A House committee rejected warnings from the Bush administration yesterday and approved a resolution condemning Turkey for committing genocide against Armenians during World War I, an act the White House said could jeopardize military operations in the Middle East.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 27-21 in favor of the resolution, which will go to the House floor for a full vote in mid-November, Democratic leaders said.
“I just don’t know how many people can be destroyed before that word [genocide] can be applied,” said Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, New York Democrat. “Our friends in Turkey have to understand that they can get beyond this.”
But White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said President Bush was “very disappointed” with the result. “The president made it clear that this resolution could cause grave harm to U.S.-Turkish relations,” he said. “We will continue to oppose this resolution.”
The White House yesterday used its biggest guns to argue that a resolution could provoke Turkey to cut off U.S. access to its Incirlik Air Base — a key component of resupply routes for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Bush spoke in a hastily arranged statement to reporters. “We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915,” he said. But “this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings.”
Turkish President Abdullah Gul quickly denounced the resolution as “unacceptable.”
“Unfortunately some politicians in the United States of America have closed their ears to calls to be reasonable and once again sought to sacrifice big problems for small domestic political games,” the state news agency Anatolian quoted him today as saying.
Earlier yesterday, Mr. Bush met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, and then sent them to speak with reporters.
“About 70 percent of all air cargo going into Iraq goes through Turkey. About a third of the fuel that [U.S. troops] consume comes from Turkey,” Mr. Gates said.
Mr. Gates said U.S. military commanders raised concerns about the resolution because “they believe clearly that access to air fields and to roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes and the Turks react as strongly as we believe they will.”
Miss Rice said the military commanders “asked us to do everything we could to make sure this does not pass” and said “we are very dependent on a good Turkish strategic ally to help with our efforts” in Iraq.
The Armenian National Institute estimates that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed at the hands of the Turks or died from Turkish persecution between 1915 and 1923.
Democrats downplayed concerns about a Turkish reaction to the resolution, saying their threats will turn out to be false.
“We will get a few angry words out of Ankara for a few days, and then it’s over,” said Rep. Brad Sherman, California Democrat.
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, said the resolution “was about another government at another time, and should not be perceived … as a reflection on the present government, the Turkish people or their present posture.”
Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, was irate. “I just don’t understand why we’re going to cut our nose off, shoot ourselves in the foot at a time when we need this ally,” he said.
The committee hearing drew a standing-room only crowd that included Turkish officials and four elderly Armenian women who sat in wheelchairs at the front of the room, wearing stickers that read, “I am a survivor of the Armenian genocide.”
One of the women Sirarpi Khoyan, 102, who was born in Istanbul, said “there’s no two ways about” whether the Turkish killings of Armenians from 1915 to 1923 amounted to genocide.
“Of course it was [genocide],” she said.
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