Genocide Deniers
Inside Higher Ed, October 16, 2007
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/16/genocide
In the buildup to last week's vote by a House of
Representatives committee officially calling for U.S.
foreign policy to recognize that a genocide of
Armenians took place during World War I, at the behest
of the "Young Turk" government of the Ottoman Empire,
a flurry of advertising in American newspapers
appeared from Turkey.
The ads discouraged the vote by House members, and
called instead for historians to figure out what
happened in 1915. The ads quoted such figures as
Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, as saying:
"These historical circumstances require a very
detailed and sober look from historians." And State
Department officials made similar statements, saying
as the vote was about to take place: "We think that
the determination of whether the events that happened
to ethnic Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire
should be a matter for historical inquiry."
Turkey's government also has been quick to point
American scholars (there are only a handful, but
Turkey knows them all) who back its view that what's
needed with regard to 1915 is not to call it genocide,
but to figure out what to call it, and what actually
took place.
Normally, you might expect historians to welcome the
interest of governments in convening scholars to
explore questions of scholarship. But in this case,
scholars who study the period say that the leaders of
Turkey and the United States - along with that handful
of scholars - are engaged in a profoundly
anti-historical mission: trying to pretend that the
Armenian genocide remains a matter of debate instead
of being a long settled question. Much of the public
discussion of the Congressional resolution has focused
on geopolitics: If the full House passes the
resolution, will Turkey end its help for U.S. military
activities in Iraq?
But there are also some questions about the role of
history and historians in the debate. To those
scholars of the period who accept the widely held view
that a genocide did take place, it's a matter of some
frustration that top government officials suggest that
these matters are open for debate and that this effort
is wrapped around a value espoused by most historians:
free and open debate.
"Ultimately this is politics, not scholarship," said
Simon Payaslian, who holds an endowed chair in
Armenian history and literature at Boston University.
Turkey's strategy, which for the first 60-70 years
after the mass slaughter was to pretend that it didn't
take place, "has become far more sophisticated than
before" and is explicitly appealing to academic
values, he said.
"They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the
idea of 'on the one hand and the other hand,' " he
said. "That's very attractive on campuses to say that
you should hear both sides of the story." While
Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn't favor
censoring anyone or firing anyone for their views, he
believes that it is irresponsible to pretend that the
history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it
is important to expose "the collaboration between the
Turkish Embassy and scholars cooperating to promote
this denialist argument."
To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these
calls for debating whether a genocide took place are
coming at a time when emerging new scholarship on the
period - based on unprecedented access to Ottoman
archives - provides even more solid evidence of the
intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the
Armenians. This new scholarship is seen as the
ultimate smoking gun as it is based on the records of
those who committed the genocide - which counters the
arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide
view relies too much on the views of Armenian
survivors.
Even further, some of the most significant new
scholarship is being done by scholars who are Turkish,
not Armenian, directly refuting the claim by some
denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe
a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars
have faced death threats as well as indictments by
prosecutors in Turkey.
Those who question the genocide, however, say that
what is taking place in American history departments
is a form of political correctness. "There is no
debate and that's the real problem. We're stuck and
the reality is that we need a debate," said David C.
Cuthell, executive director of the Institute for
Turkish Studies, a center created by Turkey's
government to award grants and fellowships to scholars
in the United States. (The center is housed at
Georgetown University, but run independently.)
The action in Congress is designed "to stifle debate,"
Cuthell said, and so is anti-history. "There are
reasonable doubts in terms of whether this is a
genocide," he said.
The term "genocide" was coined in 1944 by Raphael
Lemkin, a Jewish-Polish lawyer who was seeking to
distinguish what Hitler was doing to the Jews from the
sadly routine displacement and killing of civilians in
wartime. He spoke of "a coordinated plan of different
actions aiming at the destruction of essential
foundations of the life of national groups, with the
aim of annihilating the groups themselves." Others
have defined the term in different ways, but common
elements are generally an intentional attack on a
specific group.
While the term was created before 1915 and with the
Holocaust in mind, scholars of genocide (many of them
focused on the Holocaust) have broadly endorsed
applying the term to what happened to Armenians in
1915, and many refer to that tragedy as the first
genocide of the 20th century. When in 2005 Turkey
started talking about the idea of convening historians
to study whether a genocide took place, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars issued
a letter in which it said that the "overwhelming
opinion" of hundreds of experts on genocide from
countries around the world was that a genocide had
taken place.
Specifically it referred to a consensus around this
view: "On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I,
the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began
a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens - an
unarmed Christian minority population. More than a
million Armenians were exterminated through direct
killing, starvation, torture, and forced death
marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into
permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was
expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years."
Turkey has put forward a number of arguments in recent
years, since admitting that something terrible did
happen to many Armenians. Among the explanations
offered by the government and its supporters are that
many people died, but not as many as the scholars say;
that Armenians share responsibility for a civil war in
which civilians were killed on both sides; and that
the chaos of World War I and not any specific action
by government authorities led to the mass deaths and
exiles.
Beyond those arguments, many raise political arguments
that don't attempt to deny that a genocide took place,
but say that given Turkey's sensitivities it isn't
wise to talk about it as such. This was essentially
the argument given by some House members last week who
voted against the resolution, saying that they didn't
want to risk anything that could affect U.S. troops.
Similarly, while Holocaust experts, many of them
Jewish, have overwhelmingly backed the view that
Armenians suffered a genocide, some supporters of
Israel have not wanted to offend Turkey, a rare Middle
Eastern nation to maintain decent relations with the
Israel and a country that still has a significant
Jewish population.
Dissenters or Deniers?
Probably the most prominent scholar in the United
States to question that genocide took place is Bernard
Lewis, an emeritus professor at Princeton University,
whose work on the Middle East has made him a favorite
of the Bush administration and neoconservative
thinkers. In one of his early works, Lewis referred to
the "terrible holocaust" that the Armenians faced in
1915, but he stopped using that language and was
quoted questioning the use of the term "genocide."
Lewis did not respond to messages seeking comment for
this article. The Armenian National Committee of
America has called him "a known genocide denier" and
an "academic mercenary."
The two scholars who are most active on promoting the
view that no genocide took place are Justin McCarthy,
distinguished university scholar at the University of
Louisville, and Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of
political science at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst. Both of them are cited favorably by the
Turkish embassy and McCarthy serves on the board of
the Institute of Turkish Studies.
McCarthy said in an interview that he is a historical
demographer and that he came to his views through "the
dull study of numbers." He said that he was studying
population trends in the Ottoman Empire during World
War I and that while he believes that about 600,000
Armenians lost their lives, far more Muslims died.
"There's simply no question," he said, that Armenians
killed many of them.
The term genocide may mean something when talking
about Hitler, McCarthy said, "where you have something
unique in human history." But he said it was "pretty
meaningless" to use about the Armenians. He said that
he believes that between the Russians, the Turks and
the Armenians, everyone was killing everyone, just as
is the case in many wars. He said that to call what
happened to the Armenians genocide would be the
equivalent of calling what happened to the South
during the U.S. Civil War genocide.
