Panel passes genocide resolution
WASHINGTON – A key House committee defied forceful opposition from the Bush administration and Turkey on Wednesday and passed a resolution labeling the Ottoman-era killings of Armenians as “genocide.”
President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates all warned publicly that passage of such a resolution would be “highly destabilizing” to U.S. goals in the Middle East.
“Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror,” the president told reporters at the White House, hours before the 27-21 vote in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., long a supporter of the measure, is likely to bring it before the full House for a vote before Congress breaks for the Thanksgiving recess in mid-November.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters, “I believe that our government’s position is clear: that genocide was perpetrated against the Armenian people approximately 90 years ago during the course of the First World War and that I believe that remembering that and noting that is important so that we not paper over or allow the Ahmedinejads of the next decade or decades hereafter to deny the fact.” Hoyer was referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran.
At issue is the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, says the toll has been inflated and insists that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
Although the resolution has been introduced in years past, this is the first year in which it has the support of more than half the House. Also, Democrats now control both chambers of Congress and they appear more likely to bring the measure to a vote than the Republicans were.
Administration officials cautioned that the nonbinding measure would jeopardize cooperation by Turkey in Iraq and Afghanistan. Turkey has warned of serious consequences if the resolution is approved and has launched a vigorous lobbying campaign against it, including full-page ads in various newspapers and buttonholing lawmakers.
Appearing with Rice just after a weekly briefing with military leaders in Iraq, Gates said 70 percent of all air cargo going into Iraq and a third of the fuel consumed there goes through Turkey. He said that “access to airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes, and the Turks react as strongly as we believe they will.”
The measure comes at a sensitive time for U.S.-Turkey relations. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who telephoned Bush last week about the Armenian resolution, said his government would submit a motion to Turkey’s parliament today to authorize a cross-border incursion into northern Iraq to strike a Kurdish rebel group known as the PKK, after 15 Turkish soldiers were killed in attacks in recent days. The Turks are scheduled to play host to the next ministerial-level conference of Iraq’s neighbors, which will be held in Istanbul the first week of November.
“It will be hard to do much of anything collaborative with the Turks for a while,” a senior administration official said.