The Los Angeles Times: President Bush will not utter the word "genocide" on April 24

PanARMENIAN.Net - President Bush will be obliged, by law, to wrap his double-talking mouth around one of the most curiously persistent debates in modern geopolitics: Whether to call a 92-year-old genocide a genocide. As The Los Angeles Times reports, the 2007 may be the year that the cop-out finally blows up in a president's face. "What was once the obscure obsession of marginalized immigrants from a powerless little Caucasus country has blossomed in recent years into a force that has grown increasingly difficult to ignore. In 2000, the Armenian issue helped fuel one of the most expensive House races in U.S. history; two years ago, it turned a mild-mannered career U.S. diplomat into an unlikely truth-telling martyr. Now the question of how to address these long-ago events is having an impact on next month's elections in Turkey," analyst Matt Welch writes. He thinks President Bush won't say "genocide" on April 24. In the words of Condoleezza Rice, the administration's position is that Turks and Armenians both need to "get over their past" without American help.



"But this issue won't go away. Of all issues subject to realpolitik compromises, mass slaughter of a national minority surely should rank at the bottom of the list. Hitler reportedly said, just before invading Poland, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" It's a chilling reminder that forgetting is the first step in enabling future genocides. Yet Hitler was eventually proved wrong. No temporal power is strong enough to erase the eternal resonance of truth," The Los Angeles Times underlines.