Turkey Up in Arms Over House Resolution Against Armenian ‘Genocide'

WASHINGTON — Turkey was so alarmed by a proposed House resolution calling the mass slaughter of Armenians by Turks during World War I a "genocide" that it dispatched its foreign minister to persuade American Jewish leaders to lobby against it.

At a suite at the Willard Hotel in Washington on February 5, Abdullah Gül met with representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Friends of Lubavitch, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and United Jewish Communities. According to one participant in the meeting, the Turkish foreign minister "made a hard sell," against House resolution 106, whose short title is "Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution."

This participant, who asked not to be named, said Mr. Gül appealed to the assembled Jewish representatives by noting the singularity of the German genocide against the Jews and warning that the House resolution, if passed, would rupture American-Turkish relations.

The Turks have reason to be worried. Although the resolution has faced opposition from the House leadership in previous congressional sessions, the current speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, is said to support it. Indeed, Ms. Pelosi has supported similar resolutions in the past. The resolution is now before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, whose chairman, Rep. Tom Lantos of California, has supported the Armenian genocide resolution in recent sessions, though he opposed it in the past.

"In the past, the speaker was a very strong obstacle, Speaker Hastert. He was a strong opponent of genocide recognition," one of the resolution's authors, Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California, told The New York Sun. "We start with a new speaker and a new slate this time."

Another original sponsor of the resolution, which now counts 176 co-sponsors, Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat of California, said: "In the past some Jewish organizations or elements thereof or prominent individuals have come out against this kind of resolution. ... Aipac is neutral on this; they see this as controversial and not all that related to Israel. An awful lot of Jewish groups are supportive of recognizing the Armenian genocide. They are for genocide acknowledgement rather than genocide denial."

Mr. Lantos's office would not offer a comment on the resolution yesterday.

The committee chairman is in a difficult position. While he is a champion of human rights and a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Lantos is also a strong supporter of Israel, which prizes its strategic friendship with Turkey.

The Turkish government denies that its military campaign between 1915 and 1917 against the Armenians was a genocide. The Turks contend that the Armenian families they force-marched and shot were effectively a fifth column, often armed and working on behalf of the Russian army in World War I.

The Turkish account, however, is at odds with that of the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry Morgenthau, who wrote in his 1919 memoir, "I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this." The orders for the deportations of the Armenian families in 1915 "were merely giving a death warrant to a whole race," he wrote.

Morgenthau's grandson, Robert Morgenthau, said yesterday that he thought the passage of the resolution in this Congress was "extremely important."

"You know in 1939, just before the Poles were invaded by Hitler, it was August 21, 1939, Hitler met with his generals and told them, ‘I want every man, woman, and child in the paths of our armies killed.' For people who say, ‘What will the world say?' I say, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?'" Mr. Morgenthau, the district attorney of New York County, said.

Mr. Morgenthau also said he believed that Jews in particular had an obligation to acknowledge the Turkish campaign against the Armenians as genocide. He recalled a conversation he had with Prime Minister Sharon when he was the Jewish state's foreign minister. Mr. Sharon said he had read "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh," the 1934 novel by an Austrian Jew, Franz Werfel, that was based on the unsuccessful efforts of some Armenian partisans to defend themselves from the Ottoman army.

"There ought to be protests from the Jews," Mr. Sharon said, according to Mr. Morgenthau.

Some Turkish diplomats have threatened American bases in Turkey with closure if Congress passes an Armenian genocide resolution.

A pro bono attorney for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, David Saltzman, said the mere introduction of the resolution "brings up strains in Turkish-American relations. It is really a grand diversion from the more important issues that our countries work on together."