Armenian Americans Battle Bush Over Genocide Recognition
Pacific News Service, News Feature, Peter Micek, Posted: May 19, 2004
Editor's Note: From the Canadian Parliament to California's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, more politicians are describing the World War I-era massacre of Armenians as genocide. President Bush, like other U.S. presidents before him, is resisting -- a move that could hurt his re-election bid.
President Bush risks provoking an Armenian American voter backlash with his election-year refusal to grant the word "genocide" to the early 20th century massacres of Armenians.
Armenian Americans say Bush's latest sidestepping of the issue means he has broken a pledge he made in year 2000 campaigning.
White House political strategist Karl Rove should take note: Armenian Americans, estimated to number more than 1 million nationwide, are a well-assimilated and politically connected group.
Many Armenian Americans consider recognition of the Armenian Genocide their No. 1 political goal. Armenians and some historians estimate that between 1915 and 1923, as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks.
Sensing an opportunity, President Bush's main rival, Sen. John Kerry has already called the massacres of Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire "a dark period of history" that should be recognized as genocide.
Presidents of both parties have balked at granting official recognition of an Armenian "genocide," even after making campaign promises to that effect. That's because Turkey, a U.S. ally in a restive Muslim world, is opposed to any such terminology. Turkey denies any systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing took place as the Ottoman Empire crumbled.
Yet the Canadian Parliament, California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, The New York Times -- which freed its writers to refer to the "Armenian Genocide" without qualification -- and Idaho's government all decided to grant recognition this year.
Several of these moves coincided with last month's ceremonies to commemorate the 89th anniversary of the date, April 24, 1915, seen as the start of the massacres.
Idaho's declaration brought the total number of states that recognize the genocide to 36, including the electoral battleground state of Florida. In California, where some 500,000 Armenian Americans live, Schwarzenegger declared April 24 a "Day of Remembrance for the Armenian Genocide."
"This month was amazing," said Maral Habeshian, English-language editor of the Los Angeles-based Asbarez Armenian Daily, in an April interview.
The Asbarez Armenian Daily reprinted Schwarzenegger's statement and a statement issued by U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, who said recognition from the U.S. government is an important step toward avoiding similar tragedies.
"At the outset of the Jewish Holocaust, Adolph Hitler said that no one remembered what happened to the Armenian people during the genocide," Boxer wrote. "He then proceeded to implement his Final Solution."
Armenian Americans have now found common cause with efforts to gain recognition for other genocides.
Partly thanks to Samantha Powers' prize-winning book "The Problem from Hell," more attention is being paid to genocide and why it can still take place in a world as interlinked as ours.
In the book, which includes a discussion of U.S. indifference toward the Armenian Genocide, Powers indicts U.S. government denials and failures to act and shows how they helped fuel some of the last century's worst atrocities, including the Jewish Holocaust, Cambodia and Rwanda.
Last fall, a best-selling book, "Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response," by Armenian American author Peter Balakian, also publicized the issue.
Unlike an Armenian Genocide resolution that nearly came to vote in the U.S. Congress in 2000, a resolution pending now includes recognition for genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda and has a wider base of support, says Elizabeth Chouldjian, communications director of the Armenian National Committee of America.
Micheline Marcom, author of "Three Apples Fell From Heaven" and "The Daydreaming Boy," two novels set during and after the massacres, says young second- and third-generation Armenian Americans also have embraced the issue.
"Even among young people, it's very intense," says Marcom, who like many Armenian Americans learned about the massacres from immigrant grandparents.
Despite the recent attention and activism, the Bush administration has opposed the congressional legislation recognizing the Armenian Genocide.
On the April anniversary date, President Bush called for a "pause in remembrance" of the "annihilation of as many as 1.5 million Armenians through forced exile and murder at the end of the Ottoman Empire."
Armenian Americans, who remember a presidential campaign promise by Bush in 2000, remain "troubled" that Bush's statement avoided the word "genocide," says Armenian National Committee of America Executive Director Aram Hamparian.
In June 2000, then-candidate Bush sent a letter to the Armenian Assembly of America saying that Armenians were subjected to a "genocidal campaign" and that as president he would "properly recognize" their suffering. The Armenian Assembly took this statement as a pledge that Bush's administration would formally recognize the genocide.
"For the fourth year in a row, despite [Bush's] repeated calls for 'moral clarity' in the conduct of our international affairs, he has used evasive and euphemistic terminology to avoid properly identifying the Armenian Genocide as what it was," Hamparian says.
The National Organization of Republican Armenians, or NORA, acknowledges in a press release that President Push has fallen "short of formally declaring the Armenian Genocide a genocide," but says his statements have been more "strongly worded" than those of past presidents.
Past Armenian American voter history in Florida points to the danger candidates of any party face by not recognizing the Armenian Genocide.
In 2000, according to NORA, Florida's 18,000-strong Armenian community helped tilt the election away from candidate Al Gore. NORA's own polling showed 80 percent of Armenian Americans in Florida said they were influenced by the Clinton-Gore administration's broken promise, made during the 1992 presidential campaign, to recognize the Armenian Genocide.
PNS contributor Peter Micek (pmicek@pacificnews.org) works for NCM, an association of over 600 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service and members of ethnic media.
Also by Peter Micek:
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