(Corbis)
Armenian orphans in Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, board a ship bound for Greece. The ship was laid on during World War One by Near East Relief, an American charity
WASHINGTON — The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted narrowly on Thursday to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians early in the last century, defying a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to forgo a vote that seemed sure to offend Ankara and jeopardize delicate efforts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.
The vote on the nonbinding resolution, a perennial point of friction addressing a dark, century-old chapter of Turkish history, was 23 to 22. A similar resolution passed by a slightly wider margin in 2007, but the Bush administration, fearful of losing Turkish cooperation over Iraq, lobbied forcefully to keep it from reaching the House floor. Whether this resolution will reach a floor vote remains unclear.
In Ankara, the office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately issued a sharp rebuke. “We condemn this bill that denounces the Turkish nation of a crime that it has not committed,” said the statement. It said that Ambassador Namik Tan, who had only weeks ago taken up his post in Washington, was being recalled to Ankara, the Turkish capital, for consultations.
Historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died amid the chaos and unrest surrounding World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey denies, however, that this was a planned genocide, and had mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign against the resolution.
A White House spokesman, Mike Hammer, said Thursday that Mrs. Clinton had told Representative Howard L. Berman, the committee chairman, late Wednesday that a vote would be harmful, jeopardizing Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts that last year yielded two protocols aimed at a thawing of relations.
President Obama spoke to the President Abdullah Gul of Turkey on Wednesday to endorse the efforts at normalization with Armenia, said Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman.
“We’ve pressed hard to see the progress that we’ve seen to date, and we certainly do not want to see that jeopardized,” he said.
The timing of the administration’s plea seemed to catch some committee members by surprise. Early in the meeting on Thursday, the ranking Republican member, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, declared that the administration had taken no position on the vote. But several minutes later she requested time to correct herself: an aide had handed her a wire-service story describing the administration’s newly announced opposition.
Suat Kiniklioglu, a Turkish member of Parliament in Washington to meet with lawmakers, said later that he thought the intervention by Mrs. Clinton — who was asked about the resolution last week before the same House committee but did not then condemn it explicitly — had come too late.
“It was done in a fashion to be able to allow this administration to say in future, when things go wrong, that they did intervene” in support of Turkey, he said.
Bryan Ardouny, executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America, also said he doubted Mrs. Clinton’s intervention changed much. He said of the vote: “It was closer than anticipated but at the end of the day the truth prevailed and the members made a very affirmative statement in the face of the opposition.”
Committee members were clearly torn between what they said was a moral obligation to condemn one of the darkest periods of the last century and the need to protect an ongoing relationship with a NATO partner vital to American regional and security interests, on issues from Afghanistan to Iran.
“This is not one of those issues that members of Congress look forward to voting on,” said Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York.
Like nearly every member, Mr. Berman saluted Turkey as an important ally. “Be that as it may,” he added, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.”
“The Turks say passing this resolution could have terrible consequences for our bilateral relationship,” Mr. Berman said. “But I believe that Turkey values its relations with the United States at least as much as we value our relations with Turkey.”
While still in the Senate, Mr. Obama had described the killings of Armenians at Ottoman hands as genocide. Mrs. Clinton, also then a senator, had taken a similar stance.
Last year, she strongly supported talks that led to two protocols between Turkey and Armenia calling for closer ties, open borders and the creation of a commission to examine the historical evidence in dispute.
Those accords, not yet ratified by either nation’s parliament, could now be endangered, opponents of the resolution said. “This is a fragile process that destabilizes the protocols,” said Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana.
In Istanbul, Ozdem Sanberk of Global Political Trends Center at Istanbul Kultur University, agreed that the protocols would suffer. “With this result,” he said, “the effectiveness of the ethnic lobbies got maximized and American foreign policy got hurt.”
In 1915, the decaying Ottoman Empire launched a pogrom against eastern Turkey’s Armenian population, falsely accusing them of supporting a Russian invasion. Tens of thousands of men were shot and hundreds of thousands of women and children driven out of their homes and on forced marches towards Syria and Iraq. The death toll is estimated to have been a million people.
It was also one of the century’s first atrocities to be photographically covered; there are anonymous photographs and there are signed and documented photographs that corroborated witness accounts. A German military officer Armin T. Wegner, stationed with the 6th Ottoman Army, took a series of photographs of dying and dead Armenians. These pictures anticipates photographs that were to follow during the Second World War, and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
In fact, the international nonchalance over the Armenian genocide emboldened Hitler. In his August 1939, he spoke “Who after all is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” in an haunting harbinger of his own Holocaust. “The world believes only in success,” he added, justifying his potential invasion of Poland and all the deeds that would follow that calamitous event.
Topeka Mayor William Bunten issued a proclamation declaring that, for the month of March, the Kansas capital would be known as “Google, Kansas — the capital city of fiber optics.”
The official city website, Topeka.org, welcomes visitors to “The City of Google” — written in the large colorful letters the Internet search giant is known for — and includes a link to the mayor’s proclamation.
Google announced last month that it planned to build experimental, ultra high-speed broadband networksthat would deliver Internet speeds 100 times faster than those of today.
The Web search and advertising giant said the envisioned one-gigabit-per-second networks would be built in “a small number of trial locations” in the United States.”
