Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:53:40 +0500 (AMST)
ETHIC CLEANSING
Michael Crowley
The New Republic
April 15, 2009
Whose genocide are you on?
Are you a former current or former leader of the House of
Representatives? Then the government of Turkey wants to talk to
you! In recent years, Turkey has hired as lobbyists at least four
men who held senior House posts. Currently working Capitol Hill for
the Turks is former Democratic leader Richard Gephardt. Schmoozing
Republicans is the former House speaker, Dennis Hastert. Hastert was
signed up to replace Bob Livingston, a former House speaker-designate
(now plying his trade for the Libyans), and former House Republican
leader Dick Armey. Steny Hoyer, what are you waiting for? Have you
seen Gephardt's new house in Sonoma?
Turkey pays these men handily to defend its many interests in
Washington. But one mission overrides all the others: blocking an
official U.S. government declaration that the Ottoman Turks committed
genocide against the Armenian people at the end of World War I. For
years, lobbyists for Turkey have smothered congressional efforts,
fueled by America's vocal Armenian community, to pass a resolution
recognizing the genocide. They warn that such a blasphemy of Turkey's
founding fathers would ignite public outrage there, alienating a
moderate Muslim ally and perhaps costing the United States access to
an air base vital for Iraq operations. The result has been a classic
perennial Washington issue that mostly serves to appease interest
groups and enrich lobbyists, much like asbestos reform or tax loophole
fights--except, in this case, there are up to 1.5 million murdered
innocents involved.
But, as Barack Obama prepares for his upcoming state visit to Ankara
in early April and the day of a traditional presidential statement
to the Armenian-American community that follows a couple of weeks
later, this debate may finally be coming to a head. Obama is the first
American president elected after explicitly promising to invoke the
dreaded G-word. And, thus, a trip designed to defuse tension between
the United States and the Muslim world will have the small matter of
genocide culpability hanging over it like a foul odor.
As a candidate, Obama was perfectly clear. "The facts are undeniable,"
he said in a January 2008 statement. He called the massacre not
an allegation or matter of opinion--many Turks maintain that the
killing resulted from anarchy accompanying the Ottoman Empire's
collapse--but a clear exercise in race-based killing: "As president,"
he vowed, "I will recognize the Armenian genocide." Joe Biden and
Hillary Clinton, who said America's "morality" and "credibility"
demanded such a statement, agreed. And why not? Last year, all were
presidential candidates looking for easy ways to sound bold and noble,
not to mention courting Armenian-American votes and money.
But, now that Obama is in the Oval Office, the world may seem
rather more complex than it did on the campaign trail. The smell
of capitulation is in the air. "At this moment, our focus is on
how, moving forward, the United States can help Armenia and Turkey
work together to come to terms with the past," a National Security
Council spokesman told the Los Angeles Times last week. When a top
Turkish official emerged from a recent meeting with National Security
Advisor Jim Jones, he sounded sanguine on the question, declining to
say whether Obama was standing by his campaign promise, yet adding
cheerily that he and Jones "went through all these issues in a very
friendly and cooperative manner."
Obama has also been joined by a new cadre of influential advisers. Take
his chief of staff. When Congress considered a genocide resolution
in late 2007, then-Representative Rahm Emanuel opposed it. The
new State Department official with purview over Turkey, Assistant
Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Phillip Gordon, has
warned about a possible anti-American backlash in Turkey resulting
from recognition, and, in 2006, Gordon wrote that "[u]ltimately,
historians, not governments, should be the ones to decide these
sensitive issues." Jones has close ties to the Turkish military from
his time as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. And Obama's defense
secretary, Robert Gates, strongly opposed the 2007 resolution, which
he feared could result in Turkey cutting off supply lines the United
States relies on to support its troops in Iraq.
Obama can be forgiven for dodging the explosive subject of genocide
while he is a guest in Ankara next week. But, when the Armenians'
annual day of genocide remembrance comes on April 24, the White
House will be expected to release a statement. In the past, these
proclamations have been exercises in strained euphemism. Last year,
for instance, George W. Bush lamented "mass killings and forced exile"
and "epic human tragedy"--but did not use the term "genocide." The
Armenian-Americans who supported Obama in November (John McCain never
endorsed genocide recognition) expect him to use the occasion to say
the magic word.
But sources on Capitol Hill and those familiar with Ankara's thinking
both predict Obama will punt on the issue. "I fully expect him to
fold," laments one human rights activist who wishes otherwise. "I would
be shocked if he didn't." But the real shock should be in seeing Obama
break such a clear promise. Reasonable people can differ on whether
recognizing the genocide is worth the possible consequences. It is
not debatable, however, that Obama made a promise, or that he ran as
a man of integrity and principle. To be sure, Obama's high-minded
rhetoric has always concealed a deeply rooted pragmatism (think
of the convenient difference between troops and "combat troops"
in Iraq). But there is a line between pragmatism and hypocrisy,
and Obama may be about to cross it.
Last week, Aram Hamparian, the genial executive director of the
Armenian National Committee of America, sat in his Dupont Circle
town-house office surrounded by books with titles like The Banality
of Denial and Blood and Soil and recounted how his grandparents had
been forced out of their villages by the Ottomans and marched through
the Syrian Desert. Hamparian said he wasn't nervous that the cause he
has worked on for years will once again lose out to Turkey's strategic
clout. "The basic civics-class understanding of the situation should
be that folks run for office on a certain promise, and they should
govern that way," Hamparian said. Hopelessly naive words? In Barack
Obama's Washington, they shouldn't be.
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