News

Genocide Resolution Draws Ire: Turkey Rebukes House Panel for OK'ing Measure

By Farah Stockman, The Boston Globe,  March 5, 2010

WASHINGTON - The House Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly passed a nonbinding resolution yesterday that condemns the World War I-era killings of Armenians as genocide, despite warnings by the Obama administration that such a move would anger Turkey, a key US ally in the Middle East, and would put fragile reconciliation efforts between Turkey and Armenia at risk.

The resolution, passed by a razor-thin margin of 23 to 22, calls on President Obama to recognize the events that led up to 1.5 million deaths beginning in 1915 as a systematic attempt to destroy the Armenian people in his presidential statement marking Armenian Remembrance Day on April 24.

Turkey, which insists that the deaths were from war and unrest, issued a scathing rebuke after the vote.

“We condemn this draft resolution, accusing the Turkish nation with a crime that it has not committed,’’ the Turkish government’s statement read.

Armenians in the United States have been lobbying for decades to get the killings recognized as genocide. The resolution has been championed by congressmen from California, home to the largest Armenian population in the United States. All five members of the panel from California supported the measure.

The issue has also been closely watched in the Boston area, home to some 21,000 Armenian-Americans.

“We are very pleased,’’ said Mariam Stepanyan, executive director of Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown, where about 8 percent of residents are of that descent.

But geopolitical forces have always prevented such a resolution from passing on the House floor. In 2007, after a House panel passed a similar resolution, the Bush administration persuaded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, not to bring it to the House floor for a vote, because of the US need for Turkey’s cooperation in Iraq and elsewhere. It is not known whether this resolution will reach a floor vote.

This time, congressmen had yet another reason to vote against the resolution: Last year, Turkey and Armenia signed an unprecedented protocol aimed at normalizing relations. But the agreement has yet to pass the Parliament in either country.

Yesterday, Representative William D. Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat on the committee, said the resolution could ruin chances for a diplomatic breakthrough, so he voted against it.

But Peter Koutoujian, an Armenian-American state representative from Waltham whose grandparents fled the killings, hailed the vote, calling the genocide “a historical truth.’’

“I respect Congressman Delahunt, but I disagree completely with the reasoning,’’ Koutoujian said. “Each year this resolution comes up, there is a claim that the timing is bad. If not now, when?’’