Genocide bill clears hurdle

GLENDALE — The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved a controversial resolution that urges the president to recognize the Armenian Genocide, despite warnings from President Bush and eight former U.S. secretaries of state that passage of the bill would jeopardize the United States’ crucial alliance with Turkey.

The symbolic resolution still requires a House vote, but because a House majority has already co-sponsored the bill, Wednesday’s hearing was characterized by supporters as the measure’s most critical hurdle.

“That is the view of most everybody because just factually, we have more than half [of House members] signed as cosponsors . . . and with Speaker [Nancy Pelosi] supporting it, I can’t see how this fails unless something extraordinary happens,” said Harut Sassounian, publisher of the Glendale-based California Courier and president of the United Armenian Fund.

Whereas previous versions of the bill passed the committee in 2001 and 2005, those bills died in the House because former Speaker Dennis Hastert did not bring them to the floor. But this time around, with Pelosi reportedly supporting the resolution, supporters are expecting a vote.

Before the resolution passed Wednesday with a 27-21 vote, opponents of the bill echoed the president’s warning, even though they largely acknowledged and condemned the genocide.

“I can’t begin to tell you how my heart bleeds for the pain and the anguish the people from Armenia have suffered and are suffering, but I believe that we have to look at the here and the now,” said Rep. David Scott of Georgia. “. . . What was done to them is wrong. The issue is what is in the best interest of the national security of the United States? . . . Do we want to take a risk that the Turks will not remove and pull back the over-air rights that they’ve given us to fly our fighters into Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, what will we say if they say ‘I told you so’?”

Testimony during the more than four-hour hearing was often emotional, with supporters likening the task at hand to recognizing other well-documented dark chapters in history like the Holocaust. And after all, supporters said, the nonbinding resolution is only a symbolic affirmation of history, not an indictment of modern Turkey.