So why do so many historians see what happened
differently? McCarthy said the scholarship that has
been produced to show genocide has been biased. "If
you look at who these historians are, they are
Armenians and they are advancing a national agenda,"
he said. Cuthell of the Institute for Turkish Studies
said that it goes beyond that: Because the Armenians
who were killed or exiled were Christians (as are many
of their descendants now in the United States), and
those accused of the genocide were Muslims, the United
States is more sympathetic to the Armenians.
Lewy said that before he started to study the issue,
he too believed that a genocide had taken place. He
said that intellectuals and journalist "simply echo
the Armenian position," which he said is wrong. He
said that there is the "obvious fact" that large
numbers of Armenians were killed and he blamed some of
the skepticism of Turkey's view (and his) on the fact
that Turkey for so long denied that anything had taken
place, and so lost credibility.
In 2005, the University of Utah Press published a book
by Lewy that sums up his position, Armenian Massacres
in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. Lewy's
argument, he said in an interview, "is that the key
issue is intent" and that there is "no evidence" that
the Young Turks sought the attacks on the Armenians.
"In my view, there were mass killings, but no intent."
Lewy's argument can also be found in this article in
The Middle East Forum, as can letters to the editor
taking issue with his scholarship.
The Evidence for Genocide
Many scholars who believe that there was a genocide
say that Lewy ignored or dismissed massive amounts of
evidence, not only in accounts from Armenians, but
from foreign diplomats who observed what was going on
- evidence about the marshaling of resources and
organizing of groups to attack the Armenians and kick
them out of their homes, and the very fact of who was
in control of the government at the time.
Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National
Institute, called the Lewy book part of an "insidious
way to influence Western scholarship and to create
confusion." He said it was "pretty outrageous" that
the Utah press published the book, which he called
"one of the more poisonous products" to come from
"those trying to dispute the genocide."
John Herbert, director of the University of Utah
Press, is new in his job there and said he wasn't
familiar with the discussions that took place when
Lewy submitted his book. But he said that "we want to
encourage the debate and we've done that."
Notably, other presses passed on the book. Lewy said
he was turned down 11 times, at least 4 of them from
university presses, before he found Utah. While
critics say that shows the flaws in the book, Lewy
said it was evidence of bias. "The issue was clearly
the substance of my position," he said.
Of course the problem with the "encouraging the
debate" argument is that so many experts in the field
say that the debate over genocide is settled, and that
credible arguments against the idea of a genocide just
don't much exist. The problem, many say, is that the
evidence the Turks say doesn't exist does exist, so
people have moved on.
Andras Riedlmayer, a librarian of Ottoman history at
Harvard University and co-editor of the H-TURK e-mail
list about Turkish history, said that in the '80s, he
could remember scholarly meetings "at which panels on
this issue turned into shouting matches. One doesn't
see that any more." At this point, he said, the
Turkish government's view "is very much the minority
view" among scholars worldwide.
What's happening now, he said, outside of those trying
to deny what took place, "isn't that the discussion
has diminished, but that the discussion is more
mature." He said that there is more research going on
about how and why the killings took place, and the
historical context of the time. He also said that he
thought there would be more research in the works on
one of "the great undiscussed issues of why successive
Turkish governments over recent decades have found it
worthwhile to invest so much political capital and
energy into promoting that historical narrative," in
which it had been "fudging" what really happened.
Among the scholars attracting the most attention for
work on the genocide is Taner Akçam, a historian from
Turkey who has been a professor at the University of
Minnesota since 2001, when officials in Turkey stepped
up criticism of his work. Akçam has faced death
threats and has had legal charges brought against him
in Turkey (since dropped) for his work, which directly
focuses on the question of the culpability of Young
Turk leaders in planning and executing the genocide.
(Akçam's Web site has details about his research and
the Turkish campaigns against him.) Opposition to his
work from Turkey has been particularly intense since
the publication last year of A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish
Responsibility.
In an interview, Akçam said that his next book -
planned for 2008 - may be "a turning point" in
research on the genocide. He is finishing a book on
what took place in 1915 based only on documents he has
reviewed in Ottoman archives - no testimony from
survivors, no documents from third parties. The
documents, only some of which he has written about
already, are so conclusive on the questions Turkey
pretends are in dispute, he said, that the genocide
should be impossible to deny.
To those like Lewy who have written books saying that
there is no evidence, "I laugh at them," Akçam said,
because the documents he has already released rebut
them, and the new book will do so even more. "There is
no scholarly debate on this topic," he said.
The difficulty, he said, is doing the scholarship. In
the archives in Turkey, he said, the staff are
extremely professional and helpful, even knowing his
views and his work. But he said that he has received
numerous death threats and does not feel safe in
Turkey for more than a few days, and even then must
keep a low profile. As to legal risks, he said that
laws on the books that make it illegal to question the
Turkish state on certain matters, are inconsistently
enforced, so while he has faced legal harassment, he
generally felt that everything would work out in the
end. But Akçam is well known, has dual German-Turkish
citizenship, and a job at an American university, and
he said those are advantages others do not have.
He plans to publish his next book first in Turkey, in
Turkish, and then to translate it for an American
audience.
Another scholar from Turkey working on the Armenian
genocide is Fatma Müge Göçek, an associate professor
of sociology at the University of Michigan. Until she
came to Princeton to earn her Ph.D., Göçek said that
she didn't know about the Armenian genocide. For that
matter, she said she didn't know that Armenians lived
in Turkey - "and I had the best education Turkey has
to offer."
Learning the full history was painful, she said, and
started for her when Armenians she met at Princeton
talked to her about it and she was shocked and angry.
Upon reading the sorts of materials she never saw in
Turkey, the evidence was clear, she said.
Göçek's books to date have been about the
Westernization of the Ottoman Empire, but she said she
came to the view that she needed to deal with the
genocide in her next book. "I have worked on how the
Ottoman Empire negotiated modernity," she said, and
the killings of 1915 are part of "the dark side of
modernity."
So the book she is writing now is a sociological
analysis of how Turkish officials at the time
justified to themselves what they were doing. She is
basing her book on the writings these officials made
themselves in which they frame the issue as one of
"the survival of the Turks or of the Armenians" to
justify their actions. While Göçek will be focusing on
the self-justification, she said that the diaries and
memoirs she is citing also show that the Turkish
leaders knew exactly what they were doing, and that
this wasn't just a case of chaos and civil war getting
out of hand.
Göçek said she was aware of the harassment faced by
Akçam and others from Turkey who have stated in public
that a genocide took place. But she said scholars must
go where their research leads them. "That is why one
decides to become an academic - you want to search
certain questions. If you do not want to, and you are
not willing to, you should go do something else."
