Sweden Passes Genocide Bill

March 22, 2010

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The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

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STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Combined Sources) — Armenia’s leaders thanked Sweden’s parliament on Friday for adopting a resolution that recognizes the Armenian Genocide committed at the order of the Ottoman leaders.

President Serge Sargisian hailed the development at a meeting with Goran Lennmarker, the visiting chairman of the Swedish parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. He said, “recognition of and condemnation of crimes against humanity is the best way to avert such crimes.”

Lennmarker had endorsed the resolution, which was opposed by the Swedish parliament but passed by a 131-130 vote. He said he would have voted for the measure had he not been absent from Stockholm during Thursday’s vote.

Lennmarker, who is better known in Armenia as the Nagorno-Karabagh rapporteur of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, visited on Thursday the Yerevan Genocide memorial.

Parliament speaker Hovik Abrahamian also welcomed the resolution, which had been condemned by Ankara. “I think that with its historic decision Sweden’s parliament … will also contribute to peace and stability in the South Caucasus,” Abrahamian said in a letter to his Swedish counterpart, Per Westerberg.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned, meanwhile, that the Swedish vote “can hurt relations between Turkey and Armenia.”

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The foreign ministers of Turkey and Sweden condemned on Saturday a vote in the Swedish parliament that defined the early 20th-century killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who is holding informal talks with foreign ministers including Turkey’s Ahmet Davutoglu in northern Finland, said he was upset by the vote on Thursday and concerned it could affect Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.

“It’s regrettable because I think the politicization of history serves no useful purpose,” he told reporters.
“We are interested in the business of reconciliation, and decisions like that tend to raise tensions rather than lower tensions,” he said.

Sweden’s parliament, by a vote of 131-130, backed a resolution that branded the killing of up to 1.5 million Christian Armenians by Ottoman Turks as a genocide, a term that Turkey resolutely rejects.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt phoned his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Saturday and said he disagreed with the resolution, according to a statement on the Turkish prime minister’s official website.

The vote followed a decision by a committee of the US House of Representatives the week before approving a nonbinding measure condemning the 1915 killings.

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In both cases Turkey responded angrily, withdrawing its ambassadors to Washington and Stockholm.

The vote in the Swedish Parliament was particularly galling for Turkey as Sweden is one of Ankara’s strongest backers on issues such as Turkey’s desire to join the European Union.

Reinfeldt told Erdogan Sweden would continue to back Turkey’s EU bid and that the vote was driven by domestic politics and would not affect bilateral relations, the statement said. Erdogan canceled a planned visit to Sweden this month, and the government recalled its ambassador from Stockholm.

Davutoglu said Turkey would not stand by quietly if other nations took similar steps to describe the 1915 killings as a genocide and said it was pointless for countries to think they could put pressure on Turkey.

“We will not be silent and we will not just show the usual attitudes. For each case we will have a different [set of] measures,” he said.

“What is the purpose of this? If the purpose is to make pressure, nobody can make pressure on Turkey. if the purpose is to get local domestic concerns raised, Turkish historical events should not be misused for these narrow issues.”

Davutoglu, the architect of Turkey’s foreign policy of re-engaging with its neighbors, including Armenia, said it was wrong for parliaments to think they could define history purely via a vote.

He also said he was concerned about the impact the vote could have on efforts by Armenia and Turkey to reconcile their history and find a political common ground at a time when they are making progress toward normalizing relations.

The resolution also recognized the genocides committed during the same timeframe in Ottoman Turkey against Assyrians/Syrians/Chaldeans and Pontic Greeks.

The resolution cited a brief history of the events and referred to the UN Genocide Convention 1948, the European Parliament and Official Recognitions and Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” during the 1940s and was the father of the UN Convention of Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

“Second to the Holocaust, the 1915 Genocide is regarded as the most studied case in the modern time. Today a broad and interdisciplinary consensus exists among an overwhelming majority of genocide scholars who regard the massacres in the Ottoman Empire during World War I as genocide and which is referred by the scholars as the ‘genocide prototype,’” according to one of the articles.

On another interesting note, two members of the Swedish Parliament of Turkish extraction, members of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Ibrahim Baylan and Yilmaz Kerimo, and one of Kurdish extraction, Gulan Avci, voted for the adoption of Armenian Genocide Resolution.

Another Parliamentarian of Turkish extraction — Mehmet Kaplan — opposed the resolution but did not vote though he was present.

(RFE/RL and Reuters contributed to this report.)

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