Turkey, Bush work to block House resolution on Armenian genocide
by Baron Bodissey
For the last ninety-two years, the Turkish authorities have been denying that the events that occurred in Anatolia in 1915 constitute a genocide against the Armenians.
First the Ottomans denied it, and then the Turkish republic under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his successors took the same line: there was no genocide. There may have been some excesses, and several thousand people got killed, but that was because a few Armenian provocateurs instigated a rebellion during a time of war. The Turks did what they had to do.
We’ve written about the Armenian Genocide several times. The political battle over the official recognition of it has been waged almost since the last of the Armenian corpses were buried in their mass graves. There are extensive eyewitness accounts, many of them by non-Turks and non-Armenians, mostly American aid workers who were present in Anatolia before the United States joined the war against the Central Powers.Turkey’s German allies sent their observations of the events back to headquarters in Berlin: how’s that for a reliable source? Here’s a quote from the files of the German Foreign Office: “The final result must be the extermination of the Armenian race.”
In the ensuing decades much of the eyewitness material was recorded on audio and film. The last living eyewitness account I read was an interview in 2005 with a very old Armenian woman living in Israel. She had been a small child in 1915, and both her parents had been killed before her eyes.
But to the Turks all of these peoples are liars and exaggerators, and the attempts to designate the unfortunate affair as a genocide is the work of Turkey’s longtime enemies.
The political issues over the Armenian Genocide intensified after 1945, when Turkey became a member of NATO, home to an importqant US Air Force base, and a stalwart ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. The genocide was relegated to the sidelines, an annoying trifle to be swept under the rug and forgotten in the interest of pragmatic statecraft.
The USSR is no more, and the Cold War exigencies are gone, but the impulse to suppress discussion of the Armenian Genocide has never died. And now the administration of George W. Bush joins the ranks of the holocaust deniers. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/909920.html:
Turkey, Bush work to block House resolution on Armenian genocide
Turkish and American officials have been pressing lawmakers to reject in a vote next week a measure that would declare the World War I-era killings of Armenians a genocide.
On Friday, the issue reached the highest levels as U.S. President George W. Bush and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan talked by telephone about their opposition to the legislation, which is to go before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/10/george-w-bush-armenian-holocaust-denier.html#readfurther