If Bush has backbone, he'll condemn Armenian genocide

[Garo]

Charley Reese

April 26, 2001

Copyright © 2001, Orlando Sentinel

 

One test coming soon for President Bush will be when he speaks about Armenia. Will he have the stuff to refer to what happened to the Armenians from 1894 to 1915 as genocide?

 

If he does, Turkey, a NATO ally, will be greatly upset. It might even toss Americans out of its air bases from which we routinely bomb Iraq. The Turkish government has made a great effort in recent years to dismiss the Armenian deaths as casualties of a civil war.

 

It doesn't seem so. The Ottoman Turks, an ally of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany during World War I, distrusted Armenians, even though they had pledged their loyalty. Therefore, the Ottoman Turks decided to transport forcibly 2 million Armenians to Syria and Mesopotamia. As many as 1.5 million Armenians died. Seems like genocide to me. And there were other massacres after that.

 

In my more naive days, I once chided then-Sen. Bob "The sorryyyyy Pitchman" Dole for proposing a resolution commemorating Armenian genocide. I argued: Why stick our nose into a controversy that really does not concern us? I got angry mail from more Armenians than I knew even existed.

 

Since then, I've repented, though not because of the angry mail. If the United States is going to be the moralistic policeman of the universe, then, by God, let's not let diplomacy stand in the way of calling a spade a spade. If you're moving 2 million people and you lose 75 percent, I'd say you lost them on purpose.

 

So the president should speak out about the Armenian genocide, and, if the Turks don't like it, tough beans. He should not let the fact that they allow the use of their air bases or the prospects of an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea area influence his moral judgment. He's a Christian, and Christians are supposed to cherish the truth.

 

It's bad enough that we've been silent all the years about the several thousands of Kurds whom the Turks have "lost" in dealing with Kurdish desires for independence, or at least autonomy.

 

I have stated before that there is no more hypocritical government in the world than our own. No American dies for the cause of human rights. Americans die usually for business reasons or because leaders make stupid errors of judgment. I hope one day that we will quit falling for the patriotic human-rights baloney with which these business deals are papered over and say, "You're not sacrificing my son just so some businesses can make more money."

 

And if we're going to be moralistic, then let's call genocide genocide. It happened to the Armenians; it happened to the Ukrainians; it happened to the Tibetans; it happened to the Ibos in Nigeria; it happened to the Jews of Europe; it also happened to the Germans after the war. It probably has happened to others I'm not aware of. Mass killing is something the human race excels in, including Americans.

 

It's even clear that victims one year can become the perpetrators the next. It's too bad that so few believe the wisdom of the comedian who said, "In a world of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, everybody ends up blind and toothless."

 

But payback, when the opportunity arises, is a hard temptation to resist.

 

Getting back to Bush and his at-this-point confusing foreign policy, there are really two choices. We can play hardball, imperial politics in which we define right as what is in our interests at the moment and wrong as what ain't. Or we can take the moral high ground and support human rights and decline to associate with those who do not respect them.

 

The latter is by far the most difficult. If we followed it strictly, we could probably reduce the number of U.S. embassies abroad by about two-thirds. Contact with many so-called allies would have to be cut off. Human rights get a lot of lip service but very little practice in most parts of the world. Our own record would not stand a close scrutiny.

 

The other style is not that easy either, because what the government at any given moment decides is "in our interests" is frequently kept secret and has nothing whatsoever to do with the American people. Nor does it have anything to do with the publicly stated reasons.

 

Turkey is at least bluntly honest. It is not, for example, a good place to try a hunger strike. So far 17 people have died protesting prison conditions with hunger strikes, and the government had made it plain that it doesn't care if all of them die.

 

Turkey has never been a "friend" of the United States. It was just that during the Cold War we had the same enemy. But today we don't. Our mutually shared enemy, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. Therefore, no reason exists for either Turkey or the United States to do each other any favors.

 

Turkey is experiencing very hard times at the moment, and I would say is politically unstable. Now would be a good time to dig out old "sorryyyyy" Bob's resolution commemorating the Armenian genocide. Let's see if President Bush has the backbone to speak in favor of it.