Last Wednesday the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a nonbinding resolution labeling the killings of Armenians that began in 1915 as "genocide." The Bush Administration opposed the measure, as did eight former secretaries of state, as being not helpful in terms of the US’s relations with Turkey, a key ally in, among other things, the war in Iraq.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she will call the measure for a vote by the full House. Pelosi did not explain why it was important to do this now, other than to say "there’s never a good time and all of us in the Democratic leadership have supported" the resolution.
Two comments: First, prior versions of the resolution passed the House in 1975 and 1984, so passing it yet again seems a little unnecessary unless there were votes or contributions to be gained (complications for US foreign policy being irrelevant in that case) or a Republican President to be embarrassed (complications for US foreign policy being doubly irrelevant in that case).
Second, some will say, as did Bryan Ardouny of the Armenian Assembly of America, "It is long past time for the U.S. government to acknowledge and affirm this horrible chapter of history – the first genocide of the 20th century and a part of history that we must never forget."
It is important to not forget genocides in the past. However, I cannot help wonder if, instead of spending time and effort arguing whether what happened to the Armenians starting in 1915 was genocide or just "mass killings" (as the Bush administration has called it), we might better remember the victims of what happened in Armenia by trying to actually stop the killings that are going on in Darfur today.
In 1998 Bill Clinton went to Rwanda to say he was sorry for the killings that happened there in 1994. His apology was nice, but nicer would have been the people whose lives might have been saved if the United States had done something on a timely basis when the killings were actually happening.
Apologies are nice. Acknowledgments of past wrongs are good. But better than either of them is doing something now so that fewer apologies and acknowledgments are needed in the future.
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