Once more we have to forget the Armenian Holocaust – the first of the
20th
century – in order to appease the Turks. Bill Clinton did it.
George W Bush spinelessly caved in to the Turkish generals. And now our
favourite Nobel prize winner – another brave president who promised to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide if he was elected and then declined
to do
so – went whinging and whining to the House Foreign Affairs Committee
in
Washington and pleaded with them not to tell the truth about the
savage rape
and murder of 1.5 million Armenian civilians by the Turks in 1915.
Good for
the committee that it did not give in. But it will do no good.
Sure, the Turkish ambassador has been recalled from Washington in a
huff. But
equally certain is that there will be no vote on the genocide by the
full
House of Representatives. And if there is, there'll never be a vote in
the
Senate. Obama will help see to that. The man who wanted change doesn't
want
change on the little matter of a genocide that led directly to the
Nazi
murder of 6 million Jews.
The events in Washington prove a few things. The Armenian American
community
have a more powerful and wealthier lobby than ever before. More
seriously –
for the Turks – is that this year Turkey did not have the Israeli
lobby
behind it. In the past, Israel, which disgracefully claims that the
Armenian
Holocaust was not a genocide, has supported its close ally Turkey. But
this
year, Israel and Turkey have fallen out and the Israelis are still
miffed at
Turkey's condemnation of the bloodbath in Gaza.
The Turks sent their generals to bully Bush last time round. This time,
the
Turkish Foreign Minister warned that "Turkish-US ties are going
through
a very important phase in which they need strategic co-operation at
the
highest level in their history." The message is simple. Acknowledge
the
genocide, and the US will lose its airbases in Turkey and the Turkish
roads
its military convoys use into Iraq.
The fact, unfortunately, is that these roads are the very highways down
which
the Armenians were sent on their death marches in 1915. That's not
mentioned, of course. Our faithful Turkish ally might even pack up its
support for the US in Afghanistan, where they are helping fight
"Obama's
war". But Robert Gates is still in Washington to remind congressmen
what he said last year; that America needed "those roads and so on".
Well, let's just hope the American troops don't halt their convoys and
dig
in the fields around those roads in the coming years. The skeletons
are
still there in their tens of thousands.
One wonders what would happen if Germany suddenly decided that the Nazi
Holocaust was not a genocide. Would Chancellor Merkel get away with
it?
Would Obama lobby that Germany should be allowed to get away with such
an
obscenity? Perhaps it's worth remembering that in 1939, Hitler asked
his
generals – before setting off into Poland to murder the millions of
Jews in
eastern Europe – a simple question: "Who now remembers the
Armenians?" Well, Hitler got the answer he would have wanted from
Obama
this week.
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