Inside Higher Ed, October 16, 2007
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/16/genocide
In the buildup to last week's vote by a House of
Representatives committee officially calling for U.S.
foreign policy to recognize that a genocide of
Armenians took place during World War I, at the behest
of the "Young Turk" government of the Ottoman Empire,
a flurry of advertising in American newspapers
appeared from Turkey.
The ads discouraged the vote by House members, and
called instead for historians to figure out what
happened in 1915. The ads quoted such figures as
Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, as saying:
"These historical circumstances require a very
detailed and sober look from historians." And State
Department officials made similar statements, saying
as the vote was about to take place: "We think that
the determination of whether the events that happened
to ethnic Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire
should be a matter for historical inquiry."
Turkey's government also has been quick to point
American scholars (there are only a handful, but
Turkey knows them all) who back its view that what's
needed with regard to 1915 is not to call it genocide,
but to figure out what to call it, and what actually
took place.
Normally, you might expect historians to welcome the
interest of governments in convening scholars to
explore questions of scholarship. But in this case,
scholars who study the period say that the leaders of
Turkey and the United States - along with that handful
of scholars - are engaged in a profoundly
anti-historical mission: trying to pretend that the
Armenian genocide remains a matter of debate instead
of being a long settled question. Much of the public
discussion of the Congressional resolution has focused
on geopolitics: If the full House passes the
resolution, will Turkey end its help for U.S. military
activities in Iraq?
But there are also some questions about the role of
history and historians in the debate. To those
scholars of the period who accept the widely held view
that a genocide did take place, it's a matter of some
frustration that top government officials suggest that
these matters are open for debate and that this effort
is wrapped around a value espoused by most historians:
free and open debate.
"Ultimately this is politics, not scholarship," said
Simon Payaslian, who holds an endowed chair in
Armenian history and literature at Boston University.
Turkey's strategy, which for the first 60-70 years
after the mass slaughter was to pretend that it didn't
take place, "has become far more sophisticated than
before" and is explicitly appealing to academic
values, he said.
"They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the
idea of 'on the one hand and the other hand,' " he
said. "That's very attractive on campuses to say that
you should hear both sides of the story." While
Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn't favor
censoring anyone or firing anyone for their views, he
believes that it is irresponsible to pretend that the
history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it
is important to expose "the collaboration between the
Turkish Embassy and scholars cooperating to promote
this denialist argument."
To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these
calls for debating whether a genocide took place are
coming at a time when emerging new scholarship on the
period - based on unprecedented access to Ottoman
archives - provides even more solid evidence of the
intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the
Armenians. This new scholarship is seen as the
ultimate smoking gun as it is based on the records of
those who committed the genocide - which counters the
arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide
view relies too much on the views of Armenian
survivors.
Even further, some of the most significant new
scholarship is being done by scholars who are Turkish,
not Armenian, directly refuting the claim by some
denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe
a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars
have faced death threats as well as indictments by
prosecutors in Turkey.
Those who question the genocide, however, say that
what is taking place in American history departments
is a form of political correctness. "There is no
debate and that's the real problem. We're stuck and
the reality is that we need a debate," said David C.
Cuthell, executive director of the Institute for
Turkish Studies, a center created by Turkey's
government to award grants and fellowships to scholars
in the United States. (The center is housed at
Georgetown University, but run independently.)
The action in Congress is designed "to stifle debate,"
Cuthell said, and so is anti-history. "There are
reasonable doubts in terms of whether this is a
genocide," he said.
The term "genocide" was coined in 1944 by Raphael
Lemkin, a Jewish-Polish lawyer who was seeking to
distinguish what Hitler was doing to the Jews from the
sadly routine displacement and killing of civilians in
wartime. He spoke of "a coordinated plan of different
actions aiming at the destruction of essential
foundations of the life of national groups, with the
aim of annihilating the groups themselves." Others
have defined the term in different ways, but common
elements are generally an intentional attack on a
specific group.
While the term was created before 1915 and with the
Holocaust in mind, scholars of genocide (many of them
focused on the Holocaust) have broadly endorsed
applying the term to what happened to Armenians in
1915, and many refer to that tragedy as the first
genocide of the 20th century. When in 2005 Turkey
started talking about the idea of convening historians
to study whether a genocide took place, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars issued
a letter in which it said that the "overwhelming
opinion" of hundreds of experts on genocide from
countries around the world was that a genocide had
taken place.
Specifically it referred to a consensus around this
view: "On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I,
the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began
a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens - an
unarmed Christian minority population. More than a
million Armenians were exterminated through direct
killing, starvation, torture, and forced death
marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into
permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was
expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years."
Turkey has put forward a number of arguments in recent
years, since admitting that something terrible did
happen to many Armenians. Among the explanations
offered by the government and its supporters are that
many people died, but not as many as the scholars say;
that Armenians share responsibility for a civil war in
which civilians were killed on both sides; and that
the chaos of World War I and not any specific action
by government authorities led to the mass deaths and
exiles.
Beyond those arguments, many raise political arguments
that don't attempt to deny that a genocide took place,
but say that given Turkey's sensitivities it isn't
wise to talk about it as such. This was essentially
the argument given by some House members last week who
voted against the resolution, saying that they didn't
want to risk anything that could affect U.S. troops.
Similarly, while Holocaust experts, many of them
Jewish, have overwhelmingly backed the view that
Armenians suffered a genocide, some supporters of
Israel have not wanted to offend Turkey, a rare Middle
Eastern nation to maintain decent relations with the
Israel and a country that still has a significant
Jewish population.
Dissenters or Deniers?
Probably the most prominent scholar in the United
States to question that genocide took place is Bernard
Lewis, an emeritus professor at Princeton University,
whose work on the Middle East has made him a favorite
of the Bush administration and neoconservative
thinkers. In one of his early works, Lewis referred to
the "terrible holocaust" that the Armenians faced in
1915, but he stopped using that language and was
quoted questioning the use of the term "genocide."
Lewis did not respond to messages seeking comment for
this article. The Armenian National Committee of
America has called him "a known genocide denier" and
an "academic mercenary."
The two scholars who are most active on promoting the
view that no genocide took place are Justin McCarthy,
distinguished university scholar at the University of
Louisville, and Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of
political science at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst. Both of them are cited favorably by the
Turkish embassy and McCarthy serves on the board of
the Institute of Turkish Studies.
McCarthy said in an interview that he is a historical
demographer and that he came to his views through "the
dull study of numbers." He said that he was studying
population trends in the Ottoman Empire during World
War I and that while he believes that about 600,000
Armenians lost their lives, far more Muslims died.
"There's simply no question," he said, that Armenians
killed many of them.
The term genocide may mean something when talking
about Hitler, McCarthy said, "where you have something
unique in human history." But he said it was "pretty
meaningless" to use about the Armenians. He said that
he believes that between the Russians, the Turks and
the Armenians, everyone was killing everyone, just as
is the case in many wars. He said that to call what
happened to the Armenians genocide would be the
equivalent of calling what happened to the South
during the U.S. Civil War genocide.
