Cohen's Turkey stance a puzzler
By Wendi C. Thomas (Contact), Memphis Commercial Appeal
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Unless he changes his mind, U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen is about to sack his budding reputation as a human-rights crusader. And he'll do it with a vote against a resolution to officially label as genocide the World War I era massacre of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Turks.
His stance on a resolution with broad bipartisan support is an unfortunate yet avoidable deviation from socially conscious positions Cohen has selected to stake out in his first year as a congressman.
Wendi C. Thomas
And it calls into question whether Cohen is the principled politician he portrays himself to be.
Not two months into his new job, Cohen introduced a bill to apologize for Jim Crow and slavery. After decades of representation by a black man with the last name of Ford, this move undoubtedly scored points with any black voters who wondered if a white congressman would have their best interests at heart.
In August, he withstood fire from some local black ministers against his support of a hate-crimes bill that would protect gay men and women, which had to play well with a liberal base worried that he'd cave under the pressure.
Cohen aborted an attempt to join the Congressional Black Caucus -- a politically savvy, if slightly silly, move to bolster one of his favorite assertions: He's so liberal, he might as well be a black woman.
But he's not. He's a Jewish man, which makes his denial of the 20th century's first holocaust unconscionable, says Dany Beylerian, whose grandparents survived the Armenian genocide.
Denial, Beylerian says, is the last stage of genocide. It thwarts complete mourning and inhibits healing.
Adolf Hitler, Beylerian points out, admired the Turks' systematic slaughter of Armenians and the absence of any punishment after the killing stopped. "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Hitler is quoted as saying in 1939. Just a few years later, his "final solution" had killed six million Jews.
But never mind the compelling moral arguments. All that matters, according to Cohen, is that supporting this resolution would rile a key ally in the Middle East.
"I regret whatever happened," he says, careful not to label the "whatever" as genocide, "but this is not the right time."
Military officials have said that passage of House Resolution 106 could threaten the safety of U.S. troops in Iraq, which rely on supplies trucked through Turkey.
Despite opposition from the Bush administration, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the nonbinding resolution Wednesday. It's expected to come before the full House within weeks.
Turkey's already stomping its feet; it has told its ambassador to come home and is threatening to withdraw support for the Iraq war.
Cohen has other reasons to mollify Turkey, not the least of which is the $256 million in goods Tennessee exported there in 2005.
Turkey is Memphis in May's honored country for 2008. That month, the U.S.-Turkey Study Group, a passel of leaders from both countries, will convene here. "I've got to factor in that I'm their host," Cohen says.
Under the guise of Southern hospitality, Cohen will bow to the arm-twisting Turkey exacts on all who broach the Armenian issue.
In Turkey, where Hitler's autobiography "Mein Kampf" is a bestseller, the democratic government is still struggling with the concept of free speech; Article 301 makes it a crime to insult "Turkishness." Suggesting that the Turkish government is guilty of genocide qualifies as such an insult. Article 301 has been a sticking point between Turkey and its attempts to join the European Union.
The government maintains that blood was shed on both sides and that the death tolls have been hugely inflated.
Among scholars, though, "there's about as much debate about the Armenian genocide as there is about the Holocaust," says Beylerian, a graduate of Rhodes College.
In the early 1900s, U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau witnessed what was happening in what was then the Ottoman Empire and described it as "racial extermination." In 1915 alone, The New York Times wrote 145 stories about the massacres.
