WASHINGTON - Last Thursday's vote by a United States congressional committee
condemning the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War I as
"genocide" is almost certain to complicate US ties with Turkey, a long-time
strategic ally and increasingly influential player in the Middle East and
Central and Southwest Asia.
The 23-22 vote by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives
prompted the immediate recall of Turkey's ambassador here and an announcement
by Ankara that ratification of a pending US-backed treaty with Armenia would be
frozen.
And the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which sent several
senior Turkish lawmakers and hired a high-priced public relations firm as well
as a former house speaker to
lobby against the resolution is likely to take much stronger measures if it
reaches the house floor later this year, according to both US and Turkish
analysts.
"We are seriously concerned that the adoption of this draft resolution ... will
harm Turkey-US relations and impede the efforts for the normalization of
Turkey-Armenia relations," the Turkish Embassy said in a release after the
vote.
"This decision, which could adversely affect our cooperation on a wide common
agenda with the United States, also regrettably attests to a lack of strategic
vision," it added.
After maintaining silence about the resolution for several weeks, the
administration of President Barack Obama came out against it just hours before
the vote - apparently too late to affect the final outcome, according to a
number of lawmakers.
"We do not believe that the full congress will or should vote on that
resolution and we have made that clear to all the parties involved," US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during a press conference in San Jose,
Costa Rica, on Thursday morning in the administration's first official
statement on the issue.
The administration, which needs Turkey's support on a slew of key issues,
ranging from Arab-Israeli peace to Iran and Afghanistan, is likely to lobby
hard against any effort by lawmakers to bring the resolution to the floor,
despite the fact that both Obama and Clinton promised to support some version
of it during their 2008 presidential primary campaigns.
At least half a million US citizens, many of them concentrated in the
electorally powerful state of California, claim Armenian ancestry.
The Armenian-American community, which is among the wealthiest and best
organized of the many US ethnic minorities, has long sought recognition of the
1915 death toll as a genocide. In 1975 and again in 1984, it succeeded in
getting such resolutions passed by the house, although never in the senate.
In 2007, the Foreign Affairs committee approved a similar "genocide"
resolution. However, it was never referred to the floor of the house due to
intense opposition by the administration of president George W Bush backed by
the powerful "Israel Lobby", which has frequently intervened in congress on
Turkey’s behalf since the late 1980s when Ankara and Israel began building a
strategic alliance.
But Israeli-Turkish ties have become increasingly strained in recent years,
particularly since Israel's "Cast Lead" military campaign in Gaza, which
Erdogan strongly denounced in a heated exchange with Israeli President Shimon
Peres at the World Economic Forum in late January last year, just days after
the offensive had ended.
A number of subsequent incidents, most recently the apparently deliberate
televised humiliation in January by Israel's deputy foreign minister of
Ankara's ambassador in Tel Aviv, have added to the strains.
Indeed, some analysts in the US and in Turkey suggested that the resolution's
passage was due as much to the Israel Lobby's failure to oppose it, as to the
Obama administration's delay in coming out against it. Several key lawmakers
who are considered close to the Lobby, notably Gary Ackerman, Brad Sherman and
committee chair Howard Berman, spoke in favor of its approval.
"In the past, the pro-Israel community has lobbied hard against previous
attempts to pass similar resolutions, citing warnings from Turkish officials
that it could harm the alliance not only with the United States but with Israel
...," noted the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
"In the last year or so, however, officials of American pro-Israel groups have
said that while they will not support new resolutions, they will no longer
oppose them, citing Turkey's heightened rhetorical attacks on Israel and a
flourishing of outright anti-Semitism the government has done little to stem,"
it asserted.
The resolution, which was introduced by a California Democrat, calls on the
president to use the annual presidential statement on the 1915 mass deaths next
month to "accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of
1,500,000 Armenians as genocide".
Turkey has argued that the Armenian deaths were a great tragedy played out
under the chaotic conditions of World War I when the collapsing Ottoman Empire
was under attack on many fronts, including internally in the form of a
Russian-backed Armenian insurgency.
Unlike most of its predecessors, the Erdogan government has indicated a
willingness to review the events of that time, possibly even in cooperation
with Armenia with which it agreed only last September to establish diplomatic
relations and re-open borders that have been closed since 1993.
It was hoped that that agreement, which was mediated by Switzerland with strong
backing from Washington, would be quickly ratified by both countries and lead
to the resolution of the territorial dispute between Armenia and oil-rich
Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh.
Despite US urging - most recently in a conversation between Obama and Turkish
President Abdullah Gul last Wednesday - Erdogan has insisted that
implementation of the treaty is dependent on progress in resolving the
territorial dispute. Ankara's decision to freeze the ratification process in
the wake of Thursday's committee vote here could deal a lethal blow to the
treaty's prospects.
In the four years since the committee last voted out a genocide resolution,
Turkey's strategic importance to Washington has significantly increased.
In addition to having the largest army among the European members of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and having recently increased its troop
contribution to US-led forces in Afghanistan, Turkey continues to permit the US
access to key military bases on its territory, provides critical supply routes
to Iraq and acts as an increasingly important transit route - bypassing both
Russia and Iran - for Caspian and Central Asian oil and gas.
Ankara's influence and involvement in the Arab world, particularly in Iraq and
Syria, have grown sharply in recent years, and its friendly ties with Iran have
positioned itself as a potential mediator between Tehran and the West.
Turkey has thus far resisted US pressure to host a radar base that would be
part of larger regional defense network designed to intercept Iranian missiles
and to vote for stronger economic sanctions against Tehran on the United
Nations Security Council, of which it is a member.
Some sectors, particularly those most closely associated with Israel here, have
become increasingly concerned about Turkey's growing orientation toward the
Muslim world under Erdogan, who heads the Islamist Justice and Development
Party (AKP), in both its foreign and domestic policies.
Indeed, neo-conservatives, whose views often reflect those of Israel's Likud
Party, have been attacking Erdogan and the AKP with growing fervor in recent
months, accusing them of a systematic effort to weaken Turkey's traditionally
secular institutions, notably the once-dominant armed forces.
In a column coincidentally published on Friday by the neo-conservative Wall
Street Journal Friday, Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish-born specialist at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, accused Erdogan of transforming
Turkey into a "police state".
At the same time, hard-line neo-conservatives, such as the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs and the Journal's editorial board, opposed the
genocide resolution precisely because of fears that it will serve only to
further poison bilateral relations with a country whose geostrategic importance
to Washington and its Israeli ally is simply too great.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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