Armenian News... A Topalian 4 editorials

Reuters                                                     

Oct 29 2019

U.S. House backs measure recognising Armenian genocide

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday in favour of a resolution recognising the mass killings of Armenians a century ago as a genocide, a symbolic but historic vote likely to inflame tensions with Turkey.

The Democratic-controlled House voted 405-11 in favour of the resolution, which asserts that it is U.S. policy to commemorate as genocide the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923.

The Hill, DC

Oct 29 2019

House votes to recognize Armenian genocide

By Juliegrace Brufke

The House passed a resolution on Tuesday officially recognizing and rebuking the Ottoman Empire's genocide against the Armenian people and rejecting any efforts to enlist the U.S. government in denying that the genocide took place.

Proponents of the long-delayed measure, which passed in a 405-11 vote, argue that it's a necessary and overdue step in providing justice for Armenians. Three lawmakers voted present.

The resolution was introduced by Rep. Adam SchiffAdam Bennett SchiffJudge schedules hearing for ex-Trump aide who refused to appear in inquiryTop Republicans say impeachment resolution is too little too lateEx-Trump official's refusal to testify escalates impeachment tensionsMORE (D-Calif.), a vice chair of the Congressional Armenian Caucus.

“Many American politicians, diplomats and institutions have rightly recognized these atrocities as a genocide, including America's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry Morgenthau, and Ronald Reagan," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot EngelEliot Lance EngelFormer White House official won't testify, lawyer saysThis week: House to vote on Turkey sanctions billHouse leaders threaten contempt if former White House official defies subpoenaMORE (D-N.Y.) said on the floor ahead of the vote.

"Only by shining a light on the darkest parts of our history can we learn not to repeat them and properly acknowledging what occurred is a necessary step in achieving some measure of justice for the victims,” he added.

The bill emphasizes the position of the House that U.S. policy will "(1) commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance; (2) reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise associate the United States Government with denial of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide; and (3) encourage education and public understanding of the facts of the Armenian Genocide, including the United States role in the humanitarian relief effort, and the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day crimes against humanity."

“Genocides, whenever and wherever they occur, cannot be ignored, whether they took place in the 20th century by the Ottoman Turks or mid-20th century by the Third Reich and in Darfur," Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), a co-chair of the Armenian Caucus who helped lead the efforts on the measure, said on the House floor.

The resolution comes amid U.S. tensions with Turkey following Ankara's military incursion into northern Syria after the Trump administration pulled troops from the area earlier this month. Turkey does not recognize the murder of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide.

Bilirakis said it is time Congress address the injustices committed by the Ottoman Empire, saying he believes Turkey’s “current actions against our Kurdish allies is extremely concerning and we cannot stand by and let egregious human rights violations happen.”

"Today we end a century of international silence that will not be another period of indifference or international ignorance to the lives lost to systematic murder,” he said.

The House later passed a bill to place additional sanctions on Turkey on Tuesday in the wake of their incursion against U.S.-allied Kurdish troops.

Reuters

Oct 29 2019

Turkey slams U.S. move to back measure recognizing Armenian 'genocide'

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu slammed a move by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday to vote in favor of a resolution recognizing the mass killings of Armenians a century ago as a “genocide”, saying the decision was “null and void”.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 405-11 in favor of a resolution recognizing the mass killings of Armenians a century ago as a genocide, a symbolic but historic vote likely to inflame tensions with Turkey.

In a tweet, Cavusoglu said Turkey had thwarted a “big game” with its offensive into northeastern Syria and that the move by the House was aimed at taking revenge for the operation.

“Those whose projects were frustrated turn to antiquated resolutions. Circles believing that they will take revenge this way are mistaken. This shameful decision of those exploiting history in politics is null&void for our Government and people,” Cavusoglu said on Twitter.

The Washington Post

Oct 29 2019

Trump’s dealings with Turkey pave way for House vote acknowledging Armenian genocide

By Paul Kane

Senior congressional correspondent and columnist

The Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians early last century is one of the most well-documented attempts at genocide on record, down to the U.S. ambassador’s contemporaneous description of a “campaign of race extermination.”

But it’s taken almost 100 years just to get one half of the U.S. Congress to acknowledge and affirm that such an atrocity took place and that, as stated by the nonbinding resolution, the U.S. government should no longer associate itself “with denial of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide.”

