US Congress Turns Up The Heat, Burns Turkey

port1080.

Posted to Politics on Mon Oct 15, 2007 at 01:03:00 PM EST (promoted by 1fastdog). RSS.

The nation of Turkey (US military ally and one of the few functional Muslim democracies) is threatening "repercussions" if the United States Congress passes a resolution officially labeling the killing of Armenians by Turks during World War II as an incident of genocide.

From 1915 to 1917, quite a few Armenians in the vicinity of the Ottoman Empire (which would soon be divvied up into a number of different countries in the aftermath of World War I) were killed. Most scholars are content to label this incident as the Armenian Genocide, but the government of Turkey (which still draws many of its national myths from the late Ottoman period) denies that the events were either organized or state sponsored, and hence claims that, while the conflict was tragic for all involved, we shouldn't label it a genocide.

While this may seem like a debate for the hallowed halls of academia, in the postmodern world everything is political. Armenian diaspora interest groups have waged a well organized campaign to push states to officially recognize the event as a genocide, and so far twenty-two countries (as well as 40 of 50 U.S. states) have passed such legislation. Some have even gone so far as to stifle debate on the subject entirely; France, for example, has made it illegal to question whether any officially recognized genocides should be considered as such. Even before this law was passed, French courts convicted and fined Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis for making the argument that the Armenian incident shouldn't be called a genocide, because the state itself did not actively promote it.

Owing perhaps to Turkey's strategic position as a member of NATO as well as one of America's few dependable allies in the Middle East, the US federal government had up to this point avoided the issue. In 2000 a bill to recognize the genocide made it out of committee, but never reached the House floor due to intervention by then-President Bill Clinton, who persuaded then-House Speaker Denny Hastert to axe the resolution. President Bush has had no such luck in persuading Nancy Pelosi to kill the current resolution, so it moves forward despite his protestations. Bush would love for the issue to go away, as Turkey could easily make things much more difficult for the US operation in Iraq. Currently 70% of US air cargo and one third of US fuel supplies in support of the military operation go through Turkey. The US has also recently had difficulty in keeping the peace between Turkish and Kurdish forces on the border between the two countries in Northern Iraq.