The Armenian Genocide – The Other Holocaust

The reluctance of the US Congress and a succession of American presidents to adopt a resolution recognizing the Genocide is particularly painful for the estimated 1.5 million Armenians who live in America. As Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had done during their campaigns for president, Barack Obama pledged on running for the White House in 2008 that he would support the introduction of a Genocide Resolution in Congress.

And as Clinton and Bush had done, Obama retreated from that pledge on assuming the presidency. While Obama has stated that he continues to believe personally that a Genocide had taken place, the Turkish government has mounted a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign and presented him with an offer that he has been unable to refuse. Regardless of any questions of conscience or the historical and moral upper ground that would be gained by recognizing the Armenian Genocide, Turkey has stressed to the United States that as a NATO member, it is America’s strongest military ally in the increasingly hostile Middle East and to back the Genocide Resolution would be a diplomatic insult to it.

Particularly ironic in the debate is that one of the fiercest past advocates for recognizing the Genocide has been one of Obama’s closest foreign policy advisors. Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations, authored the book “A Problem from Hell: America and The Age of Genocide.” In the book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 2003, Power said America’s failure to act more forthrightly against attacks against ethnic or political minorities in the 20th century – whether against Armenians, Jews, in Cambodia, Rwanda or Bosnia – has only ensured that the problem will carry over to the next century.

If there is a flicker of hope that this year’s commemoration might provide a revelatory moment of conscience as Pope Francis did last April on the 100th anniversary at St. Peter’s, it rests with Ambassador Power. If she needs a model, all she need do is view the last season’s episode of “House of Cards” in which the fictionalized US ambassador to the United Nations – the wife of the US President – decides at a press conference to unleash a withering verbal attack against the Russian president, standing a few feet away, because of his country’s inhumane treatment of homosexuals, a policy which has led to the suicide of an imprisoned American citizen. Her outburst costs her husband’s administration a diplomatic breakthrough with Russia but it is clear, at least in Hollywood’s eyes, that in some rare moments choices of conscience are the better course to take.

In the real world, however, President Obama has remained a resolute friend of Turkey, even looking past increased acts of repression by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan against the press, ethnic minorities and political foes. The White House went so far as to block public display last year of a rug that had been woven by Armenian youths orphaned by the Genocide and given as a gift to President Calvin Coolidge and the American people in thanks for their life-saving generosity in the 1920s.

Nowhere is the moral argument for adopting of the Genocide Resolution seen stronger – and the loss felt deeper – than with Israel. But such recognition would breach the long-standing and deep strategic ties that exist between Turkey and Israel. Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize the new state of Israel with the two countries formalizing ties in 1949, and those early ties developed into military and economic cooperation between them, which pertain despite frequent anti-Israeli outbursts by Erdogan in recent years.