Category: America

[ 10 Mar 2010 14:44 ]
By Alexander Jackson, Caucasian Review of International Affairs exclusively for APA

The tangled relationship between history and politics was underlined last week when the US House Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly voted to label the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as ‘genocide’ (BBC, March 5). In principle the resolution now moves to the floor of the House for a full vote.

In practice, this is unlikely to happen. The Obama Administration stayed oddly quiet in the run-up to the committee vote, until, at the last minute, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acted. She called on committee chairman Howard Berman to acknowledge that a vote would damage US-Turkish ties and undermine efforts at reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia. The US government is now moving to block the resolution coming before the full House (RFE/RL, March 5).

However, its opposition has been weak, and certainly less vociferous than that of George Bush in 2007, when a similar resolution was passed. The current Administration’s last-minute scramble looks like a foreign-policy miscalculation rather than a deliberate omission, although the reaction in Turkey is nonetheless furious.

If the resolution stays out of the House, then Turkey is likely to limit its immediate response to angry protests and denunciations. However, the longer term implications are harder to gauge, and potentially serious. Suat Kiniklioglu, a representative of Turkey’s ruling AKP, made it clear that the implications of a full vote would be serious: “Everything from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iraq to the Middle East process would be affected. There would be major disruption to the relationship between Turkey and the US” (Guardian, March 5).

The most commonly voiced danger is that Ankara would deny the US access to the Incirlik air base, a vital logistical hub for supplying Afghanistan and an essential part of any plan to withdraw from Iraq. Turkey might also withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. Either of these may be too harsh and too obvious a measure, but both will become more viable options if the relationship deteriorates further. The main danger is more subtle. Turkish cooperation on vital issues would be much harder to come by. In particular, securing Ankara’s assistance to pressure Iran over its nuclear programme would be extremely difficult.

The damage may already have been done. The perception that Washington does not value Turkey’s strategic leverage has been underlined by the vote, even if the White House now fights to stop it going to the House. In a politically charged atmosphere such as Turkey, the actions of the US legislature are likely to be conflated with the opinions of the executive.

In this respect the remarks of committee chairman Berman come across as flippant and dismissive. He stated that Turkey is “a vital and, in most respects, a loyal ally of the United States”, which could easily be construed as a patronising chastisement (House Foreign Affairs Committee, March 4). More significantly, he brushed aside Turkish criticism by arguing that “Turkey values its relations with the United States at least as much as we value our relations with Turkey.” In other words, you need us too much to respond to this.

Such attitudes will hardly reduce the existing strains on the Turkish-American alliance. Recent events will intensify Ankara’s strategic shift towards Russia (notwithstanding the fact that Russia’s State Duma too has officially recognised 1915 events as genocide). Any policies or geopolitical shifts which seem to oppose ‘American imperialism’ will be loudly welcomed on the Turkish streets, a fact which will not be lost on the populist AKP.

In fact, although the Turkish government asserts otherwise, this growing tide of nationalist anger could do serious damage to the protocols which would formalise the rapprochement with Armenia. The AKP holds the parliamentary majority necessary to ratify the protocols, but was unwilling to push the matter too hard even before the US committee vote. In the aftermath of the resolution, nationalist anger will only intensify, forcing the AKP to expend even more political capital on ratification.

It may be unwilling to do so, and prefer to view the current clamour as a justification to block ratification, blaming the issue on Armenia and its powerful diaspora in the US. Reassuringly, it seems the AKP, hoping that a full House vote on the resolution will be blocked, is unlikely to resort to such measures at the moment, although the rapprochement has certainly been damaged by the vote – as Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu observed bluntly, “Further intervention by third parties will render this normalization impossible” (Sundays Zaman, March 7). Turkey undertook the rapprochement out of its own national interest, not to please Washington, but the vote looks like a clumsy attempt to lean on Ankara.

That is the crux of the matter. Mr Berman insists that the resolution is simply historical. But Washington must understand that this vote is construed – in Ankara and across Turkey – as undue, poorly-timed pressure on the normalisation process between Turkey and Armenia. After all, Turks may reasonably ask, why now?

The Obama Administration is likely to salvage the matter for now by keeping the vote out of the House. But its lacklustre response to the issue will not win America many friends in Turkey, which has been decidedly underwhelmed by the US in recent years. Simply assuming that Turkey needs America, or taking it for granted, is short-sighted. The consequences of the current crisis may not be visible for some time, but they could be serious.

