STRANGE COINCIDENCE

The US Congress House of Repre-sentatives Committee on Foreign Affairs has approved a resolution calling on the United States to consider the so-called "genocide of Armenians in the Turkish Ottoman Empire" in its foreign policy. "Congress calls on the US president to describe the systematic and deliberate extermination of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide in his annual presidential address on the anniversary of the Armenian genocide on 24 April," the resolution says.

At the same time, three hours before the session of the committee, US President George Bush urged the congressmen to vote against the resolution. "We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people in 1915, but this resolution is not the right response to mass killings that belong to history and its adoption will cause enormous damage to our relations with a key NATO ally in the global war on terror," Bush said.

US State Secretary Condoleezza Rice and US Defence Secretary Robert Gates also sent letters to Congress, stressing that the adoption of the "genocide" resolution will "considerably endanger US national security interests".

Eight former state secretaries, including Henry Kissinger, Collin Powell, Madeleine Albright, James Baker and others, also sent a joint letter calling on Congress to reject the resolution. The discussion of this resolution also caused a sharp reaction in Turkey itself. In a telephone conversation with Bush, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned the White House about the negative consequences of such a step by Congress for US-Turkish relations. Turkey's 11th president, Abdullah Gul, also sent a similar message to the US president, saying that the adoption of the resolution "will have serious negative consequences".

It must be noted that the recognition of the so-called "genocide of Armenians" in the US Congress committee coincided with the unprecedented activity of Kurdish separatists in Turkey. One terrorist attack alone claimed the lives of 13 soldiers. The synchronized work of some congressmen and the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party, also supported by the Armenian lobby, raises a number of questions which we will try to answer in our next edition.