Turkey, US squabble over Armenian ‘genocide’ bill
Foreign Desk Report

ANKARA—Turkey on Thursday condemned a vote by a US House of Representatives committee branding the World War I massacre of Armenians “genocide” and urged them not to take it to a full House vote. A government statement said the “irresponsible” resolution, voted by the House foreign affairs commitee, was likely to endanger bilateral relations.
“We still hope that the House of Representatives will have enough good sense not to take this resolution further,” said the statement. To do so, it added, would jeopardise a strategic partnership with an ally and friend and would be an “irresponsible attitude”, it added. “It is unacceptable that the Turkish nation should be accused of a crime that it never committed in its history.”
The non-binding measure at the centre of the row concerned the actions of the Ottoman Empire, the precursor to the modern state of Turkey. The text says the World War I killings of Armenians was a “genocide” that should be acknowledged fully in US foreign policy towards Turkey, along with “the consequences of the failure to realize a just resolution.”
It was passed on Wednesday by the Democratic-led House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee by 27 votes to 21, despite warnings by President George W. Bush and Turkey. It will now go to the the full House for a possible vote. Shortly before the vote, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned that the resolution would harm ties between the two NATO allies.
Bush and his top lieutenants had also been unusually blunt in attacking the resolution in the run-up to the vote. Bush said: “We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people. “This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in Nato and in the global war on terror.”
After the vote was passed, Assistant Secretary of State Nick Burns said: “We are disappointed by the vote at the House of Representatives today.” The department was communicating to Turkey its unhappiness with the vote and its desire to keep working closely with Ankara, he added. Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul denounced the vote as “unacceptable” earlier Thursday.
“Unfortunately, some politicians in the United States ignored appeals for common sense and once again moved to sacrifice big issues to petty games of domestic politics,” he said. “This is not an action that suits and benefits the representatives of a great power like the United States,” he added. Armenians say up to 1.5 million people died in deportations and systematic killings in 1915-17 and want the killings internationally recognised as genocide.
Turkey denies the killings were genocide. It argues that 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia during World War I and sided with Russian troops invading the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
Turkey refuses to establish diplomatic relations with Armenia, its eastern neighbour, because of Yerevan’s campaign for the international recognition of the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
Turkey warned on Thursday that relations with its NATO ally the United States would be harmed by a U.S. House committee’s approval of a resolution calling the 1915 massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks genocide. The move came as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan prepared to ask parliament, which his party controls, to authorize a military incursion into northern Iraq to fight Kurdish Turkish rebels using the region as a base.
“The committee’s approval of this resolution was an irresponsible move, which at a greatly sensitive time will make relations with a friend and ally, and a strategic partnership nurtured over generations, more difficult,” the centre-right government said in a statement.