Turkey pulls envoy after U.S. vote on "genocide" label
In a telephone call with Turkish President Abdullah Gul on Wednesday, Obama emphasized his administration had urged lawmakers to consider the potential damage to efforts to normalize Armenian-Turkish ties, a senior administration official said.
At a news conference in Costa Rica on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she and Obama, who both supported proposed Armenia genocide resolutions as presidential candidates, had changed their minds because they believed the drive to normalize relations between Turkey and Armenia was bearing fruit.
Turkey, a Muslim secular democracy that plays a vital role for U.S. interests from Iraq to Iran and in Afghanistan and the Middle East, accepts that many Armenians were killed by Ottoman forces but denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounted to genocide — a term employed by many Western historians and some foreign parliaments.
Turkey regards such accusations as an affront to its national honor.
UNCERTAIN OUTLOOK FOR MEASURE
The outlook for the measure passing the full House is as “tight” as it was in committee, the panel’s chairman, Howard Berman, said after the vote.
Similar resolutions have been introduced in past sessions of Congress but never passed both houses. Ronald Reagan was the only president to publicly call the killings genocide.
Clinton called Berman on Wednesday saying the measure could harm efforts to improve Turkish-Armenian relations. She warned on Thursday against a vote by the full House.
“I do not think it is for any other country to determine how two countries resolve matters between them,” she said in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Berman brushed aside Clinton’s entreaties. While Turkey was a “vital” ally, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide,” he said.
The price on Turkey’s 2030 benchmark Global Bond did not change after the vote. It remained down 0.44 points in price to 160, yielding 6.465 percent.
Turkey and Armenia signed accords last year to normalize ties after a century of bitter hostility that traces its roots to the 1915 mass killing and deportation of Armenians. The accords have yet to go through either parliament.
In his telephone call with Gul, Obama urged quick ratification of the accords, the White House said.
“The Turkish people and we all here are extremely upset,” a Turkish member of parliament, Suat Kiniklioglu, told reporters in Washington after the vote, which took over two hours.
“You will see in the coming days and week that the Turkish parliament and the Turkish government will take all necessary actions to make our displeasure known in no uncertain terms. … No one can equate our grandfathers with Nazis.”
Despite the victory in committee, the Armenian-American lobby was upset with the Obama administration for having come out against the measure at the last minute. It was a “stab in the back,” Kenneth Hachikian, chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America, told reporters.
The outcome was bipartisan, although Democrats tended to vote for the measure, while Republicans mostly voted against.
The resolution urges Obama to use the term “genocide” when he delivers his annual message on the Armenian massacres in April — something Obama avoided doing last year.
(Additional reporting by Daniel Bases in New York, Ross Colvin in Washington, Zerin Elci in Ankara and Andrew Quinn in San Jose, Costa Rica; Editing by Matt Spetalnick and Peter Cooney)