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Thread: Turkey, on Edge, Watches U.S. Vote on Armenia

  1. #1

    Default Turkey, on Edge, Watches U.S. Vote on Armenia

    Is the US immature for voting on this? Is Turkey immature for being so hypersensitive to this?

    I don't know...but my pride that the US will take moral symbolic stands on this stuff is mitigated by how totally batshit this issue makes the Turkish government.

    * ASIA NEWS
    * MARCH 4, 2010
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...692377622.html

    Turkey, on Edge, Watches U.S. Vote on Armenia
    Washington's Shift on Armenian Genocide Debate Angers Ankara

    By MARC CHAMPION

    ISTANBUL—A U.S. congressional vote on how to define the 1915 slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, expected Thursday, is turning into a game of brinksmanship between the White House and Ankara.

    In previous years, Congress has attempted to pass a resolution to recognize the Armenian events as genocide. Such a resolution would inflame Turkey and has brought vows from past U.S. administrations that they would block the bill, a nod to Turkey's role as a key ally of Washington in the Middle East.

    This year, in a shift of U.S. position, the Obama administration isn't lobbying publicly to block the resolution, say officials and lobbyists involved in the issue. That fact has triggered hopes among Armenians who have long lobbied foreign governments for recognition of the killings as genocide—and raised alarm in Turkey at the prospect that the country's ally might rule against it on a neuralgic issue of history and identity.

    On Thursday, at least one Turkish national TV channel, NTV, plans to air the U.S. vote live; others are expected to do likewise. Two delegations of Turkish lawmakers have been in Washington this week, lobbying the committee to block the move.

    "There would be consequences," if the vote passes, said Suat Kiniklioglu, a legislator and deputy chairman of external affairs for the ruling Justice and Development party. "Turks find it very offensive to be equated with Nazis."

    "We are working well with the U.S. in a number of areas—in Iraq, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, on the Middle East peace process, Iran and Syria. In all these areas, if this passes through the Congress there would be an impact," said Mr. Kiniklioglu, speaking by phone from Washington. Turkey has the second-largest armed forces in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and is a key U.S. ally in the region.

    The Obama administration has largely remained silent on the resolution, a break from previous administrations' actively lobbying against similar measures. Asked this week about how its passage would effect bilateral relations with Turkey, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said, "We have a pretty good idea of how everyone feels on the issue."

    Another State Department official said the administration continues to support efforts by Turkish and Armenian officials to come to a consensus on the incident as part of the two country's negotiations over re-establishing diplomatic ties.

    Thursday's vote in the House Foreign Affairs Committee would come less than two months before President Barack Obama is due to make an annual White House statement on April 24 commemorating the killings. The committee vote wouldn't be binding, but it would open the floor to a vote on the floor of Congress, something Turkey is anxious to avoid.

    Up to 1.5 million ethnic Armenians are estimated to have died through executions, mass deportations, starvation and other means in 1915. Armenians, and many historians, say the killings were an attempt to erase Armenians from Eastern Anatolia and were therefore genocide.

    Turkey argues that the events, while tragic, can't be compared to the Jewish holocaust and don't amount to genocide. Turkish officials note that the killings took place during World War I, as the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating and under attack from all sides, including Russia. Armenians, traditional allies of Russia, were seen as a fifth column. Even the historical record, they say, was warped by the wartime propaganda needs.

    "Turks feel the way these events happened is not well known abroad and only in a one-sided way," said Ilter Turan, a professor of political science at Bilgi University in Istanbul. He said a vote to recognize genocide would likely trigger anti-American demonstrations and retaliation by the government.

    Last year, Mr. Obama avoided using the term genocide in his April 24 statement. He made it clear he was doing so because he didn't want to destroy efforts under way between Ankara and Yerevan to reopen their border and establish relations, and form a joint historical commission.

    A year later, efforts have stalled to ratify the border-opening protocols that each government has signed. Turkey has made it clear it sees ratification as linked to progress in settling a territorial dispute between Armenia and its other Turkic neighbor, Azerbaijan, in the enclave of Nagorno Karabakh. Though Karabakh isn't mentioned in the protocols, Turkey wants Armenia to pull troops out of several buffer zones around the enclave, which is in Azerbaijan, before it will ratify them. So far, there is little sign of that happening.

