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| Europe | |
| Turkey seethes, recalls US ambassador for talks | |
| 2007-10-11 | |
The ambassador would stay in Turkey for about a week or 10 days for discussions about the measure, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Levent Bilman. "We are not withdrawing our ambassador. We have asked him to come to Turkey for some consultations," he said. "The ambassador was given instructions to return and will come at his earliest convenience." State Department spokesman Tom Casey, said he was unaware of Turkey's decision, but said the United States wants to continue to have good relations with Turkey. "I'll let the Turkish government speak for itself," he said. "I think that the Turkish government has telegraphed for a long time, has been very vocal and very public about its concerns about this and has said that they did intend to act in very forceful way if this happens." Private NTV television said Turkey's naval commander had canceled a planned trip to the United States over the bill. Earlier, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Ross Wilson, was invited to the Foreign Ministry, where Turkish officials conveyed their "unease" over the bill and asked that the Bush administration do all in its power to stop the bill from passing in the full House, a Foreign Ministry official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make press statements. The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the bill Wednesday despite intense lobbying by Turkish officials and opposition from President Bush. The vote was a triumph for well-organized Armenian-American interest groups who have lobbied Congress for decades to pass a resolution. The administration will now try to pressure Democratic leaders in Congress not to schedule a vote, although it is expected to pass. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated his opposition to the resolution Thursday, saying the measure could hurt relations at a time when U.S. forces in Iraq rely heavily on Turkish permission to use their airspace for U.S. air cargo flights. Relations are already strained by accusations that the U.S. is unwilling to help Turkey fight Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq. About 70 percent of U.S. air cargo headed for Iraq goes through Turkey, as does about one-third of the fuel used by the U.S. military in Iraq. U.S. bases also get water and other supplies by land from Turkish truckers who cross into the northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Historians estimate up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by genocide scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey, however, denies the deaths constituted genocide, saying that the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest. "It is not possible to accept such an accusation of a crime which was never committed by the Turkish nation," the Turkish government said Thursday. "It is blatantly obvious that the House Committee on Foreign Affairs does not have a task or function to rewrite history by distorting a matter which specifically concerns the common history of Turks and Armenians." Armenian President Robert Kocharian welcomed the vote, saying: "We hope this process will lead to a full recognition by the United States of America ... of the genocide." Speaking to reporters Thursday after meeting European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Kocharian also appealed to Turkey to join talks on restoring bilateral relations. Turkey is under no pressure from the EU to call the Armenian killings genocide. The European Commission criticized France last year when that country's lower house voted to make it a crime to deny the killings were genocide. The upper house did not take up the bill, so it never became law. Turkey has warned that relations with the United States will suffer if the bill passes, but has not specified possible repercussions. U.S. diplomats have been quietly preparing Turkish officials for weeks for the likelihood that the resolution would pass, asking for a muted response. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said the Turks "have not been threatening anything specific" in response to the vote, and that he hopes the "disappointment can be limited to statements." Turkey ended its military ties with France over its bill last year. But a decision to cut far more expansive military ties with the United States could have serious consequences for Turkey's standing as a reliable ally of the West. "I don't think that Turkey will go so far as to put in doubt its whole network of allied relations with the United States," said Ruben Safrastian, director of the Institute of Eastern Studies of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences. "In the end, not only is the United States interested in Turkey, but Turkey is interested in the United States." Adding to tensions, Turkey is considering launching a military offensive into Iraq against the Kurdish rebels — a move the United States strongly opposes because it could destabilize one of the few relatively peaceful areas in Iraq. Iraq's Kurdish region is heavily dependent on trade with Turkey, which provides the region with electricity and oil products. Annual trade at Habur gate, the main border crossing, is more than $10 billion. In a recent letter, Turkish President Abdullah Gul warned there would be "serious troubles" if Congress adopted the measure. He reacted quickly Wednesday, saying "some politicians in the United States have once again sacrificed important matters to petty domestic politics despite all calls to common sense." Turkish newspapers denounced the decision. "27 foolish Americans," the daily Vatan said on its front-page headline, in reference to legislators who voted for the bill. Hurriyet called the resolution: "Bill of hatred." The U.S. Embassy urged Americans in Turkey to be alert for violent repercussions. Wilson said he regretted the committee's decision and said he hoped it would not be passed by the House. | |