So why do so many historians see what happened
differently? McCarthy said the scholarship that has
been produced to show genocide has been biased. "If
you look at who these historians are, they are
Armenians and they are advancing a national agenda,"
he said. Cuthell of the Institute for Turkish Studies
said that it goes beyond that: Because the Armenians
who were killed or exiled were Christians (as are many
of their descendants now in the United States), and
those accused of the genocide were Muslims, the United
States is more sympathetic to the Armenians.
Lewy said that before he started to study the issue,
he too believed that a genocide had taken place. He
said that intellectuals and journalist "simply echo
the Armenian position," which he said is wrong. He
said that there is the "obvious fact" that large
numbers of Armenians were killed and he blamed some of
the skepticism of Turkey's view (and his) on the fact
that Turkey for so long denied that anything had taken
place, and so lost credibility.
In 2005, the University of Utah Press published a book
by Lewy that sums up his position, Armenian Massacres
in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. Lewy's
argument, he said in an interview, "is that the key
issue is intent" and that there is "no evidence" that
the Young Turks sought the attacks on the Armenians.
"In my view, there were mass killings, but no intent."
Lewy's argument can also be found in this article in
The Middle East Forum, as can letters to the editor
taking issue with his scholarship.
The Evidence for Genocide
Many scholars who believe that there was a genocide
say that Lewy ignored or dismissed massive amounts of
evidence, not only in accounts from Armenians, but
from foreign diplomats who observed what was going on
- evidence about the marshaling of resources and
organizing of groups to attack the Armenians and kick
them out of their homes, and the very fact of who was
in control of the government at the time.
Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National
Institute, called the Lewy book part of an "insidious
way to influence Western scholarship and to create
confusion." He said it was "pretty outrageous" that
the Utah press published the book, which he called
"one of the more poisonous products" to come from
"those trying to dispute the genocide."
John Herbert, director of the University of Utah
Press, is new in his job there and said he wasn't
familiar with the discussions that took place when
Lewy submitted his book. But he said that "we want to
encourage the debate and we've done that."
Notably, other presses passed on the book. Lewy said
he was turned down 11 times, at least 4 of them from
university presses, before he found Utah. While
critics say that shows the flaws in the book, Lewy
said it was evidence of bias. "The issue was clearly
the substance of my position," he said.
Of course the problem with the "encouraging the
debate" argument is that so many experts in the field
say that the debate over genocide is settled, and that
credible arguments against the idea of a genocide just
don't much exist. The problem, many say, is that the
evidence the Turks say doesn't exist does exist, so
people have moved on.
Andras Riedlmayer, a librarian of Ottoman history at
Harvard University and co-editor of the H-TURK e-mail
list about Turkish history, said that in the '80s, he
could remember scholarly meetings "at which panels on
this issue turned into shouting matches. One doesn't
see that any more." At this point, he said, the
Turkish government's view "is very much the minority
view" among scholars worldwide.
What's happening now, he said, outside of those trying
to deny what took place, "isn't that the discussion
has diminished, but that the discussion is more
mature." He said that there is more research going on
about how and why the killings took place, and the
historical context of the time. He also said that he
thought there would be more research in the works on
one of "the great undiscussed issues of why successive
Turkish governments over recent decades have found it
worthwhile to invest so much political capital and
energy into promoting that historical narrative," in
which it had been "fudging" what really happened.
Among the scholars attracting the most attention for
work on the genocide is Taner Akçam, a historian from
Turkey who has been a professor at the University of
Minnesota since 2001, when officials in Turkey stepped
up criticism of his work. Akçam has faced death
threats and has had legal charges brought against him
in Turkey (since dropped) for his work, which directly
focuses on the question of the culpability of Young
Turk leaders in planning and executing the genocide.
(Akçam's Web site has details about his research and
the Turkish campaigns against him.) Opposition to his
work from Turkey has been particularly intense since
the publication last year of A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish
Responsibility.
In an interview, Akçam said that his next book -
planned for 2008 - may be "a turning point" in
research on the genocide. He is finishing a book on
what took place in 1915 based only on documents he has
reviewed in Ottoman archives - no testimony from
survivors, no documents from third parties. The
documents, only some of which he has written about
already, are so conclusive on the questions Turkey
pretends are in dispute, he said, that the genocide
should be impossible to deny.
To those like Lewy who have written books saying that
there is no evidence, "I laugh at them," Akçam said,
because the documents he has already released rebut
them, and the new book will do so even more. "There is
no scholarly debate on this topic," he said.
The difficulty, he said, is doing the scholarship. In
the archives in Turkey, he said, the staff are
extremely professional and helpful, even knowing his
views and his work. But he said that he has received
numerous death threats and does not feel safe in
Turkey for more than a few days, and even then must
keep a low profile. As to legal risks, he said that
laws on the books that make it illegal to question the
Turkish state on certain matters, are inconsistently
enforced, so while he has faced legal harassment, he
generally felt that everything would work out in the
end. But Akçam is well known, has dual German-Turkish
citizenship, and a job at an American university, and
he said those are advantages others do not have.
He plans to publish his next book first in Turkey, in
Turkish, and then to translate it for an American
audience.
Another scholar from Turkey working on the Armenian
genocide is Fatma Müge Göçek, an associate professor
of sociology at the University of Michigan. Until she
came to Princeton to earn her Ph.D., Göçek said that
she didn't know about the Armenian genocide. For that
matter, she said she didn't know that Armenians lived
in Turkey - "and I had the best education Turkey has
to offer."
Learning the full history was painful, she said, and
started for her when Armenians she met at Princeton
talked to her about it and she was shocked and angry.
Upon reading the sorts of materials she never saw in
Turkey, the evidence was clear, she said.
Göçek's books to date have been about the
Westernization of the Ottoman Empire, but she said she
came to the view that she needed to deal with the
genocide in her next book. "I have worked on how the
Ottoman Empire negotiated modernity," she said, and
the killings of 1915 are part of "the dark side of
modernity."
So the book she is writing now is a sociological
analysis of how Turkish officials at the time
justified to themselves what they were doing. She is
basing her book on the writings these officials made
themselves in which they frame the issue as one of
"the survival of the Turks or of the Armenians" to
justify their actions. While Göçek will be focusing on
the self-justification, she said that the diaries and
memoirs she is citing also show that the Turkish
leaders knew exactly what they were doing, and that
this wasn't just a case of chaos and civil war getting
out of hand.
Göçek said she was aware of the harassment faced by
Akçam and others from Turkey who have stated in public
that a genocide took place. But she said scholars must
go where their research leads them. "That is why one
decides to become an academic - you want to search
certain questions. If you do not want to, and you are
not willing to, you should go do something else."
