After years of dancing around the issue, the U.S. Congress is about to take a stand on the massacre of more than a million Armenians in Turkey during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has already approved a resolution that calls the mass killings an act of genocide. The entire House is likely to vote on it next month and may well pass the non-binding resolution, despite fierce opposition from President Bush, the State Department and the Pentagon. The issue may be almost a century old, but it is not just a debate about history.
Members of Congress who back the resolution, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, see it as a vote winner among their ethnic Armenian constituents. But the Turkish government, which insists the Armenians were casualties in a bloody civil war, sees it as a gratuitous insult, and it could seriously damage relations with a NATO government whose help is needed in the war in Iraq.
Turkish protest against Armenia resolution
The Turkish government has temporarily recalled its ambassador from Washington to show its anger. The Bush administration is worried that it could go much further and bar the United States from using Turkish facilities to supply American forces in Iraq. Seventy percent of U.S. air cargo and about 30 percent of fuel supplies pass through Turkey. It would be time consuming and expensive for the Pentagon to arrange alternate routes, but that is not the only potential problem.
The timing of the House resolution could hardly have been worse. There has been a sudden upsurge in attacks on Turkish soldiers by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), a militant ethnic movement that has been fighting for independence from Turkey for years. The Turkish government has asked parliament to give its approval for an armed incursion into the Kurdish area of neighboring Iraq, which the PKK uses as a staging area.
The United States opposes the move because it could touch off more fighting in a part of Iraq that has been relatively quiet so far. The Turkish parliamentary vote was expected to be a symbolic gesture by a government that has been accused of weakness by the army and the Turkish public. But after the move by the U.S. Congress, the Turkish government is less likely to listen to American calls for restraint and will be under great pressure to go into Iraq.
Most observers believe the Turkish government would prefer to make a brief cross-border raid. The Turks already have a small number of special forces in Iraq, but sources close to the army say it wants to establish a permanent military presence in northern Iraq.
PKK fighters in Iraq
Aside from the official aim of going after the PKK, experts believe the Turkish army has other motives – to prevent the Iraqi Kurds from declaring an independent state next door to Turkey, and to stop them from grabbing all of the rich oil resources around the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, which the Turks would also like to develop. But a Turkish military presence in a country that is already occupied by American forces (even though there are relatively few Americans in the north) could have serious consequences. The Iranians, who have their own ethnic Kurdish problem at home, could be tempted to cross the border to help the Turks box in the Kurds in northern Iraq, and at that point, things could become very messy.
The Armenian genocide resolution may be a cheap and easy vote getter back home in the run-up to the 2008 elections, but it could have unintended consequences that America will be paying for in the future. Many observers hope Congress will think again before tossing a match into the Iraqi tinderbox.