| Posted by:Seafarious |
| #21 Yes, they came handy many times. I don't call 911. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2007-10-11 23:33 |
| #20 Good question. I guess they have to take a dump somewhere. By the way, you still using 2x4s? |
| Posted by: Hans Klass 2007-10-11 23:26 |
| #19 I thought Halloween is on 30th. Why they are crawling out of their holes just today?? |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2007-10-11 23:22 |
| #18 Way to go, LPG, insult one of this board's treasured participants. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-10-11 23:20 |
| #17 Ahhh...tw, with all those pedigrees, Lantos might just be the perfect fit for you. I'll spare you he grim details of how my maternal grandfather and his siblings, anti-Nazi activists all, suffered in Solingen, Germany in the early to mid 1930's. Why lash out at me? Beside your various ancestral pedigrees(Sniffle), daily bloviating and inflated sense of entitlement; just what point are you trying to make? Your antagonist is Lantos...not me |
| Posted by: Leonard Plynth Garnell 2007-10-11 23:01 |
| #16 Mike, how dare you have a different opinion! |
| Posted by: Hans Klass 2007-10-11 22:51 |
| #15 I fully support this resolution and would be happy if the Senate reconfirmed it every year for the next 20 years. I think the resolution should be improved by blaming not only the Turks in particular, but also the Moslems in general. The House ought to do the same. I would like to see Congress pass some resolutions asking the United Nations to establish a committee to study the feasibility of an independent national state for the Kurds who now are divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2007-10-11 22:45 |
| #14 We are at war. Of your own doing. And not everyone wants it. Perhaps if the majority of your citizens don't want it, you should accept it and move on. |
| Posted by: Hans Klass 2007-10-11 22:30 |
| #13 Having Armenian friends and having travelled to Armenia, I'll cheerfully admit to some bias in this. However, I'll ask that people consider whether there might be some wisdom in America beginning to show a consistent degree of support for and solidarity with Christian countries. As one of the oldest (~300AD)—if not the oldest—Christian nation on earth Armenia is deserving of that support. I fully comprehend why Turkey supposedly represents a vital ally in the Middle East. In light of their treachery during our invasion of Iraq, I have grave doubts as to their overall worth. The West's long term survival may well be better served by consolidating Christian and other non-Muslim nations against Islam. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-10-11 22:12 |
| #12 Some people simply aren't gifted with languages, Mr. Garnell. My father, though a reasonably brilliant biochemist, still sounds like he just got off the boat. He left Latvia in 1934 at the age of fifteen. The odd thing is, he has the same heavy accent in six or seven languages he speaks fluently -- including his three or four (depending on whether one counts Yiddish and High German as separate languages, or the former as a dialect) mother tongues -- and presumably in the handful of languages he doesn't speak as well. My mother, on the other hand, not only speaks her several languages like a native, but can accurately mimic the accents and speech patterns even of those from countries whose language she does not speak. She used to drive her professors crazy sounding like a different nationality each class... but on the phone made a point of sounding exactly like her sister, who'd spent the war safely on this side of the pond. Me? I take after Mama, without the control. It can be highly amusing after I've conversed a while with some of Mr. Wife's Indian colleagues. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-10-11 21:29 |
| #11 My Bad. Wih all due respect, that would be GEN David H. Petraeus, USA |
| Posted by: Leonard Plynth Garnell 2007-10-11 21:11 |
| #10 From out of the blue, Tom Lantos spearheaded the effort to get this POS issue through the wickets to high-viz MSM status, and to piss off our Type-"A" Turk "allies". The same Lantos, who ended his Gen Petraus Iraq SITREP dem kick-off flaying with his best Bela Lugosi, "I dunt bite" (General P, "I don't buy it"). I dunt bite? This from a "survivor" who has only lived and prospered in the U.S. for 60 years? |
| Posted by: Leonard Plynth Garnell 2007-10-11 20:57 |