By Tülin Daloglu   03/10/10 at 12:00 AM

Has Congress considered any measure as often over the last four decades as the “Armenian Genocide” resolution? Again and again the bill has returned to Capitol Hill, only to fail each time. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has debated the bill at least four times since 2000, and it has become increasingly clear that each committee member believes that what happened to the Armenians during World War I was indeed a “genocide.” Yet despite that seemingly unanimous position, the resolution passed last week on a 23-22 vote. When it was considered in 2007, the committee passed it by six votes. Given how the gap has closed, the measure doesn’t stand a chance to get a floor vote this time.

This is indeed a positive development for Turkey, even though Turks are deeply offended that the vote took place at all. They’re sick and tired of the House having this debate, and many would love to see Congress promise never to discuss it again. Of course, that will never happen. Surely, Armenians don’t relish this endless conversation either, but clearly many feel morally obliged to carry on the fight for their loved ones. While I feel strongly that it’s a mistake for Congress to legislate this conflicted bit of history, I fully respect the hard work of the Armenians to keep the issue alive.

That said, it is important for Turkey not to overplay its hand. Ankara recalled its ambassador to Washington, Namik Tan, soon after the bill passed the committee. I am not even sure as to whether that was the right decision. But Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is adamant that Ambassador Tan will not be returning to the U.S. until “there is a clear development on this issue.” It’s fair to speculate that Turkey likes to get assurances from President Obama that he will not use the term “Armenian Genocide” in this year’s April 24 statement. While doing that, Erdogan rebuked Berman without fully understanding why he gave extra time for the committee members to finish voting. On Tuesday, he said, “you will call the U.S. an advanced democracy; do every thing that a progressive democracy can not tolerate. This is not the right thing. Yet this is what they do.”

But for now at least, the resolution is dead. No one in Congress wants to assume the economic and national security risks of a full House vote. They wished Turkey to deal with this issue as plain historical fact and get over with it long time ago. But it isn’t that simple for Turkey, whose citizens remain convinced that accepting the label of “genocide” will touch off a generation of reparations claims. More importantly, many Turks believe that during World War I the Ottomans criminally neglected their own population as well, and that the Armenians were hardly the only ones to suffer. Because of that widespread suffering, they reason, the atrocities that Armenians faced could not be considered a “genocide.” Refusing to acknowledge a Turkish side of the story now only serves to add to the tragedy rather than remedy it.

Both Turks and Armenians want to reconcile, but they seem to be in it for the wrong reasons. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian signed two protocols five months ago in an attempt to normalize their relationship, with strong U.S. support. But House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.) was correct when he said last week that “[T]here is a (strong) likelihood that these protocols will not be ratified (by the respective parliaments) in the near future because the Turkish Prime Minister said he won’t put those into effect until the Nagorno-Karabagh issue is resolved.”

Turkish leaders will not admit it, but they have begun the process of de-linking the Nagorno-Karabagh issue from the Turkey-Armenia normalization process. The Turkish government misjudged the situation, and did not take into account the influence of Azerbaijan. For Turks, “[m]aking a rapprochement was a play toward the U.S. and Congress (to get rid of the genocide resolutions),” said Thomas Goltz, a political science scholar at Montana State University. “What got sacrificed was the special relationship with Azerbaijan. It was a huge blow.”

However, Suat Kiniklioglu, the head of the U.S.-Turkey inter-parliamentary friendship caucus, says that such an argument does not hold up. “It writes openly in the protocols that the ‘regional conflicts will be resolved by peaceful means,’” he said. “We’re not talking about the Middle East. This evidently refers to the Karabagkh issue.” But the Armenians could argue that it means Azerbaijan should not use military force against them, and they worry about what will happen as they watch Azerbaijan increase its defense budget.

In fact, “Armenians are not trying to normalize their relationship with Turkey for the sake of normalization,” Kiniklioglu told me. They are “trying to position themselves in a more advantageous place on the Karabagh issue after opening the borders with Turkey.” Turkey is trying to gain sympathy within the international community and find a new way to fight the genocide claims. Why shouldn’t the Armenians do the same thing with their own issues? If not naïve, Turkish leadership failed to understand why the Armenians were interested in signing the protocols. Afterall, Turkey closed its border with Armenia after a massive attack on Karabagh.

Berman was right. Turkey’s parliament will not pass the protocols any time soon, and they will surely blame him and his colleagues in Congress for that failure. In the end, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s vote gave Turkey a bigger victory than it could have realized.

Based in Washington, D.C., Tulin Daloglu is a correspondent for Turkey’s HABERTÜRK. In the 2002 general election, she ran for a seat in Parliament as a member of the New Turkey Party. Her e-mail is [email protected]