Communities seeking to take part in the experiment have until March 26 to make their interest known to Google. The selected communities will be announced later this year.
The iPhone maker’s complaint against HTC underscores the widening role of the International Trade Commission in cross-border disputes over smartphone tech
Apple’s attempt to block the import of smartphones made by HTC Corp. underscores the growing prominence of the International Trade Commission in settling patent disputes over smartphones, one of the fastest-growing areas in technology.
On Mar. 2, Apple (AAPL) filed a patent-infringement complaint with the ITC in Washington, alleging that HTC (2498:TT) is using Apple technology without permission. A decision in favor of Cupertino (Calif.)-based Apple may bar HTC from importing its devices into the U.S. Apple is embroiled in other scuffles at the ITC, including one with wireless handset maker Nokia (NOK).
Device manufacturers view the ITC as a more efficient and aggressive arbiter of patent disputes than overstretched federal courts, which can sometimes take years to bring conflicts to resolution. Turning to a government agency with a background in global trade issues underscores the infiltration by non-U.S. companies into the market for smartphones, shipments of which are expected by Gartner (IT) to rise 46% this year. “The ITC is becoming a mainstream second track for patent litigation that allows companies to take a second bite of the apple with their patent cases,” says Colleen Chien, an assistant professor of law at Santa Clara University.
In its complaint at the ITC, Apple says Taoyuan (Taiwan)-based HTC infringes 10 patents mainly related to the software that runs smartphones. HTC was the first electronics maker to sell a phone based on the Android operating system, developed by a Google (GOOG)-led group of companies. “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it,” Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a statement. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling declined to elaborate.
“Expedited Proceedings”
Created in 1916 to regulate international trade, the ITC has in recent years emerged as a potent force in patent law, especially in the area of technology products like semiconductors and wireless phones. Companies often file patent lawsuits in U.S. district courts around the same time they file complaints at the ITC. On Mar. 2, Apple also filed a lawsuit alleging infringement of 10 other patents in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Del. “The ITC is well-known for its expedited proceedings,” says Thomas Jarvis, a partner at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, a Washington-based law firm that often represents clients before the ITC.
Jarvis says it takes on average about 7 to 10 months to get a hearing at the ITC, and about two years to get to trial in district courts. ITC spokeswoman Peg O’Laughlin declined to comment on the increase in cases relating to smartphones, saying related questions “are better asked of the parties involved.”
The ITC issues so-called “exclusion orders,” instructions to U.S. Customs & Border Protection to prevent the import of products that infringe patents. The ITC cannot order an infringing company to pay monetary damages. Chien studied ITC rulings from 1995 to 2007 and found that in cases where it found infringement, it issued exclusion orders 100% of the time.
In 2009, the ITC ordered a ban on chips made by Qualcomm (QCOM), STMicroelectronics (STM), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Motorola (MOT), among others. The commission said the companies were selling chips with packaging that violated patents held by Tessera (TSRA), a San Jose-based semiconductor material company. Qualcomm and the other companies have appealed the decision.
Though the ITC was conceived in part to protect U.S. manufacturers from the import of cheaper, inferior products, foreign companies are increasingly willing to use it to wage patent disputes against U.S. companies, Chien says. Espoo (Finland)-based Nokia in December complained against Apple at the ITC, alleging patent infringement. The ITC agreed to investigate the claims on Feb. 25. Apple filed a countercomplaint on Jan. 15.
Settlement Likely
Apple’s complaints are the latest in a string of cases before the ITC involving smartphones. On Feb. 19, the same day the commission agreed to investigate Apple’s complaint against Nokia, it also agreed to investigate a complaint against BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM) brought by Motorola, the Schaumburg (Ill.)-based maker of mobile phones. RIM and Apple have also been sued at the ITC by camera giant Eastman Kodak (EK), which alleged that both make phones with built-in cameras that infringe some Kodak patents.
About 90% of cases brought before the ITC are resolved by a settlement, Chien says. Apple may genuinely be looking to win an import ban against HTC, she says. Still, even where an import ban is issued, cases often end in a settlement, says Ezra Gottheil, analyst at Technology Business Research in Hampton, N.H. “No one will be prevented from importing their phones into the country,” he says. “It’s just a matter of how much money flows to which party for the rights they end up swapping.”
In other cases, ITC decisions may be overturned. In 2007, the ITC ordered a ban on the import of chips made by Qualcomm found to have infringed patents owned by Broadcom (BRCM). Qualcomm appealed, and a U.S. court of appeals vacated the ruling on procedural grounds in October 2008. Qualcomm ultimately resolved the dispute with an $891 million global settlement in April 2009.
On Monday , Picnik, which makes an online photo editor, announced on its blog that the company is being acquired by Google.
The editor works directly with online photo libraries like Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa Web Albums. Users can also upload files to the service and download them again when they are done.
The editing capabilities it offers are a natural complement to a Picasa, even though the technology appears to be a mismatch: Picnik works in Flash, while most advanced Google apps use the slower JavaScript. (Google, however, is working to improve JavaScript performance with its Native Client technology.)
Neither Picnik nor Google provided financial terms of the deal in their blog posts.
Flickr uses Picnik by default. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo, which owns Flickr, dealswith the new owner of its preferred photo editor.
Picnik is a Webware 100 winner. It competes with Pixlr, Fotoflexer, and Aviary.
