Amerikanen gaan over tot ontkenning Armeense genocide

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Rice warns against Armenia bill

The Bush administration has urged the US Congress not to pass a resolution declaring the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to be genocide.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates made a joint appeal hours before a vote by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Ms Rice said the passing of the resolution would be "very problematic" for US policy in the Middle east.

US ally Turkey disputes the scale of the 1915-1917 massacre.

Armenia alleges that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed in an organised campaign to force them out of what is now eastern Turkey.

That is strongly denied by Turkey which says that large numbers of Turks and Armenians were killed in the chaos surrounding World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire when Armenians rose up.

Turkish indignation

The bill must be approved by the Foreign Affairs Committee before it can be debated on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Even if it passes and is then adopted by the House, the bill will not be binding. President George W Bush has made clear that he also opposes it.

But the BBC's Sarah Rainsford, in Istanbul, says that such a nuance will have little impact on the reaction in Turkey.

Ankara has pulled out all the stops to prevent the genocide resolution reaching Congress for a vote, she adds.

Politicians have travelled to Washington to lobby lawmakers, while the country's prime minister and president have both contacted Mr Bush.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul warned of "serious problems that will emerge in bilateral relations if the bill is adopted".

All this comes on top of mounting anger that the US is not doing enough to counter the Kurdish separatist PKK group, which mounts deadly attacks on Turkey from inside Iraq, our correspondent says.

Armenian pressure

It is still extremely difficult to establish a set of undisputed facts about what happened in eastern Anatolia almost a century ago, the BBC's regional analyst Pam O'Toole says.

But the issue has been kept alive by the powerful Armenian diaspora.

Twice as large as the population of Armenia itself, over recent years it has stepped up efforts to get Western parliaments to recognise those events as genocide, with some success, and has even sought to link it to Turkey's efforts to join the European Union.

That has infuriated Ankara which, although it accepts that there were massacres by both sides at the time, completely rejects the allegation that there was a state policy to kill Armenians.

Some Turks fear if those events are recognised as genocide, that could open the door to claims for compensation or even territory, our analyst says.

And that taps into fears, deep in Turkey's political psyche, about the possible dismemberment of the country.

Only two years ago it seemed that a long standing taboo had been broken when academics were allowed to hold a conference in Turkey discussing the mass killings of Armenians at that time.

But since then rising nationalism inside Turkey itself has effectively halted further debate, our analyst adds.

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Op woensdag 10 oktober 2007 17:41 schreef Floripas het volgende:
Voor meer achtergrond in C&H: Armenen in Turkije, 50 jaar aan vervolging en slachting.

Wonderlijk toch altijd hoe historische gegevens een middel zijn voor politici om te paaien, gelijk te halen, anderen onderuit te schoppen, partij te kiezen...

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Op woensdag 10 oktober 2007 17:50 schreef Floripas het volgende:

[..]

Nee, Amerika is juist heel erg pro-Turkije. Daar kon die Kirimizi of Kirizi nog zo mooi over vertellen.

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Op woensdag 10 oktober 2007 18:26 schreef Apropos het volgende:

[..]

Ja, maar de opmerking van Klopkoek reikt zo ver niet.