If U.S.-Turkey relations worsen, recognition of Armenian Genocide will be just a pretext

PanARMENIAN.Net - The resolution that would recognize the Armenian Genocide should be passed, congressman Adam Schiff stated on the House Floor in connection with the 92nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. As Schiff's Press Secretary Sean Oblack told PanARMENIAN.Net congressman's statement reads as follows, "Tomorrow marks the 92nd Anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide. In January, I introduced a resolution in the House that would recognize the Armenian Genocide. It should be passed. Ghazaros Kademian is one reason why.



Ghazaros Kademian was just 6 years old when his family was forced into exile by Ottoman Turks bent on annihilating the Armenian people. His father was murdered by Turk gendarmes and the rest of the family was forced to flee on foot to Kirkuk, where his mother died from cold and hunger. He was separated from his siblings and orphaned.



Mr. Kademian's story is terrible, but not remarkable. Over a million and a half Armenians were murdered in the first genocide of the last century as the Ottoman Empire used the cloak of war to wipe out a people it considered alien and disloyal. This mammoth crime was well known at the time; newspapers of the day were filled with stories about the murder of Armenians. "Appeal to Turkey to Stop Massacres" headlined the New York Times on April 28, 1915, just as the killing began. By October 7 of that year, the Times reported that 800,000 Armenians had been slain in cold blood in Asia

Minor. In mid-December of 1915, the Times spoke of a million Armenians killed or in exile. Thousands of pages of evidence documenting the atrocities rest in our own National Archives.



Prominent citizens of the day, including America's Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, and Britain's Lord Bryce reported on the massacres in great detail. Morgenthau was appalled at what he would later call the sadistic orgies of rape, torture, and murder. "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and ... made no particular attempt to conceal the fact."



Even those who have most ardently advocated sweeping the murder of a million and a half people under the rug of history have conceded that the vast majority of historians accept the Armenian Genocide as historical fact. And how could they not - for it was the Government of Turkey that, in early 1919, held a number of well-publicized trials of some of the Young Turk leaders and executed Keimal Bey, the governor of Diarbekir, specifically for his role as one of the Ottoman Empire's most savage persecutors of the Armenian people. The trials, by the way, were as widely covered in the American press as was the genocide itself.



So if the facts are not in dispute, why are so many nations complicit in modern Turkey's strenuous efforts to deny the genocide ever took place? First, opponents argue that recognizing the unpleasant fact of mass murder risks alienating our important alliance with Turkey. There is no question that Turkey is bitterly opposed to recognition and is threatening our military and commercial relationship, including access to the Incirlik air base. But Turkey has made similar threats to other nations in the past only to retreat from them, and the European Union's insistence that Ankara recognize the crimes of its Ottoman forebears before Turkey is admitted to the EU has not dimmed Turkish enthusiasm for joining the EU.



If Turkish relations with the U.S. do suffer, it is far more likely that the genocide recognition will be a pretext; the Bush Administration has done such a poor job managing our relations with Turkey over the last six years, that we have already seen the limits of the U.S. Turkish alliance tested and found lacking. During the run-up to the war in Iraq, Turkey denied us permission to bring in ground forces from its soil, allowing the Saddam

Fedeyeen to melt away and form the basis of a now persistent insurgency. Oddly enough, critics of recognition decry it as pandering to the victims, but are only too happy to pander to the sensibilities of an inconstant ally, and one that has shown no qualms about accusing the U.S. of genocide in Iraq.



Second, opponents take issue with the timing of the resolution and argue that Turkey is making progress with recognizing the dark chapters of its history. This claim lost all credibility when Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's Nobel Prize winning author was brought up on charges for "insulting Turkishness" for alluding to the genocide, and Turkish Armenian publisher Hrant Dink was gunned down outside his office in Istanbul earlier this year. Yet some opponents go even further, such as a former Ambassador to Turkey who argued that the time may never be right for America to comment "on another's history or morality." Such a ludicrous policy would condemn Congress to silence on a host of human rights abuses around the world. After more than ninety years and with only a few survivors left, if the time is not right now to recognize the Armenian Genocide, when will it be?



But the most pernicious argument against recognition is the claim that speaking the truth would harm relations with Turkey "for no good reason." How can we claim the moral authority to decry the genocide in Darfur, as we must, if we are unwilling to deplore other genocides when it would inconvenience an ally? Elie Wiesel has described the denial of genocide as the final stage of genocide--a double killing. If you don't think he's right, talk to Ghazaros Kademian."