Turkey irritated by Armenian genocide bill

Turkey condemned a House panel’s approval of a bill describing the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians as genocide. The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the bill Wednesday by a 27-21 vote despite intense lobbying by Turkish officials.

The committee’s vote was a triumph for well-organized Armenian-American interest groups who have lobbied Congress for decades to pass a resolution. President Bush warned that it could harm U.S.-Turkish relations, already stretched by accusations that Washington is unwilling to help Ankara crack down on Kurdish rebels based in Iraq.

Turkey’s President Gul was quick to attack the vote late on Wednesday evening, saying that some US politicians had “closed their ears to calls to be reasonable and once again sought to sacrifice big problems for small domestic political games”.

“This unacceptable decision of the committee, like similar ones in the past, is not regarded by the Turkish people as valid or of any value,” Gul said, according to the Anatolian news agency.

The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford in Istanbul says it is very unusual to hear such high-level political reaction so late at night – a sign of how seriously it takes this.

Meanwhile in Washington the US Undersecretary of State, Nicholas Burns, told the BBC that the Bush administration was “deeply disappointed”.

“The United States recognises the immense suffering of the Armenian people due to mass killings and forced deportations at the end of the Ottoman Empire,” he said.

“We support a full and fair accounting of the atrocities that befell as many as 1.5m Armenians during World War I, which House Resolution 106 does not do.”

Correspondents say the committee’s vote means that only a change of heart by the opposition Democrats, who control Congress, can now stop a full vote on the bill.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to take up their version of the resolution in the future.

Many analysts have pointed out that a public backlash in the key NATO ally could lead to restrictions on crucial supply routes to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the closure of the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik.

Turkey also is considering launching a military offensive into Iraq against the Kurdish rebels, which could destabilize one of the few relatively peaceful areas in the country.

Turkish newspapers also denounced the decision. The U.S. Embassy urged Americans in Turkey to be alert for violent repercussions.

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.

After France voted last year to make it a crime to deny the killings were genocide, the Turkish government ended its military ties with that country.

Meanwhile a senior lawmaker of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) called on American Jews to help. “It is time for all friends of Turkey to extend contributions,” he said.

The Jewish lobby in the United States has traditionally allied itself with Turkey, but Ankara was disappointed when an influential US Jewish group, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), revised its long-held stance in August and said the World War I events amounted to a genocide of Armenians. Since then, Turkish officials have warned that passage of the Armenian resolution in the US Congress would harm Turkish-Israeli relations as well.

In an interview published in The Jerusalem Post, Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said the widespread perception in Turkey is that US Jewish organizations have linked up with Armenian groups to “defame” and “condemn” Turkey and warned passage of the resolution would damage Turkish-Israeli ties. “All of a sudden, the perception in Turkey right now is that the Jewish people, or the Jewish organizations, let’s say, and the Armenian diaspora, the Armenian lobbies, are now hand-in-hand trying to defame Turkey and trying to condemn Turkey and the Turkish people,” Babacan said. “This is the unfortunate perception right now in Turkey. So if something goes wrong in Washington, it inevitably will have some influence on relations between Turkey and the US, plus the relations between Turkey and Israel as well.”

He did not spell out what specifically he expected from Israel, other than to say, “What we have done is told them the problems, and it is up to them to decide what to do and how to help the situation.”