- Scott Jaschik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
World Politics Review
Oct 30 2007
Armenian Genocide: the Lobbying Behind the Congressional Resolution
Guy Taylor | 30 Oct 2007
World Politics Review Exclusive
WASHINGTON -- Much of the controversy surrounding a congressional committee's approval of a resolution condemning as genocide the massacre of Armenians during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has focused on the action's geopolitical ramifications. But a key question remains unanswered: How did the world's most powerful body of lawmakers come to feel compelled to register a position on an event that happened almost a century ago?
By some accounts, the answer is simple: lobbying. Others, however, contend that the power of the Armenian lobby in the United States has been exaggerated and that the genocide resolution has gotten traction in Congress on moral grounds alone.
While Armenian genocide resolutions have been considered at the committee level in Congress for decades, the passage of the latest one by a 27-21 vote Oct. 10 made international headlines when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vowed to push it to a full House vote. Congressional support for the measure appears to have waned during the weeks since, however, as Turkey, angered by the resolution, threatens to launch military operations in Northern Iraq against Kurdish Workers Party militants.
Is the Armenian lobby in the United States so powerful that it convinced a group of elected U.S. officials to embrace its policy despite the immediately negative impact it could have on U.S.
interests in the Middle East?
Many astute Washington observers claim that, animated by the genocide issue for decades, the Armenian lobby has developed into one of the most formidable foreign lobbies in the United States. For example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, in a
Foreign Affairs article about foreign lobbying of the U.S. government, rated "the Israeli-American, Cuban-American, and Armenian-American lobbies as the most effective in their assertiveness."
However, influential Armenian-Americans assert that Congress has taken up the issue because of morality, not lobbying. "There's a myth that the Armenian lobby is so strong," says Michael O'Hurley-Pitts, a prominent Armenian-American author who serves as the spokesman for
the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America. "If that were true this resolution would have been passed decades ago."
"The resolution condemns the Ottoman Empire's genocide of the Armenians. It's troubling for me to understand why modern Turkey fights so hard to defend what should not be theirs to defend," he said. "If U.S. foreign policy efforts require us to abandon our morals and values as a just nation, then we as Americans must review the foundation upon which our foreign policy is built."
How Powerful is the Armenian Lobby?
Measured purely in dollars spent, the Armenian lobby is relatively small in the grand scheme of foreign policy lobbying, says Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, whose Website, www.opensecrets.org, tracks the spending of lobbying groups in Washington.
"It's possible that every day a thousand Armenians show up on Capitol Hill and knock on the doors of Congress," says Ritsch. "But it doesn't show up in the reports."
Over the past nine years, the Armenian Assembly of America, the group leading the political charge for the genocide resolution, has spent between $140,000 and $260,000 per year on lobbying was spent last year and $160,000 spent so far in 2007.
"It looks like they spent almost as much in the first six months of 2007 as they spent in all of last year," Ritsch noted. However, even with the jump in spending, the Armenian lobby does not measure up to Washington's largest influence players.
For instance, according to Open Secrets data, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, "the country's most powerful pro-Israel political group . . . spend[s] more than $1 million annually on lobbying." Open Secrets also indicates that money spent by pro-Armenian political groups, such as Political Action Committees (PACs), is less than that spent by pro-Turkey PACs, which would ostensibly be fighting to block the passage of the genocide resolution.
How, then, have Armenian groups been successful in bringing the resolution to the fore? Ritsch ventures that "the recognition of the genocide is of far greater interest and concern to Armenians than not having it recognized is to the average Turkish-American. I think it's one of these issues where one side is really motivated and the other side really doesn't care as much."
He surmises that "a whole lot of grassroots lobbying in the districts of the members who've been pushing for this" is behind the genocide resolution.
Armenian Churches vs. Turkish Mosques
Ritsch's read on the issue dovetails with the perspective of Turkish-American analysts and lobbyists, who say the Armenian-American community is more organized and politically minded
than their own.
"From an organizational perspective, there are about 500 Armenian organizations and about 50 Turkish organizations," says Gunai Evinch, a prominent Turkish-American Lawyer in Washington and vice president of the leading Turkish lobby organization, the Assembly of
Turkish-American Associations. "The Turkish organizations are primarily dedicated to cultural events, whereas the Armenian organizations do not shy away at all from political activities."
The Armenian church," argues Evinch, "is a major point of congregation for . . . Armenian life, both spiritual and political. The church's leaders are in a way the political leaders; there has
never been a distinction."
"In the Turkish-American community on the other hand, with a strong tradition of secular democracy, we do not see politics played in mosques," he said. "We don't have a meeting place to go to every week to congregate and to plan and strategize on a political issue. We don't have the force of God being used to bring us together to do political work against a particular ethnic group."
Evinch claims that tax records of the revenue and donations of all Armenian local and national organizations, including academic groups and the Armenian Church in the United States, would show that "the Armenian side has about a $40 million annual budget for advocating Armenian- American interests . . . compared to the Turkish side, which has about $400,000 dollars for all of the issues."
Over the years, he says, Congress has been "bombarded with resolutions and gotten to know the thesis of the Armenian side and decided that [passing the resolution] was a moral thing to do despite the affect on U.S.-Turkey relations and interests in the region."
Furthermore, Evinch contends that the recent House Foreign Affairs Committee vote was heavily influenced in particular by Armenian voters and money in California, Massachusetts and New York. Of the estimated 385,488 people of Armenian ancestry the 2000 U.S. Census
counted as living in the United States, some 257,686 reside in those three states, with 204,641 in California alone, according to Euroamericans.net, a Web site that keeps such statistics.
"Of the 27 votes in favor of the resolution in the Foreign Affairs Committee, 10 were from California and eight were from New York," said Evinch. "There is just no way that those congressmen or women are going to be voting against this bill, particularly if they're
going to be re-elected."
'Truth On Our Side'
Asked about the role of the church as it relates to the genocide resolution, O'Hurley-Pitts, of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, offered this response: "It's absolutely against the law for the church to raise money for political causes. The church does raise money for religious, humanitarian and other efforts, but at no time has the church ever raised money to support legislations before the United States House of Representatives. I would take issue with anybody who would suggest that the church is engaged in fundraising for political activities."
O'Hurley-Pitts acknowledged that Catholicos Karekin II, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church -- who is presently visiting the United States -- "has repeatedly supported the passage of an Armenian genocide recognition throughout the world."
But "he does not support political activity," said O'Hurley-Pitts, adding that "the reason he supports genocide recognition is because without recognition there can be no condemnation, and without condemnation there can be no prevention."
According to O'Hurley-Pitts, there are actually 1.5 million Armenians in the United States, and "it doesn't take an act of Congress for Armenians to see the gaping holes in their family trees."
Bryan Ardouny, executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America, describes the community as a "very close-knit, educated and passionate constituency."
"In terms of organization, certainly you have various churches throughout the United States," he says. "It's not that the church is by any means an arm of the Armenian lobby, but . . . part of the consciousness of all Armenians."
Money for lobbying, says Ardouny, comes "from individual support, from individuals who care obviously about what we're doing, who care about the U.S.-Armenian relationship, that want to see Armenia make the strides it's making in terms of its democratic reforms and its independence."
