The administration of US President Barack Obama on Friday sought to limit fallout from a US resolution branding the World War I-era massacre of Armenians by Turkish forces as “genocide” and vowed to stop it from going further in Congress.
Turkey was infuriated and recalled its ambassador after a US House of Representatives committee on Thursday approved the nonbinding measure condemning killings that took place nearly 100 years ago, in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.
A Democratic leadership aide said there were no plans “at this point” to schedule a vote of the full House on the measure and a US State Department official said this was the administration’s understanding as well.
“We believe it will stop where it is now,” the State Department official said as the Obama administration sought to limit damage to relations with Turkey, a NATO ally crucial to US interests in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East.
The resolution squeaked through the House Foreign Affairs Committee 23-22 on Thursday despite a last-minute appeal against it from the Obama administration.
The issue puts Obama between Turkey, a secular Muslim democracy that looks toward the West, and Armenian-Americans, an important constituency in states like California and New Jersey, ahead of the November congressional elections.
Similar resolutions have been introduced in many past sessions of Congress, but have never passed both the House and the Senate. In 2007, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed such a resolution, but it lost momentum and never came up on the floor after then-US president George W. Bush weighed in strongly against it.
After the committee’s vote on Thursday, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan warned of possible damage to ties with the US.
On Friday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said chances of Turkey’s parliament ratifying peace protocols with Christian Armenia were jeopardized by the vote on the 1915 massacres.
“The Obama administration strongly opposes the resolution that was passed by only one vote in the House committee and will work very hard to make sure it does not go to the House floor,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Guatemala City.
Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks, but denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounted to genocide — a term employed by many Western historians and some foreign parliaments.
The US envoy in Ankara, James Jeffrey, distanced the Obama administration from the panel’s vote after being invited for talks by Turkish officials.
“We believe that Congress should not make a decision on the issue. We are against new action,” he said.
There was also anger in Baku, Azerbaijan, a close Muslim and Turkic-speaking ally of Turkey. Its parliament warned that the US resolution could “reduce to zero all previous efforts” to resolve a long-standing conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
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