Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

USA Today: Obama, Make Good On Armenia

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • USA Today: Obama, Make Good On Armenia

    USA TODAY: OBAMA, MAKE GOOD ON ARMENIA

    12:25 16/04/2015 " IN THE WORLD

    By Gregory J. Wallance
    USA Today

    On April 24, 1915, in the midst of World War I, the Ottoman Empire
    began systematically massacring its Christian Armenian subjects. At
    Sunday's Mass in Rome, Pope Francis described the massacres as "the
    first genocide of the 20th century." Turkey, which emerged from the
    rubble of the defeated Ottoman Empire and has long fiercely denied
    that a genocide took place, angrily recalled its ambassador to the
    Vatican. "The pope's statement, which is out of touch with both
    historical facts and legal truths, is simply unacceptable," tweeted
    Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu.

    Will President Obama follow Pope Francis' lead?

    Contrary to the foreign minister's tweet, there is a solid factual
    and legal foundation for calling the massacres a genocide, defined
    as killing or other acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part,
    a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

    At the outbreak of the war, there were approximately 2 million
    Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Tens of thousands of Armenians
    were serving in the army of the empire, then at war with Britain and
    Czarist Russia. Seizing on the acts of a few Armenian sympathizers
    with Russia, the Ottoman government began systematically eliminating
    the Armenian leadership in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and sent
    Armenian men, women and children, many orphaned by the slaughter, on
    death marches into the Syrian desert, where they were left to die. One
    of the Ottoman leaders, Talaat Pasha, wrote that by "continuing the
    deportation of the orphans to their destinations (in the desert),
    we are ensuring their eternal rest." Ultimately, about 1.5 million
    Armenians died in the massacres which, together with Armenians who
    fled the Ottoman Empire, decimated the Armenian community.

    In fact, as a senator, Barack Obama strongly supported the passage of
    the 2007 Armenian Genocide Resolution, which called the massacres
    a genocide. As a presidential candidate, he condemned the Bush
    administration for dismissing John Evans, the U.S. ambassador
    to Armenia, after Evans said the word "genocide" in public. "As
    president," vowed Obama, "I will recognize the Armenian genocide."

    Not even close. On his first major foreign tour, President Obama
    visited Turkey and, while speaking in the Turkish Grand National
    Assembly about how "each country must work through its past," including
    the "terrible events of 1915," the word genocide did not then, and
    has not since, been publicly used by the president or members of
    his administration to describe the massacres. (As a senator, Hillary
    Clinton supported the Armenian genocide resolutions, but as Obama's
    first secretary of State, she opposed them.)

    The Obama administration has been hardly alone in its timidity. For
    example, aside from a brief reference in a 1981 Holocaust proclamation,
    the Reagan administration avoided calling the Armenian massacres a
    genocide. The historic reason is rooted in the perceived strategic
    importance of Turkey, first in the Cold War and now in the war on
    terror. Turkey, a member of NATO, has threatened to curtail operations
    at the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik in Turkey whenever momentum
    built for a congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide.

    For Turkey, its national identity is at stake. Turkish President Recep
    Tayyip Erdogan has gone so far as to acknowledge the "shared pain"
    and "inhumane consequences" of World War I, referring to the deaths of
    both Ottoman Muslims and the Armenians, but he categorically disputes
    that the Armenians died in a genocide by the Ottomans.

    Erdogan, who seems to exist in a state of near clinical paranoia, has
    warned against "new Lawrences of Arabia," read, the Western countries
    who he claims are working to destroy the Middle East. He can hardly
    afford to admit that modern Turkey was built on the greatest crime
    a government can commit.

    There are important U.S. interests at stake in relations with Turkey,
    but there is also something unseemly in a president breaking a firm
    campaign pledge rooted in moral considerations. Confronting a terrible
    past is essential to avoiding a repetition in the future. Or as the
    pope said Sunday, "Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a
    wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it."

    President Obama, who has prided himself on breaking foreign policy
    orthodoxy, as witness his opening to Cuba and nuclear negotiations
    with Iran, should do likewise with the Armenian genocide and finally
    make good on his own campaign pledge.

    Gregory J. Wallance, a lawyer and writer in New York City, is a board
    member of Advancing Human Rights.

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/04/14/pope-francis-armenia-mass-column/25719149/

    http://www.panorama.am/en/politics/2015/04/16/usatoday/

Working...
X