman rule during the First World War genocide. Reader says Turks are tired of being accused of a crime they didn’t commit.

    Photograph by: Henrik Montgomery, AFP-Getty Images, Calgary Herald

    Re: “Talking Turkey about the Armenian genocide,” Tim Giannuzzi, Opinion, March 18.

    Turkey has no intention of making “everyone forget” about its history. There is no debate that hundreds of thousands of Armenians fell victim to wartime chaos and widespread violence during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. To claim that this was an organized attempt at mass extermination is to play fast and loose with the facts. It is not just Turkey’s government that objects to the genocide label; it is also rejected by respected western scholars such as Bernard Lewis, who teaches history at Princeton University and was the recipient of the 2006 National Humanities Medal.

    There is a legitimate scholarly debate around this matter. Turks reject being accused of a crime which they believe, on the basis of information available, they have not committed.

    Even in the 20 parliaments where the Armenian ethnic lobbying proved successful, significant numbers of parliaments voted against pro-Armenian bills. Are we to write history according to how parliaments vote? Who needs historians then? Are we to leave crimes to be ascertained in parliaments, rather than courts?

    Tim Giannuzzi fails to point out that Turkey and Armenia have made serious steps toward reconciliation and normalization of their relationship.

    Last year, both countries agreed to set up a commission to address Armenian-Turkish relations during the First World War; this includes the opening of Turkish and Armenian archives. Canada could play a vital role in providing support toward reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia.

    Kevser Korhan,

    Ottawa

    Kevser Korhan is president of the Council of Turkish Canadians

    © Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
  • The Never-Ending Armenian Genocide Resolution

    The Never-Ending Armenian Genocide Resolution


    by Morton Abramowitz

    03.19.2010

    Over the last forty years, a resolution has frequently come up in one or both houses of Congress declaring the killings of over a million Armenians in present-day Turkey during World War I a genocide. The resolution has always failed to pass. But each time it comes up Armenian Americans, Turks and our politicians have acted in the same way. It has become almost a ritual.

    For Armenian-Americans it always entails an enormous effort, and ends in political abandonment. Getting a resolution passed is the principal purpose of leading Armenian organizations, which ceaselessly raise awareness and funds to lobby Congress and presidential administrations. Their effort is intense at election time, when monies are given and commitments exacted from candidates to support calling the events of 1915 a genocide. They always get much sympathy from presidential contenders, and sometimes, as with Mr. Obama, specific statements using the term genocide. Legislators also often pay attention to Armenian groups, particularly where there are large populations of Armenian descent, as in California.

    But every time the resolution has come up, the results remind one of the famous antics of the unforgettable, hard-nosed Lucy in the comic strip Peanuts, who holds the football with her finger for the believing Linus to kick. As he rushes to kick the ball, she invariably pulls it aside and Linus bites the dust. So it is that the Armenians find themselves with presidents forsaking their promises or reverting to a low profile on the resolution and their subordinates taking the lead in opposition, or legislators who similarly back down for national-security reasons. Aggrieved Armenians resolutely reject the assertion that American national interests regarding Turkey are so compelling or so threatened that political leaders will always fear the consequences of Turkish anger in expressing support or voting for such a morally compelling resolution. They impressively join the fray, year after year, despite repeated failure.

    For Turkey, the Armenian genocide issue in America, its major ally, has become increasingly contentious. The Turks vehemently deny genocide occurred; it is a matter of national honor in a country where nationalism remains very strong and politically potent. Ankara acknowledges that the huge numbers of Armenians and Turks were slaughtered, but as the result of a terrible war. Many fear passage of such resolutions will somehow ultimately lead Armenians to seek reparations from Turkey. They argue that the issue should be left to historians to determine, not legislators—although Turkish and Armenian historians agreeing on the matter seems far-fetched.

    Turkish governments complain bitterly when resolutions are introduced in other countries and threaten vague but serious consequences—yet they rarely follow through with major measures, evidenced by the passage of such a resolution in France. The rage of the Turkish government and public is greatest when it gets congressional attention in the United States, setting off fears in Washington that the consequences could be very damaging in such important places as Afghanistan and Iraq. In America, as in France, Turkey cannot easily appeal to the public: there aren’t many Americans of Turkish descent around, and not much of the electorate is interested. Instead they bring out all the heavy cannon they can to turn back the resolution—numerous lobbyists, the large military contractors, the American Jewish community (because, until recently, of the strong Turkey-Israel relationship) and most important, the executive branch. Passage of a resolution would be a huge domestic political blow for any Turkish government. Turkey’s efforts have always worked.

    This year Turkish government anger seemed greater over the resolution passing just the House Committee on International Relations, which has happened before. The Turks felt that the administration (as well as the American Jewish community, which they believe is monolithic) was insufficiently active in opposing the resolution. They recalled their ambassador and are considering other punitive measures. But after the administration’s indeed belated opposition, the resolution appears not likely to even reach the floor. Things were much more bitter than usual this year because Ankara came up with a creative approach of proposing and working out agreements with neighboring Armenia to normalize frozen relations, which it also hoped would help postpone any genocide resolution in America indefinitely. But that effort, desirable on its own, stalled politically in Turkey—the Obama administration’s expectation that the Turkish government would submit the agreements for parliamentary approval contributed to its delay in weighing in on the resolution. This year, on the commemorative date of April 24, how Mr. Obama—who used the genocide word as a candidate, but hasn’t yet as president—speaks to the Armenian community will be closely watched and another storm is possible. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has remained very vocal on the whole issue.

    For the American media, a genocide resolution is hardly an identifiable issue. Usually it gets a few inches in the middle of the paper, although this year’s Turkish threats caught more press attention.  In 1990, a quite extraordinary two-day debate took place in the Senate over a genocide resolution between the two party leaders, Senator Dole and Senator Byrd—and got barely a mention in the national press. I remember it because as our ambassador in Turkey I spent months lobbying some sixty senators to reject the resolution.

    Most Americans who pay attention to the issue probably sympathize with the Armenians and believe historical evidence supports their claim of genocide. They tend to believe Turkey should come to grips with its past.  Others question, whatever the history, that it is bizarre for the American Congress to express views of what happened one hundred years ago in wartime in another country.  But all that pales for many congressmen and presidents, whatever their commitments in election times, to compelling foreign-policy concerns with Turkey.

    Can this dynamic be changed? Not likely in the short run. The Armenian community will not give up. Moreover they believe that despite Turkey’s growing international importance, its position on this issue is eroding. Some twenty countries have called events genocide—including Sweden, a strong supporter of Turkey’s bid for EU membership, which only last week passed a genocide resolution by one vote. Even with the issue so deeply felt and politically explosive in Turkey, such governments aren’t likely change their stance even as they search for ways to fend off resolution battles.

    Perhaps over time and because of increasing public discussion in Turkey (a recent phenomenon) that will change. Conceivably our Congress may grow tired of the endless battle, but the politics are hard to put aside. Probably the best hope is the realization of Armenian-Turkish reconciliation, which will make it easier to proceed practically to better deal with horrible history. Meanwhile, stay tuned for the next episode.

    Morton Abramowitz, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, was American ambassador to Turkey 1989–1991.