> What are thoughts here on the Armenian genocide resolution?
As Abdullah Gul said, US domestic politics. The Democrats see an opportunity to embarrass the Republicans for not passing another ritual expression of regret for popular suffering - mostly that which has occured outside America, as Doug notes - even though the Clinton administration also balked at doing so. Right-wing Republican fundamentalists will have a particularly difficult time with the administration for favouring Muslim Turks above Christian Armenians. There are also about one million Armenian-American voters, and most states have passed similar resolutions.
The Defence and State departments are strongly opposed to the resolution because Turkey is a NATO ally and, in particular, they need to overfly it to resupply the occupation force in Iraq.
> A Turkish trotskyist I knew resisted the characterisation of the early
> 20c.
> massacres as a genocide. He said that there was no doubt that the
> Armenians
> were run out of town, robbed and murdered on their way. But that it was
> wrong to characterise it as a systematic, state-organised genocide on a
> par
> with Nazi Germany. It sounded convincing to me.
To me, too. On the other hand, reserving use of the term only for the Nazi extermination does tend, as critics have noted, to diminish the importance of the Armenian and other large-scale atrocities by comparison. I think we can refer to the Judeocide and still understand genocide as referring to less systematic but equally murderous pogroms against whole peoples.
> And then there is another question about the political deployment of
> genocide resolutions to undermine the legitmacy of another government.
> Isn't
> it for the Turkish people to pass judgement on their government/come to
> terms with the persecution of the Armenians. Turks describe this agitation
> as playing on anti-Turkish prejudice, and I am not sure they are wrong.
Nor am I.
> On the other hand, Turkish nationalism in the form of raids against the
> PKK
> bases in Iraqi Kurdistan, is to be abhored.
Sure. But retaliation is a fact of life whenever you get cross-border raids - the main purpose of which, in this case also, is to force the host government to crack down on the guerrillas operating from its territory with the support of the population.