He adds that "the ongoing denial campaign of the Turkish government" helps to bring the Armenian community together.
The real reason for the genocide resolution's passage by the Foreign Affairs Committee, says Ardouny, is that "we have the truth on our side."
There is no debate in Washington over the validity of the resolutions claim, he argues. House members worried about supporting it "have talked about a timing issue, but the Turkish denial position has no defenders on Capitol Hill."
Another factor, he says, is the current recognition that genocide is occurring in Darfur: "With genocide still unfolding in Darfur, the consciousness in America has certainly been raised to that issue. If you can't affirm the Armenian genocide how are you going to address future and current genocide?"
In July 2004, the House and Senate passed a resolution declaring that the atrocities then unfolding in Sudan were genocide and urging the Bush administration to refer to them as such.
Flip-Flopping Lawmakers
But American "consciousness" of genocide has certainly not reduced the controversy surrounding the Armenian resolution, the intensity of which is evidenced by the shifting positions of U.S. House members on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
The most prominent example may be that of California Democrat Rep. Jane Harman. Harman, who notes that her "own family was decimated by the Holocaust," initially cosponsored the latest version of the resolution.
In early October, however, as the resolution came up for a committee vote, she suddenly flipped her position. In a subsequent Los Angeles Times op-ed, she offered this explanation for her change of heart:
After a visit in February to Turkey, where I met with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Armenian Orthodox patriarch and colleagues of murdered Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, I became convinced that passing this resolution again at this time would isolate and embarrass a courageous and moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world.
While Harman's actions drew media attention -- not to mention the attention of young Armenian activists, who reportedly confronted her at an early October political rally in California with shouts of "genocide denier, hypocrite and liar" -- less attention has been
given to the actions of another, more influential House member, who has long gone back and forth on the issue.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, also a California Democrat, cosponsored and publicly supported one of the first Armenian genocide resolutions back in 1984. But Lantos, who like Harman is Jewish, and is the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to U.S. Congress, changed his stance during the 1990s. When the issue was brought to a vote again in 2000, he said he opposed it because it would be "counterproductive" for Turkish-Armenian,
Turkish-Greek, and Turkish-U.S. relations.
When the resolution came up again in 2005, Lantos again changed his position, and began supporting it. Then the Foreign Affairs Committee's ranking Democrat, he said he wanted to punish Turkey for refusing to allow U.S. forces to invade Iraq through Turkey two years earlier. "Our Turkish friends need to understand that support from the United States for matters that are important to them is predicated upon their support for things that are important to the United States," Lantos said at the time, suggesting he saw the issue in terms of a quid pro quo.
Lantos remained in favor of the resolution this time around, a development that "shocked and angered" Turkish diplomats in Washington, according to the Turkish Daily News. A week after the vote, the pro-Turkey, English-language publication ran with the headline, "Turkey Loses Jewish Alliance," and asserted that Jewish-American lawmakers such as Lantos had been "unimpressed" by Turkey's efforts to lobby against the resolution. Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan's foreign policy adviser reportedly criticized Lantos' vote, saying, "we have seen that his understanding of history is changing with time."
Evinch, of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations, says the quid-pro-quo reasoning behind Lantos' support for the resolution shows just how bluntly political the Armenia issue has become.
"When [Lantos] said that, I could see then that the level of debate around this issue was rapidly descending to a sort of hard politics that had nothing to do with the substance of the Armenian claim," said Evinch. "I look at Lantos as a wise person and not a person that would stoop to those levels, who would support a resolution as a quid pro quo to get back at Turkey."
The Role of Jewish and Pro-Israel Groups
Other analysts say Turkey's foreign policy in recent years has contributed to the unease among would-be Turkey supporters in the U.S. government, including many in the Jewish community who had previously supported Turkey as a beacon of Islamic moderation in the Middle East. Most notable has been the Turkish government's increased diplomatic and economic relations with Middle East actors hostile to the United States and Israel.
In February 2006, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal was received in Ankara by members of Turkish President Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, putting Turkey alongside Russia as the world's only non-Arab country to open its doors to the Palestinian party. A Voice of
America report at the time noted that "Western diplomats said the visit would likely harm Turkey's strong ties with the Jewish state." Turkey has also increased ties with Syria, whose president, Bashar al-Assad, was in Ankara in mid-October voicing his support for the Turkish Parliament's passage of the measure to allow a Turkish military incursion into northern Iraq.
Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow and the director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says "the Hamas visit and other things such as the enhancement of dialogue between Iran, Turkey and Syria, have worked together to trip some people who have been watching with nervousness over Turkey's commitment to the West and how that commitment may be coming undone."
But, Cagaptay added: "I wouldn't say that American Jews have lost heart in Turkey, they still see it as an extremely valuable ally in the region."
Evinch shares a similar view, taking issue with assertions, such as the one made by the Turkish Daily News, that the Jewish community's support for Turkey is waning.
"In the Jewish-American community, there is a liberal part and a conservative part," said Evinch. "The Liberal part has become more and more sensitive to the Armenian perspective of World War I history, while the conservative part, which is thinking more about what is good for Israel, has been less receptive to the Armenian thesis."
Jewish-American advocacy groups in Washington and nationally appear to be carefully managing their public stance on the resolution.
The Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish organization, has publicly opposed any congressional resolution condemning the Armenian genocide. While ADL leaders wrote in an August statement that what Armenians went through at the end of World War I was "indeed
tantamount to genocide," they went on to say "we continue to firmly believe that a Congressional resolution on such matters is a counterproductive diversion and will not foster reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and may put at risk the Turkish Jewish community and the important multilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel and the United States."
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the leading pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying group in Washington, told World Politics Review that AIPAC has "not taken a position" on the genocide resolution. Asked why, she said: "It's not within the issues we focus on. That particular issue is outside of our purview."
Some Armenian-Americans have expressed frustration that Jewish groups have not taken a more aggressive stance in favor of the Armenian resolution. "It's certainly been a frustration point in the Armenian community here," said one prominent Armenian-American activist, who
spoke on condition of anonymity.
Other members of the Armenian community emphasize the support the genocide resolution has received from an array of interest groups. Ardouny, for instance, said the ADL took "a positive step forward" in publicly acknowledging that Armenian suffering was tantamount to genocide.
The Armenian Assembly of America has compiled a list of 53 "third-party organizations in support" of the genocide resolution. The list includes a variety of ethnic and national advocacy
organizations, such as the Arab American Institute and the Belarusan-American Association.
However, even with such support, concerns about a genocide resolution's consequences for U.S.-Turkey relations seem to be, for the time being at least, paramount in the minds of members of Congress. A number of Democrats last week pulled their support of the resolution, and in statements to the press Pelosi allowed for the possibility that the resolution will not come to a full House vote.
Guy Taylor is World Politics Review senior editor.