The resolution, which passed the House on a 405-11 vote Tuesday, is the culmination of decades of intense lobbying, worth tens of millions of dollars, if not more, from the Turkish government that could serve as its own PhD-level course in how Congress works — or, in this case, for the past few decades, how something doesn’t work and usually ends in deadlock.

And, like so much of the past few years, what changed the dynamics and allowed the resolution to finally win approval was President Trump and one phone call earlier this month. With no consultation with Congress, Trump called President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and agreed to withdraw almost all U.S. troops in northern Syria and essentially allowed Turkish forces to invade Kurdish strongholds to attack their longtime rivals, who for years had been the chief U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State.

With that, Turkey lost its already wavering support on Capitol Hill, and the dam burst with a flow of proposed sanctions, which also were approved by the House on Tuesday, and new momentum behind the long-stalled effort to officially recognize the Armenian genocide.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) smiled, pausing for five seconds and shrugging her shoulders, when asked if Trump’s move had eased the way toward recognizing the genocide.

“There was just an aura of what the Turks could be doing, is engaged again in genocide, by the greenlight that the president gave them. So that was sort of a callback,” Pelosi said Tuesday.

[Trump says U.S. will lift sanctions on Turkey, calling cease-fire in Syria ‘permanent’]

The resolution still faces an uphill climb toward winning passage in the Senate, but just this mere victory represented a seismic shift against the usual powers of Washington insiders to thwart things that seem so obvious to most people.

The resolution is one of the rare things that Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), bitter rivals as chairman and ranking minority-party member of the House Intelligence Committee, completely agree on.

“This is a vote I have waited 19 years to cast, one that tens of thousands of my Armenian American constituents have waited decades to see,” Schiff said during the floor debate. “It is a moment that so many have worked and fought and prayed for, a moment when the House of Representatives refused to be enlisted in the cause of genocide denial.”

“Armenian Genocide recognition could finally receive vote on House floor,” Nunes tweeted Monday, linking to a story about the pending vote.

Schiff was a central player the last time the House came close to voting on the Armenian genocide resolution, in October 2000 when he was a state senator running in what was then the most expensive congressional race of all time for his Los Angeles-area district.

The House speaker at the time, J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), campaigned for the incumbent, James Rogan (R), and promised to hold a vote on the resolution just weeks before the election, giving all credit to Rogan. The House minority leader at the time, Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), cried foul and said Hastert was playing domestic politics with foreign policy — but he also pledged to pass the resolution if Democrats won the majority and he became speaker.

However, in the last weeks before the November 2000 election, the State Department intervened and persuaded Hastert to stand down because Turkey served as such a critical NATO ally, particularly with its inroads to Middle Eastern nations.

Schiff went on to win the race and rise to national prominence as the lead investigator in the impeachment inquiry of Trump, but he could never get the full House to vote on the Armenian resolution — not even when Pelosi served as speaker for four years last decade.

[Rep. Adam Schiff is well-versed in the political ramifications of impeaching a president]

Instead, Turkey’s government, as well as its business alliances, built a lobbying behemoth that thwarted any effort at acknowledging what its predecessors had done.

Gephardt and Hastert, once out of Congress, switched sides and went to work for Ankara’s government.

From 2008 through 2015, Gephardt’s firm had collected $8 million, and just a couple months after his cooling-off period ended in early 2009, Hastert signed a $35,000-a-month retainer to lobby for Turkey and, among other issues, block the Armenian resolution vote.

Both Republican and Democratic leaders at Foggy Bottom, including former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, pushed back against repeated efforts to officially condemn the Ottoman Empire for its slaughter.

In 2017 and 2018, Turkey and its government-affiliated entities spent about $13.4 million lobbying Washington, according to Open Secrets, with its biggest firm, Ballard Partners, led by Trump’s most well-connected supporter from Florida. They also added the Daschle Group, founded by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), to bolster their bipartisan credentials.

But then Trump called Erdogan, and the Turkish military entered Syria and started attacking the Kurds, prompting some of the strongest bipartisan condemnation of the president the past three years.

Even the blockade that seemed to protect Turkey from the genocide resolution fell apart.

“There’s been no pushback,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) said before the vote, “because I think people are outraged over what Turkey was doing and they still do to the Kurds.”

The diplomats from Foggy Bottom did not bother to register their traditional strong opposition with Engel. “No one’s called me, no one’s called me. I think maybe they knew that I wouldn’t be influenced by it,” he said.