| #9 WTF is the House messing with a bill like that anyway? Doing what all legislators do; responding to constituent pressures. The real question is why are there people in the U. S. who want to divert the country from its best interest in wartime to pursue their old world vendettas? It makes me think a lot less of Armenian-(so called)Americans that they are willing to undermine our national security in time of war and it reduces my sympathy for what happened in 1915 substantially. Leave the people in the old world to settle their problems and start acting like Americans. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2007-10-11 20:18 |
| #8 The Armenian killings were a great tregedy, among many great tragedies of the time. Not to minimize this tragedy, WTF is the House messing with a bill like that anyway? It does absolutely nothing, and wastes the time of the Congress, when there are plenty of issues that need resolution and closure. I see it as a way of sticking it to the President and his policies at the expense of the country. If relations sour and we are denied overfly or transit rights to Iraq, then it can seriously affect our troops health and well being. But seeing the Congress in action these past years, they are capable of this kind of stupid and harmful behavior. We are at war. We have to deal with a$$holes in the course of our actions. It is not a perfect world. It angers me to see congress critters playing these games in their safe little cubby holes while our troops put their lives on the line to protect their worthless a$$es. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2007-10-11 19:28 |
| #7 Did they ever pass a resolution calling mass killings of Europeans by Ghengis Khan as genocide? That'd be just about as relevant, wouldn't it? |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2007-10-11 18:48 |
| #6 In a way, I can see Turkey's point. Until Kemal Attaturk crushed the last of the Ottoman Empire and set up the current secular government, the government of "Turkey" as it exists today didn't exist. The Ottomans were a mixture of Kurds, Turks, Arabs, and just about anything else that could be tossed into the blender. Their defeat in World War I caused a LOT of hard feelings, plus gave many of their subject peoples the idea of forming their own nations. Britain and France encouraged that by partitioning most of the Muddled East into "nations" in the late 1919-1925 time period. Among the nations formed by the British and French were Syria, Lebanon, "Palestine", Transjordan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Borders of many states were redrawn, and plebecites were required in a dozen or more places. The Russians helped redraw the maps by conquering or absorbing more than a dozen smaller states in the Caucusus area following the Bolshevek Revolution. Places like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Transcaucasian Federated Republic arose at the end of World War I and then were absorbed into the USSR. The whole landscape has more border changes than modern Africa. A lot of the fighting was genocidal, not so much by design as by happenstance, as locals refused to give up the fight as long as two people were still alive. The US Congress needs to learn the history of this area and make rational decisions, not "feel-good declarations" that distort history and anger our friends. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-10-11 17:49 |
| #5 The native Americans are beginning to blame the Italian Columbus for what they consider genocide, but grumbling at the government is considered patriotic, working Homeland Security. |
| Posted by: Danielle 2007-10-11 15:54 |
| #4 This is not the first time. When I was in DC doing Govt. Relations for my old firm (we had considerable business in Turkey) they tried to pass this under GWB41. I think it was Dole who was on the Armenian side. Don't remember why but we had our hands full knocking it down (back then Turkey was cool, pro-American, pro-Capitalist and very much moving westward). But you could see that they were turning Islamic more and more. When I went there to meet with the Mayor of Izmir to talk about a new light-rail system, an Army General walked into our meeting unannounced and when he saw we were Americans he couldn't have been more relaxed and warm toward us. His number one concern then as now was the PKK and Islamicism. They have gone from 90% secular to about 35% in just 8 years. Scary because I never thought the miitary would ever allow that to happen. |
| Posted by: Jack is Back! 2007-10-11 15:52 |
| #3 ...a U.S. House panel's approval of a bill describing the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians as genocide Being that the House is under control of the Donks, I would say this is an effort to line up election support, to obstruct the war effort, and to embarass G.W. Bush. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-10-11 15:47 |
| #2 I think they are a bit thin skinned over this. If you look in their records I would not be surprised to find them accusing us of genocide on native Americans. (so many countries have done so...) Can't say we would even notice folks calling us names... its sort of a common thing. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2007-10-11 15:12 |
| #1 Well, considering how Turkey is completely becoming a Islamofascist state, all I can say is... "Whaaa." |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2007-10-11 15:01 |