Ben Cardin: in Armenia we need an ambassador who understands historical facts

PanARMENIAN.Net - Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) castigated the Bush Administration's policy of Armenian Genocide denial, today, dramatically pressing U.S. Ambassadorial nominee to Armenia Marie Yovanovitch regarding the Administration's refusal to properly characterize Ottoman Turkey's systematic destruction of its Armenian population as a genocide, reported the Armenian National

Committee of America (ANCA).



The Associated Press, in an article today entitled "Nominee Refuses to Call Killings Genocide," noted Senator Menendez's "intense questioning" and the "prosecutorial style" of his inquiries during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing. The AP article, which was also carried by MSNBC and other media outlets, quoted ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian as saying, after the hearing, that, "we were troubled by Ambassador Yovanovitch's refusal to offer any meaningful rationale for the Administration's ongoing complicity in Turkey's denials."



Sen. Menendez, who had placed two consecutive holds on previous ambassadorial nominee Dick Hoagland for denying the Armenian Genocide, meticulously questioned Yovanovitch by presenting historical State Department documents from the time of the Genocide and comparing those statements with her opening remarks.



Following these remarks, Sen. Menendez presented the nominee with several documents quoting U.S. Ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgethau and Abram Elkus, and other U.S. diplomats who served in the region at the time of the Armenian Genocide and documented the destruction of the Armenian population. Sen. Menendez responded, "It is a shame that career foreign service officers have to be brought before the Committee and find difficulty in acknowledging historical facts, and find difficulty in acknowledging the realities of what has been internationally recognized." He went on to state, "And it is amazing to me that we can talk about millions, a million and a half human beings who were slaughtered, we can talk about those who were raped, we can talk about those who were forcibly pushed out of their country, and we can have presidential acknowledgements of that, but then we cannot call it what it is. It is a ridiculous dance that the Administration is doing on the use of the term genocide. It is an attempt to suggest that we don't want to strain our relationships with Turkey...



"We look forward to carefully reviewing Ambassador Yovanovitch's responses to the written questions that will be posed by Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in order to get a fuller understanding of her ability to effectively represent U.S. interests and American values as our Ambassador to Yerevan," added Hamparian.



Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) who chaired the confirmation hearing concurred with Sen. Menendez, noting that "there is no question in my mind, that facts speak for themselves, and what happened was genocide... In Armenia we need an ambassador... who understands the historical facts."



Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has submitted a set of questions for the record in which he reaffirmed the importance of recognizing the killing of 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1923 as genocide.