    Analysts say the U.S. administration's silence looks like an attempt to increase pressure on Turkey to ratify the reconciliation protocols. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's focused on promoting the protocols in testimony on Capitol Hill last month, rather than warning directly against a vote to recognize genocide.

    The performance was welcomed by the Armenian National Committee of America, a lobby, which noted that "for the first time in a generation" a sitting secretary of state hadn't lobbied against the genocide classification. But just as the U.S. is likely to ignore Turkish threats, Ankara is unlikely to buckle to pressure on the protocols, analysts say.

    "I don't think it will work," said Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank that hosted one of the Turkish delegations this week. "The movement on Capitol Hill doesn't seem to be making the Turks reconsider—instead we have the Turks saying we have a whole range of issues the U.S. needs us to cooperate on and well use these to respond. This has the potential to spin out of control," he said.

  2. #2
    The US isn't voting on it. Even the House isn't voting on it. It's just a panel that passed this through before. It's not going to be adopted by the House. Everyone is just playing their role. The Congressmen with large Armenian districts pretend to care about the genocide, and Turkey pretends to be insulted. Things will go back to normal in a matter of weeks.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  3. #3
    What I don't get is how labeling something genocide (which this probably was) somehow means it's being equated to the Holocaust. There have been lots of genocides in recent history, let alone going into the past. It's not like the Jews have a monopoly on it; it just happened to be a particularly egregious example.

    That being said, the Armenians aren't likely to get anything substantive out of a recognition of the genocide, either. Thus, it's a question of whether it's worth it to satisfy some domestic pressure groups (and a vague sense of century-old injustice) or keep a moderately important ally happy.

    One interesting thing, though, is that this debate is hardly new. US concern about the Armenian genocide caused a huge row in US policy and diplomatic circles early in WWI. A lot of people were arguing the US had a moral obligation to intervene way before they ended up entering the war on an entirely different pretext. That tension is well illustrated in a section of Oren's book on US Middle East policy a couple of years back.

  4. #4
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    Well, I can tell you the Turks get hysterical about the use of that word. In Turkey a civil debate is possible about the situation in 1915, including the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians (I think the Turkish official number hovers around half a million). When the 'g' word is used though all reason goes out of the window.

    Which is strange because some of the people behind the killings were put on trial and hanged in Istanbul in the early twenties. But not so strange if you know that Turks all live with the paranoid idea that 'the Turk has no friend in this world but another Turk'. They seriously believe that in essence 'we' are all out to get them. A nice example of this can be seen in the comedy 'Ottoman Republic'. In this movie a picture of a Turkey is shown where M.K. Atatürk died as a young boy. What is depicted is a Turkey under a figurehead sultan but effectively run by the USA and EU. You'd be surprised how many Turks I have had to tell that Turkey isn't exactly in everybody's mind all the time.

    My personal reply to that paranoia is 'Turkey actually doesn't have all that many enemies, but it's very bad at making friends'.

    It's becoming harder and harder to talk about what is in the interest of 'the Armenians' because the interests of the Armenians and the Armenian diaspora are not the same. For the Armenians normalization of its relations with Turkey is essential, the present situation is harmful to their economy. The diaspora does not suffer the negative side-effects of the campaign to have the mass murder recognized as genocide and has been relentless in pursuing it.
    Last edited by Hazir; 03-05-2010 at 12:32 PM.
    Congratulations America

  5. #5
    Good points about Armenian diaspora vs. Armenian.

    And about keeping friends. It does seem like it can be a difficult relationship, at least for certain states like the US, Israel, Iraq...

  6. #6
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    I personally think the Turks have got themselves to blame for this 'success' of the Armenian diaspora. If they would have gone with the agreement with Armenia and had let a bunch of historians research the sources then probably this vote wouldn't have taken place.

    But they decided to cosy up to Azerbaijan and stop ratification of the agreement, making it dependent on the situation in Nagorno Karabach, thus effectively killing it. That must have made it a lot easier for the diaspora to convince its contacts in DC that Turkey was unwilling to let the truth be told about the 1915 events.

    I wonder if the Turkish government will call the renewal of the Incirlik airbase agreement into question now. I can imagine that the Turkish armed forces must be really in a turmoil over relations with the US right now; they are the strongest opponents of the genocide claims, but at the same time derive a lot of their actual power (also internal) from the good ties with the US.

    Funny fait divers; the day before this vote the House session was opened with a prayer by a turkish-born muslim imam.
    Congratulations America

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