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Judging genocide...Strained relations between Turkey and America

“THE Mohammedans in their fanaticism seemed determined not only to exterminate the Christian population but to remove all traces of their religion and…civilisation.” So wrote an American consul in Turkey, in 1915, about an incipient campaign by Ottoman Turkey against its Armenian population. Today, Turkey explains the killings of huge numbers of Armenians—as many as 1.5m died—as an unpleasant by-product of the first world war’s viciousness, in which Turks suffered too. But Armenians have long campaigned for recognition of what they say was genocide.

On Wednesday October 10th America’s Congress stepped closer to endorsing the latter view. The foreign-affairs committee of the House of Representatives passed a bill stating that “the Armenian Genocide was conceived and carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923.” The bill has enough co-sponsors that it seems likely to pass the full House. The speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has a large number of Armenians in her home district and has promised the measure a vote on the floor. As a foretaste of the trouble this could stir up in Turkey, the country’s president, Abdullah Gul, immediately condemned the passage of the bill. He called it “unacceptable” and accused American politicians of being willing to cause “big problems for small domestic political games”.

Turkey is enormously important to American military efforts in the Middle East. So leading American politicians past and present have lined up to oppose the resolution. President George Bush has said historians, not legislators, should decide the matter. Turkey has hired Dick Gephardt, a former leader of the Democrats in the House, to lobby against the bill. All eight living former secretaries of state, from Henry Kissinger to Madeleine Albright, who lost three grandparents in the Nazi Holocaust, oppose the bill. So does Condoleezza Rice, who holds the post now. Jane Harman, a powerful and hawkish Democrat, initially co-sponsored the measure. But last week she urged its withdrawal. A trip to Turkey, where she met the prime minister and the Armenian Orthodox patriarch, changed her mind.

Ms Harman echoed an argument that others have made against the resolution: that Turkey itself is tiptoeing towards normal relations with neighbouring Armenia. The resolution could throw that process off course. But in other ways Turkey has not helped its own case: its criminal code has been used against writers within the country who dare to mention genocide. Continue @ The Economist