House Vote Could Kindle Another Mideast Dispute

by Jim Lobe

That is because the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Dennis Hastert, has agreed to bring to the House floor a resolution which, if passed, would put the United States on record as formally recognizing that the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against its Armenian subjects between 1915 and 1923.

Turkey, whose government has long denied that the deaths of more than 1 million Armenians during that period amounted to genocide, vehemently opposes the measure and has threatened to take a number of actions against U.S. interests if it passes.

Those include closing the Incirlik Air Base to U.S. and British planes which daily patrol the "no-fly zone" over northern Iraq; cancelling billions of dollars in business and military contracts with U.S. companies; and restoring an economic blockade against Armenia, which nonetheless supports the resolution.

As a token of Turkish seriousness, the government of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit last week sent relief supplies to Iraq and announced plans to re-open rail links with that country and increase the amount of oil Baghdad can send through Turkish pipelines. Ankara has also indicated it may soon appoint an ambassador to Iraq for the first time since the Gulf War 10 years ago.

The State Department is taking no chances. Noting the upcoming vote, it released a travel advisory on Oct. 17 for U.S. citizens in Turkey and in cities outside Turkey with large Turkish populations. In both places, it said, U.S. citizens "should exercise caution, avoid large crowds and gatherings, keep a low profile, and vary routes and times of all required travel."

"The timing couldn't be worse," according to former New York Rep. Steve Solarz, who is reminding his old colleagues that Washington's whole strategy in the Middle East has come under threat as a result of the apparent breakdown in the Oslo peace process and the bombing attack in Yemen which killed 17 U.S. sailors and injured three dozen others.

Solarz is one of several retired lawmakers who have been retained at a cost of $1.5 million by Ankara, which sent a special, multi-party parliamentary delegation to testify against the resolution, to try to kill it.

A letter signed by 13 former Cabinet members and military commanders warned last week that passage of the resolution "would deliver a severe blow to U.S. interests in the region." The head of the House Intelligence Committee has also spoken out strongly against the measure, arguing that it risks one of Washington's most important strategic relationships.

Clinton himself has been lobbying congressmen by phone to oppose the resolution. "The administration, as have other administrations in the past -- both Republican and Democratic -- oppose such resolutions," said White House spokesman P.J. Crowley earlier this month. "From our point of view, a matter of historical controversy is best left to historians, not legislators."

But those who favor the resolution also have powerful allies, beginning with the more than 1 million Armenian Americans who are among the wealthiest and most politically savvy among U.S. ethnic groups. "Armenians know how to spend their money on Capitol Hill as well as any group," said one Congressional aide who asked not to be identified.

About half of them live in California, mostly in suburbs around Los Angeles. Indeed, it was in search of their support that prompted one Republican congressman from the area, James Rogan, to put forward the resolution this year and then seek Hastert's commitment to bring it to the floor just two months ago.

Normally, such a special favor would be denied, particularly given the already-crowded legislative schedule in the last weeks of the session. But control of the House is very much up for grabs in next month's elections. Rogan, whose only foreign trip as a congressman was to Armenia, is locked in a particularly tight race. So Hastert, who has not himself taken a position on the resolution, went along.

The Armenian-Americans are backed as well by another powerful ethnic lobby. Despite an unprecedented detente carried out between Turkey and Greece over the last 18 months, Greek-Americans have also backed the genocide resolution.

In addition, some Jewish-Americans have lined up with their Armenian colleagues, including Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and Deborah Lipstadt, a particularly influential Holocaust historian who recently won a celebrated libel case in Britain against David Irving, a historian who at various times in his career, has called into question the historical reality of the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

At the same time, however, Jewish-American lobbies generally have stayed out of the fight. Turkey and Israel have drawn closer, to the point of carrying out joint military exercises, and some prominent Jewish lawmakers, including Rep. Tom Lantos, Congress' only Holocaust survivor, have expressed concern about the strategic consequences of angering Turkey, not just for the United States, but for Israel as well.

Lantos' and other foes' arguments, however, were not enough to persuade a majority of the House International Relations Committee which approved it earlier this month by a 23-12 vote after two days of debate.

For their part, the Turkish parliamentarians admitted that many Armenians were killed by the Ottomans during the period in question, but insisted at the same time that tens of thousands of Turks were killed by Armenians during a time when the Empire was being attacked both from abroad and within. They strongly denied that any decision was made to engage in a "systematic and deliberate annihilation" of Armenians, as the language of the pending resolution describes it.

This is not the first time the Congress has taken a position on the issue. In 1975 and again in 1984, it passed resolutions calling for the president to recognize April 24 as the National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man, when he is supposed to issue a proclamation commemorating "all the victims of genocide, especially those of Armenian ancestry."

In 1996, it decreed that $22 million in economic aid for Ankara should be withheld until it "joined the United States in acknowledging the Armenian genocide."

But presidential statements have been more ambiguous. While Jimmy Carter in 1978 charged that there had been a "concerted effort to eliminate all the Armenian people," and Ronald Reagan used "genocide" to describe what had taken place, both post-Cold War presidents, George Bush and Clinton instead referred to "massacres," and apparently deliberately avoided using the word "genocide."