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Bush backs away from 'genocide' on Armenia issue
WASHINGTON - Caught between a campaign promise to Armenian Americans and the concerns of his own State Department, President George W. Bush on Tuesday sided with the diplomats.
Bush scrupulously avoided the term "genocide" in a written commemoration Tuesday of what he termed instead "these infamous killings (that) darkened the 20th century and continue to haunt us to this day." In so doing, Bush followed the lead of his father but also antagonized the Armenian American activists who feel once again misled by the White House.
"I'm obviously disappointed," said Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa. "It didn't do what we wanted it to do, but I think it's something we just keep pursuing."
Toward that end, Radanovich planned to re-introduce legislation Wednesday which essentially seeks to use the genocide term avoided by the administration.
The Armenian National Committee of America, which had bombarded the White House with an estimated 100,000 postcards in recent weeks, likewise described itself as "profoundly disappointed" with what it termed Bush's "broken promise."
"Armenian groups thought that this time around a presidential candidate who promised to call the genocide a genocide if elected, and Bush was just one in a series, would keep his word," said Dickran Kouymjian, director of the Armenian Studies Program at California State University at Fresno. "He has not."
During last year's presidential campaign, while pursuing the roughly 1 million Americans of Armenian descent, Bush had signaled a different intent. Employing the key word that's the centerpiece of a long-running dispute, Bush said then that "the Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign."
The campaign phrasing was carefully noted in California, home to an estimated 500,000 Armenian Americans. Bush further promised that, as president, he would "ensure that our nation properly recognizes the tragic suffering of the Armenian people."
On Tuesday, neither Bush nor his White House press secretary spoke publicly about the Armenians. Instead, the White House released without fanfare a five-paragraph statement late in the afternoon. In an oblique reference, Bush's written statement praised "the spirit that survived again in the face of the bitter fate that befell so many Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire."
Of the suffering, there's no question. But assessments of what happened in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923 can vary intensely. Turkish officials peg the number of Armenian deaths during the period at about 600,000, and stress the chaotic and mutually destructive nature of the conflict.
"It was the Ottoman Armenians' violent political alliance with the Russian forces, not their ethnic or religious identity, which rendered them subject to the relocation," the Assembly of Turkish American Associations said in a statement.
Armenian officials say the death toll reached 1.5 million, and resulted from a centrally planned, attempted destruction of an entire people. Under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as intending "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Specific acts including murder and "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" can be covered by the term.
State legislatures including California's have adopted resolutions characterizing the 1915-1923 events as genocide. Congress and the White House, though, continually get entangled in the issue, and presidents traditionally have avoided use of the term certain to inflame Turkey.
A strategically placed NATO ally of the United States, and home to the heavily used Incirlik Air Force Base, Turkey lobbies aggressively every year against the recurring Armenian genocide resolutions. At the national level, Turkey often succeeds.
"Turkey, with a collapsed economy, seems to be putting more money and effort in denying genocide than in helping out rural farmers losing everything they own because of the collapse of the Turkish lira," Kouymjian said.
Last year, at the urging of President Clinton, House Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled from the House floor at the last minute a resolution that deployed the genocide term. In so doing, Hastert broke his own pledge to the Armenian American leaders in Southern California, to whom he'd promised a House vote.
Bush's father, too, had to confront the conflict between campaign
rhetoric and geo-political strategy. Though the senior Bush had,
while campaigning in 1988, declared that the United States "must
acknowledge the attempted genocide of the Armenian people," he backed
away from this language once in the White House.
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