By PHK
You might think that this country’s troubling experience in Iraq would make America’s legislators think more than once before landing feet first in the middle of yet another ethnically based seemingly intractable Middle Eastern conflict no matter how innocuous, and righteously right one side’s version of the truth appears.
Obviously not - or at least not until, "increasing criticism and high-profile defections from among the bill's supporters," suggest that it would no longer muster enough votes to pass.
Last week the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee voted 27-21 to support the Armenian Genocide Resolution and over the weekend Speaker Nancy Pelosi was stubbornly insisting on bringing it to a vote on the House floor before the beginning of the November 16 legislative recess. On Monday, the resolution had nearly 230 sponsors and cosponsors and a companion resolution in the Senate had just over 30 if the statistics I found on the Armenian National Committee’s website which is devoted to lobbying Congress on the issue are up-to-date but the numbers have now declined.
Whatever term used to describe the sorry plight of countless Armenians who lived, fought and died in the central and eastern part of what is now Turkey during and shortly after World War I that was then. This is now.
True: painful history cannot and should not be erased. On the other hand, for even the most troubling history to be credible it needs to be viewed from all available vantages. And the viewpoints and the biases of the protagonists need to be made clear. Moreover, the events themselves need to be placed in the context of the times and locations in which they occurred.
This is just one problem with the text of the Armenian Genocide Resolution that now faces members of Congress.
Taking the Resolution at its word, the distinct impression is that the Ottoman Empire (which expired in 1923) carried out mass murders, resettlements and expulsions of nearly two million innocent, non-combatant Armenians for no apparent reason between 1915 and 1923 and these murderous actions are comparable to Hitler’s later treatment of the Jews.
From my understanding of Ottoman history, such heinous actions, however, rarely if ever occurred unprovoked in the multiethnic multi-religious Ottoman Empire. Think of the far more recent heavy-fisted Russian responses to the latest Chechen separatist insurrections or the US reaction to 9/11. Both resemble the proverbial killing of gnats with a baseball bat. This is also how the Ottomans often responded to rebellions by their various independence-driven subjects throughout the shrinking Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
All about land?
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, most, if not all, Ottoman reprisals were reactions to actions of ethnically-based independence fighters who were seeking independence for the parts of the Empire where they and their ancestors had lived for generations. In eastern Turkey, as in parts of the Balkans, and in Iraq today, sometimes more than two separatist groups fought over the same city, town, orchard, lake or mountain thus making the situation even more difficult to untangle. Assassinations, retributions and reprisals among the various groups who represented different ethnicities, religions and even political stripes ran rampant throughout the Empire as the Sultan’s power weakened over the decades after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and nationalist ideas exploded.
Yet nowhere, for instance, does the Armenian Genocide Resolution even hint that the largest ethnic groups that had been living for centuries in Eastern Turkey – Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Turks – were, at the time, all battling for control of some of the same turf or that the Ottoman authorities were using force to respond to these armed insurrections that had erupted on territories ruled by the Sultan since at least 1453.
Nowhere does this Resolution indicate that at the time the Ottoman Empire was also being torn asunder by Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Italy because the Sultan had mistakenly sided with the Germans, the UK was hell bent on creating a clear overland path to India and Russia’s Czar Nicholas II – the Armenians’ principal protector until 1917 - was shopping for a permanent palace with a Bosporus view and the Russian Empire saw support of Armenian revolutionary groups as helpful in achieving that goal.
Nowhere does the Resolution indicate that the post World War I Treaty of Sevres (1920) upon which rest some of the Armenian Genocide Resolution’s claims to the genocide designation was never ratified by the U.S. Congress. Furthermore, nowhere does the Resolution indicate that the Sevres Treaty terms – which included incorporation of parts of eastern Turkey into the short-lived Armenian Republic (1918-1920) among other elements – were overtaken by events and that the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne formed the de facto and de jure basis for the post-World War I settlement of the region.
Implications for the present?
Finally, nowhere did the Armenian Genocide Resolution’s sponsors and cosponsors apparently consider the implications of passage of this seemingly innocuous piece of legislation and its potential impact upon today’s and tomorrow’s events on the eastern rim of the Aegean or broader US interests in the Middle East, Central and Southwest Asia.
Did anyone think before signing on about the Armenian Genocide Resolution’s possible impact on current bilateral negotiations over the yet to be agreed upon border between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia?
Or what about a potential for backlash on the domestic Turkish political scene? Ramifications could include, for instance, potential weakening the hands of the moderate Islamist government and the 70,000 strong Turkish-Armenian community to cope effectively with controversial Article 301 of Turkey's penal code. This article has become a fetish for the Turkish ultra-right wing which uses it willy-nilly to bludgeon even the most internationally famous Turkish and Turkish-Armenian writers, journalists and intellectuals whenever they try to broach the subject publicly to begin to clear the Turkish air.
Or did the Congressional sponsors and cosponsors consider that passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution might all too likely strengthen those in the Turkish government and military who would dearly love to see the end of US military forces based in the country anyway? Or did the members of Congress who signed on see any possible parallel with the Turkish parliament’s overwhelming vote on October 18 “to authorize the sending of Turkish troops into northern Iraq to confront Kurdish rebels in their hideouts there” – a policy likely to produce mayhem in the only relatively quiet part of Iraq?
Unfortunately, pushing the Armenian Genocide Resolution forward in the US Congress demonstrates just how poorly its sponsors and cosponsors understand the complexity of the issue, its troubled political history, and/or most importantly the potential ramifications for current and future US policy in the Middle East.
A little independent research might have gone, and still could go, a long way to educate Congress and its staff to the many facets and potential pitfalls of this controversial issue - particularly if undertaken by Congress’s own nonpartisan, unbiased and well qualified research arm, the Congressional Research Service (CRS). I hope such a report is well underway. The good news is that the official Turkish side of the equation is finally being heard from, the U.S. executive branch is weighing in with the practical concerns and some influential members of Congress are listening. It was reported on the PBS Newshour Wednesday night that if a vote were held on the Resolution today, it likely would not pass. The well-heeled Armenian-American lobby, however, has indicated that it will lobby hard to reverse a tide that has started to slip away.
An increase of Congressional visits to Turkey and meetings not only with Turkish officials but also the Armenian Patriarch and other Turkish-Armenians in Istanbul might be useful. There's nothing like firsthand experience and Turkey's a far pleasanter place to visit that war-torn Baghdad. California Congresswoman Jane Harman should be commended for having undertaken such a fact-finding trip.
Her conclusion: a decision to withdraw support for the resolution and a public explanation as to why. Given the large numbers of influential Armenian Americans in her state and the Los Angeles area in particular, this must not be politically easy. Harman’s thoughtful commentary defending her difficult decision was published in The Los Angeles Times last week. Her thoughts demand careful reading and consideration. At the very least, they should not be taken lightly.