(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.
Early voting has begun in Iraq’s parliamentary elections. Security personnel, detainees and hospital patients were among those allowed to vote ahead of Sunday’s election, when most Iraqis will
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday to a senate subcommittee the United States has little choice but to impose sanctions on Iran.
Clinton made the remarks in a senate hearing. She said the Obama administration has “extended its hand” since day one, but Iran has failed to engage with the international community to assuage the concerns about its nuclear program.
She said because of the engagement effort, the United States is in a much stronger position to push for sanctions against Iran.
“We will pursue sanctions” under the two-track strategy aimed at Iran, especially against the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, she said.
Clinton said the United States has actively pursued sanctions in the United Nations Security Council, and has made progress. Iran is “at the top” of her agenda in her visits to Gulf countries recently.
White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said this week the United States is pushing for the toughest sanctions in the security council since last year’s Resolution 1874 targeting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
In addition to pursuing multilateral sanctions, Clinton urged the Congress to target Iran with “smart” and “tough” sanctions, in order not to send the “wrong message,” asking lawmakers to leave certain wiggle-room for the administration in the UN Security Council.
The Senate passed a sanction act on Iran last month, slapping sanctions on companies that do business with Iran’s energy sector in developing petroleum resources or producing and exporting refined petroleum products.
The bill also imposes a broad ban on direct trade between the United States and Iran, and prohibits the U.S. government from purchasing goods from those companies that do business with Iran’s energy sector.
The House of Representatives passed a similar bill last year. The administration has so far been reluctant to put sanctions on Iran’s energy sector, especially its petroleum supply, which relies heavily on imports. The administration’s sanctions against Iran is mainly targeted at the Revolutionary Corps, directed through the Treasury Department.
Clinton was testifying to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs, making the case for the administration’s budget request for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Japan has offered to enrich uranium for Iran allowing access to nuclear power by the Islamic Republic, the Nikkei business daily reports.
The Japanese proposal is aimed to allay international fears that Iran might be seeking an atomic weapon, according to Wednesday’s edition of the report.
The uranium would be used at Tehran’s research reactor to produce medical isotopes, the report added.
According to the publication, the Iranian government has not yet responded to the proposal, but the issue was expected to be discussed Wednesday when the visiting Iranian Parliament (Majlis) Speaker Ali Larijani and Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada meet in Tokyo.
“Japan strongly hopes Iran’s nuclear issue will be resolved peacefully and diplomatically … and that Iran considers a related UN Security Council resolution seriously”, a foreign ministry spokesman quoted Katsuya as saying in the meeting.
Iran says that it is a signatory of the NPT and, unlike Israel, neither believes in atomic weapons nor, as a matter of religious principle, does it intend to access such weapons of mass-destruction. Furthermore, Tehran has repeatedly called for the elimination of all nuclear weapon development, production and arsenals throughout the globe.
Iran’s nuclear facilities and enriched uranium remain under the supervision of IAEA inspectors, as outlined in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Safeguards Agreement.
The UN nuclear watchdog has carried out the highest number of inspections in Iran, compared to any other country throughout its history and has found nothing to indicate any diversion toward weaponization.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday to a senate subcommittee the United States has little choice but to impose sanctions on Iran.
Japan has offered to enrich uranium for Iran allowing access to nuclear power by the Islamic Republic, the Nikkei business daily reports.