Obama still won't refer to the Armenian genocide by name. He should end the charade

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/23/obama-armenian-genocide-end-the-charade

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“The Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence,” said a US senator named Barack Obama in 2008, before he sought to be elected to the highest office in the land.

He was right then. He is so very wrong now.

On 24 April 1915, near the end of the Ottoman empire, more than 200 Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul, most of whom were in government custody, were killed. More than a million of their kin were killed in the following year as part of a national program designed to quite literally decimate the Armenian populace of the crumbling empire.

In 2008, Obama was unequivocal about his plans to acknowledge that history: “As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide.” In the ensuing 7 years, he has yet to do so. What irks isn’t just that he broke a campaign promise – politicians do that all the time – but that he would refuse to acknowledge historical facts he’s already admitted to knowing.

The reason for his studied ignorance is entirely too obvious: Turkey is a valuable NATO ally, and has been (sometimes) helpful in the fight against the Islamic State (Isis). Given Turkey’s attacks on the Pope and the European Union for recognizing the genocide, Obama is seeking to avoid a tiff with another ally.

The Guardian reported that the fight against Isis and even the “safety of US diplomats and troops in Turkey,” entered into the administration’s decision to continue the policy of not saying “the g-word”.

The Turkish government, however, is in the wrong – and the US government need not and should not remain complicit in denying the truth of the Armenians’ history.

The 1949 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

That what happened to Armenians in Turkey fits this description is impossible to deny – and yet the Turkish government does so unabashedly, lashing out at anyone who defies their ahistoricism to acknowledge what scholars and people of conscience alike – not to mention Armenians themselves – rightfully call the Armenian genocide. The Turkish overreaction serves a purpose: to intimidate those who would dare to do nothing more than speak a historical truth.

Speaking to Foreign Policy, for instance, one Congressional aide nicely encapsulated the Obama administration’s hesitance to call what happened in Armenia “genocide” with a rhetorical question: “Is this the time to kick Turkey in the balls given everything that’s going on in the region?”

But there will never be a right time to enrage Turkey and it’s not worth it to continue to placate their denialism: the fight against terrorism will go on despite Turkey’s wounded pride. Turkey – unlike Libya, where post-revolutionary chaos led to a deadly attack on American diplomats – has sophisticated and heavy-handed security forces, so any failure to help protect US diplomats and troops there would be an abdication of its position as an ally.

There’s also a precedent for taking the risk that Turkey might withdraw its cooperation in the region in a fit of diplomatic pique: Iran. Iranian leaders’ ugly history of Holocaust denial reared its head in 2014 amid the tense and difficult nuclear negotiations: Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader chose that moment to tweet, “#Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it’s uncertain how it has happened.”

The Obama administration responded forcefully: a State Department spokesperson called the statements “inflammatory”, and adding, “They’re, quite frankly, abhorrent. And it’s insulting to the millions of people who died in the Holocaust” – in keeping with Obama’s comments in 2012 that “we pledge to speak truth to those who deny the Holocaust.”

Yet the nuclear talks continued apace.

What’s so troubling about Obama’s failure to acknowledge the Armenian genocide is that the pattern of denialism seen with the Holocaust is the same: some deny it outright; some question the specifics, such as the death toll; and other simply say more research is needed (though the Turks have blocked access to the full Ottoman archives). But there has been historical research aplenty – and there are first person accounts from Americans in the region at the time – so failing to acknowledge the facts is to acquiesce to the deniers’ position.

“State-sponsored denial is not a void, a simple absence of truth; it is a wounding instrument,” Raffi Khatchadourian wrote this year in the New Yorker, recalling his own family’s ordeal amid the genocide. Obama, and with him the United States, now wields that instrument, and our own hands are working in concert with the denialists of the Turkish government.In his cowardice, Obama has become complicit in a sort of wounding far more grave than Turkish pride: that of the Armenians whose lore includes watching their forebears forcibly deported and summarily executed, their bodies deposed in mass graves or floated down rivers into oblivion.

Just as failing to forcefully rebut Holocaust denial is to disrespect the memories of those Jews and others who perished, so is failing to rebut the Armenian genocide denial an affront to the memories of the Armenians who died at Ottoman hands. The President should speak truth to Armenian genocide deniers just as he does Holocaust deniers – whomever they may be.