Armenian Genocide: the Lobbying Behind the Congressional Resolution
Guy Taylor | 30 Oct 2007
World Politics Review Exclusive
WASHINGTON -- Much of the controversy surrounding a congressional committee's approval of a resolution condemning as genocide the massacre of Armenians during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has focused on the action's geopolitical ramifications. But a key question remains unanswered: How did the world's most powerful body of lawmakers come to feel compelled to register a position on an event that happened almost a century ago?
By some accounts, the answer is simple: lobbying. Others, however, contend that the power of the Armenian lobby in the United States has been exaggerated and that the genocide resolution has gotten traction in Congress on moral grounds alone.
While Armenian genocide resolutions have been considered at the committee level in Congress for decades, the passage of the latest one by a 27-21 vote Oct. 10 made international headlines when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vowed to push it to a full House vote. Congressional support for the measure appears to have waned during the weeks since, however, as Turkey, angered by the resolution, threatens to launch military operations in Northern Iraq against Kurdish Workers Party militants.
Is the Armenian lobby in the United States so powerful that it convinced a group of elected U.S. officials to embrace its policy despite the immediately negative impact it could have on U.S.
interests in the Middle East?
Many astute Washington observers claim that, animated by the genocide issue for decades, the Armenian lobby has developed into one of the most formidable foreign lobbies in the United States. For example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, in a
Foreign Affairs article about foreign lobbying of the U.S. government, rated "the Israeli-American, Cuban-American, and Armenian-American lobbies as the most effective in their assertiveness."
However, influential Armenian-Americans assert that Congress has taken up the issue because of morality, not lobbying. "There's a myth that the Armenian lobby is so strong," says Michael O'Hurley-Pitts, a prominent Armenian-American author who serves as the spokesman for
the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America. "If that were true this resolution would have been passed decades ago."
"The resolution condemns the Ottoman Empire's genocide of the Armenians. It's troubling for me to understand why modern Turkey fights so hard to defend what should not be theirs to defend," he said. "If U.S. foreign policy efforts require us to abandon our morals and values as a just nation, then we as Americans must review the foundation upon which our foreign policy is built."
How Powerful is the Armenian Lobby?
Measured purely in dollars spent, the Armenian lobby is relatively small in the grand scheme of foreign policy lobbying, says Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, whose Website, www.opensecrets.org, tracks the spending of lobbying groups in Washington.
"It's possible that every day a thousand Armenians show up on Capitol Hill and knock on the doors of Congress," says Ritsch. "But it doesn't show up in the reports."
Over the past nine years, the Armenian Assembly of America, the group leading the political charge for the genocide resolution, has spent between $140,000 and $260,000 per year on lobbying was spent last year and $160,000 spent so far in 2007.
"It looks like they spent almost as much in the first six months of 2007 as they spent in all of last year," Ritsch noted. However, even with the jump in spending, the Armenian lobby does not measure up to Washington's largest influence players.
For instance, according to Open Secrets data, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, "the country's most powerful pro-Israel political group . . . spend[s] more than $1 million annually on lobbying." Open Secrets also indicates that money spent by pro-Armenian political groups, such as Political Action Committees (PACs), is less than that spent by pro-Turkey PACs, which would ostensibly be fighting to block the passage of the genocide resolution.
How, then, have Armenian groups been successful in bringing the resolution to the fore? Ritsch ventures that "the recognition of the genocide is of far greater interest and concern to Armenians than not having it recognized is to the average Turkish-American. I think it's one of these issues where one side is really motivated and the other side really doesn't care as much."
He surmises that "a whole lot of grassroots lobbying in the districts of the members who've been pushing for this" is behind the genocide resolution.
Armenian Churches vs. Turkish Mosques
Ritsch's read on the issue dovetails with the perspective of Turkish-American analysts and lobbyists, who say the Armenian-American community is more organized and politically minded
than their own.
"From an organizational perspective, there are about 500 Armenian organizations and about 50 Turkish organizations," says Gunai Evinch, a prominent Turkish-American Lawyer in Washington and vice president of the leading Turkish lobby organization, the Assembly of
Turkish-American Associations. "The Turkish organizations are primarily dedicated to cultural events, whereas the Armenian organizations do not shy away at all from political activities."
The Armenian church," argues Evinch, "is a major point of congregation for . . . Armenian life, both spiritual and political. The church's leaders are in a way the political leaders; there has
never been a distinction."
"In the Turkish-American community on the other hand, with a strong tradition of secular democracy, we do not see politics played in mosques," he said. "We don't have a meeting place to go to every week to congregate and to plan and strategize on a political issue. We don't have the force of God being used to bring us together to do political work against a particular ethnic group."
Evinch claims that tax records of the revenue and donations of all Armenian local and national organizations, including academic groups and the Armenian Church in the United States, would show that "the Armenian side has about a $40 million annual budget for advocating Armenian- American interests . . . compared to the Turkish side, which has about $400,000 dollars for all of the issues."
Over the years, he says, Congress has been "bombarded with resolutions and gotten to know the thesis of the Armenian side and decided that [passing the resolution] was a moral thing to do despite the affect on U.S.-Turkey relations and interests in the region."
Furthermore, Evinch contends that the recent House Foreign Affairs Committee vote was heavily influenced in particular by Armenian voters and money in California, Massachusetts and New York. Of the estimated 385,488 people of Armenian ancestry the 2000 U.S. Census
counted as living in the United States, some 257,686 reside in those three states, with 204,641 in California alone, according to Euroamericans.net, a Web site that keeps such statistics.
"Of the 27 votes in favor of the resolution in the Foreign Affairs Committee, 10 were from California and eight were from New York," said Evinch. "There is just no way that those congressmen or women are going to be voting against this bill, particularly if they're
going to be re-elected."
'Truth On Our Side'
Asked about the role of the church as it relates to the genocide resolution, O'Hurley-Pitts, of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, offered this response: "It's absolutely against the law for the church to raise money for political causes. The church does raise money for religious, humanitarian and other efforts, but at no time has the church ever raised money to support legislations before the United States House of Representatives. I would take issue with anybody who would suggest that the church is engaged in fundraising for political activities."
O'Hurley-Pitts acknowledged that Catholicos Karekin II, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church -- who is presently visiting the United States -- "has repeatedly supported the passage of an Armenian genocide recognition throughout the world."
But "he does not support political activity," said O'Hurley-Pitts, adding that "the reason he supports genocide recognition is because without recognition there can be no condemnation, and without condemnation there can be no prevention."
According to O'Hurley-Pitts, there are actually 1.5 million Armenians in the United States, and "it doesn't take an act of Congress for Armenians to see the gaping holes in their family trees."
Bryan Ardouny, executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America, describes the community as a "very close-knit, educated and passionate constituency."
"In terms of organization, certainly you have various churches throughout the United States," he says. "It's not that the church is by any means an arm of the Armenian lobby, but . . . part of the consciousness of all Armenians."
