Pope remembers Armenians killed in WWI
Hagar Hajjar Chemali is founder and CEO of Greenwich Media Strategies LLC. She was Director for Syria and Lebanon at the National Security Council and Spokesperson for the US Mission to the United Nations under the Obama administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.
(CNN)For years, the Armenian-American community has called on US presidents to officially recognize the 1915 mass killings of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide. Their failure to do so has been a perennial feature of American politics for decades.
And yet, despite his well-known disregard for facts, the one president uniquely positioned to speak the truth after so many of his predecessors have refused is Donald Trump.
This is because of two defining aspects of his approach to international relations: he doesn’t care what other countries think about his foreign policy; and he wants to achieve what he believes his predecessors could not.
We all know the reasons to make this declaration. It’s the right thing to do. It respects historical facts, and appropriately honors those killed. It upholds our values as a nation to speak truth to power. It also answers the call of a key American constituency: the United States is home to roughly 1.5 million Americans of Armenian descent — the second largest population of Armenians outside Armenia. But these reasons have always been there and every modern-day US president surely understood them.
They also understood that such a move would upset Turkey — which vehemently denies that a genocide occurred — and felt it could possibly undermine a number of important joint efforts with the key strategic ally.
President Barack Obama came close to making the genocide declaration several times. At the beginning of his tenure, after promising to make this declaration during his campaign, he decided against making the move because he did not want to disrupt or undermine Turkey-Armenia reconciliation talks that were taking place at the time.
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Later in 2015, the Obama administration came close to making the declaration for the 100th anniversary of Armenian Remembrance Day, but the administration was concerned such a move would undermine joint efforts with Turkey to combat ISIS in the region.
President Ronald Reagan is the only sitting US president to have used the word “genocide” in describing the atrocities, and he called on others to follow through on an official recognition — but neither Congress nor subsequent Presidents did this. Like President Obama, President George W. Bush also promised during his presidential campaign that he would make this declaration, but did not.
The United States continues to work with Turkey in a number of ways that support US national security objectives, for example on counterterrorism efforts in Syria. The United States also provides military aid to Turkey and has used the air base at Incirlik to support military operations in the region — a factor that is glaringly significant given the current situation in Syria and related mounting global tension. And of course, although it is unclear how much this matters to President Trump, Turkey is a NATO ally.
Up to this point, the Trump administration has been following the apparent tradition of not making a declaration. President Trump’s statement last year on Armenian Remembrance Day, made weeks before Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to Washington, like every other such statement before it, fell short of recognizing the Armenian genocide.
But now the time is ripe for President Trump to make the genocide declaration.
First, Turkey’s recent actions go directly against our national security objectives and the resources we have put behind achieving them.