Money for lobbying, says Ardouny, comes "from individual support, from individuals who care obviously about what we're doing, who care about the U.S.-Armenian relationship, that want to see Armenia make the strides it's making in terms of its democratic reforms and its independence."
He adds that "the ongoing denial campaign of the Turkish government" helps to bring the Armenian community together.
The real reason for the genocide resolution's passage by the Foreign Affairs Committee, says Ardouny, is that "we have the truth on our side."
There is no debate in Washington over the validity of the resolutions claim, he argues. House members worried about supporting it "have talked about a timing issue, but the Turkish denial position has no defenders on Capitol Hill."
Another factor, he says, is the current recognition that genocide is occurring in Darfur: "With genocide still unfolding in Darfur, the consciousness in America has certainly been raised to that issue. If you can't affirm the Armenian genocide how are you going to address future and current genocide?"
In July 2004, the House and Senate passed a resolution declaring that the atrocities then unfolding in Sudan were genocide and urging the Bush administration to refer to them as such.
Flip-Flopping Lawmakers
But American "consciousness" of genocide has certainly not reduced the controversy surrounding the Armenian resolution, the intensity of which is evidenced by the shifting positions of U.S. House members on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
The most prominent example may be that of California Democrat Rep. Jane Harman. Harman, who notes that her "own family was decimated by the Holocaust," initially cosponsored the latest version of the resolution.
In early October, however, as the resolution came up for a committee vote, she suddenly flipped her position. In a subsequent Los Angeles Times op-ed, she offered this explanation for her change of heart:
After a visit in February to Turkey, where I met with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Armenian Orthodox patriarch and colleagues of murdered Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, I became convinced that passing this resolution again at this time would isolate and embarrass a courageous and moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world.
While Harman's actions drew media attention -- not to mention the attention of young Armenian activists, who reportedly confronted her at an early October political rally in California with shouts of "genocide denier, hypocrite and liar" -- less attention has been
given to the actions of another, more influential House member, who has long gone back and forth on the issue.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, also a California Democrat, cosponsored and publicly supported one of the first Armenian genocide resolutions back in 1984. But Lantos, who like Harman is Jewish, and is the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to U.S. Congress, changed his stance during the 1990s. When the issue was brought to a vote again in 2000, he said he opposed it because it would be "counterproductive" for Turkish-Armenian,
Turkish-Greek, and Turkish-U.S. relations.
When the resolution came up again in 2005, Lantos again changed his position, and began supporting it. Then the Foreign Affairs Committee's ranking Democrat, he said he wanted to punish Turkey for refusing to allow U.S. forces to invade Iraq through Turkey two years earlier. "Our Turkish friends need to understand that support from the United States for matters that are important to them is predicated upon their support for things that are important to the United States," Lantos said at the time, suggesting he saw the issue in terms of a quid pro quo.
Lantos remained in favor of the resolution this time around, a development that "shocked and angered" Turkish diplomats in Washington, according to the Turkish Daily News. A week after the vote, the pro-Turkey, English-language publication ran with the headline, "Turkey Loses Jewish Alliance," and asserted that Jewish-American lawmakers such as Lantos had been "unimpressed" by Turkey's efforts to lobby against the resolution. Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan's foreign policy adviser reportedly criticized Lantos' vote, saying, "we have seen that his understanding of history is changing with time."
Evinch, of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations, says the quid-pro-quo reasoning behind Lantos' support for the resolution shows just how bluntly political the Armenia issue has become.
"When [Lantos] said that, I could see then that the level of debate around this issue was rapidly descending to a sort of hard politics that had nothing to do with the substance of the Armenian claim," said Evinch. "I look at Lantos as a wise person and not a person that would stoop to those levels, who would support a resolution as a quid pro quo to get back at Turkey."
The Role of Jewish and Pro-Israel Groups
Other analysts say Turkey's foreign policy in recent years has contributed to the unease among would-be Turkey supporters in the U.S. government, including many in the Jewish community who had previously supported Turkey as a beacon of Islamic moderation in the Middle East. Most notable has been the Turkish government's increased diplomatic and economic relations with Middle East actors hostile to the United States and Israel.
In February 2006, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal was received in Ankara by members of Turkish President Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, putting Turkey alongside Russia as the world's only non-Arab country to open its doors to the Palestinian party. A Voice of
America report at the time noted that "Western diplomats said the visit would likely harm Turkey's strong ties with the Jewish state." Turkey has also increased ties with Syria, whose president, Bashar al-Assad, was in Ankara in mid-October voicing his support for the Turkish Parliament's passage of the measure to allow a Turkish military incursion into northern Iraq.
Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow and the director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says "the Hamas visit and other things such as the enhancement of dialogue between Iran, Turkey and Syria, have worked together to trip some people who have been watching with nervousness over Turkey's commitment to the West and how that commitment may be coming undone."
But, Cagaptay added: "I wouldn't say that American Jews have lost heart in Turkey, they still see it as an extremely valuable ally in the region."
Evinch shares a similar view, taking issue with assertions, such as the one made by the Turkish Daily News, that the Jewish community's support for Turkey is waning.
"In the Jewish-American community, there is a liberal part and a conservative part," said Evinch. "The Liberal part has become more and more sensitive to the Armenian perspective of World War I history, while the conservative part, which is thinking more about what is good for Israel, has been less receptive to the Armenian thesis."
Jewish-American advocacy groups in Washington and nationally appear to be carefully managing their public stance on the resolution.
The Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish organization, has publicly opposed any congressional resolution condemning the Armenian genocide. While ADL leaders wrote in an August statement that what Armenians went through at the end of World War I was "indeed
tantamount to genocide," they went on to say "we continue to firmly believe that a Congressional resolution on such matters is a counterproductive diversion and will not foster reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and may put at risk the Turkish Jewish community and the important multilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel and the United States."
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the leading pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying group in Washington, told World Politics Review that AIPAC has "not taken a position" on the genocide resolution. Asked why, she said: "It's not within the issues we focus on. That particular issue is outside of our purview."
Some Armenian-Americans have expressed frustration that Jewish groups have not taken a more aggressive stance in favor of the Armenian resolution. "It's certainly been a frustration point in the Armenian community here," said one prominent Armenian-American activist, who
spoke on condition of anonymity.
Other members of the Armenian community emphasize the support the genocide resolution has received from an array of interest groups. Ardouny, for instance, said the ADL took "a positive step forward" in publicly acknowledging that Armenian suffering was tantamount to genocide.
The Armenian Assembly of America has compiled a list of 53 "third-party organizations in support" of the genocide resolution. The list includes a variety of ethnic and national advocacy
organizations, such as the Arab American Institute and the Belarusan-American Association.
However, even with such support, concerns about a genocide resolution's consequences for U.S.-Turkey relations seem to be, for the time being at least, paramount in the minds of members of Congress. A number of Democrats last week pulled their support of the resolution, and in statements to the press Pelosi allowed for the possibility that the resolution will not come to a full House vote.
Guy Taylor is World Politics Review senior editor.
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