Wheel Column: The Politics of Genocide (10/19)

It’s been a key tenant of political thought in the West since the Holocaust:

If a country like the United States recognizes something as genocide ­­— acknowledges an act as the deliberate destruction of a group of people — then we have a moral obligation to intervene and stop the killing.

In the past few weeks, talk of genocide has been prominent in the United States, and especially at Emory. On Tuesday, Paul Rusesabagina, the man whose story formed the basis for the movie Hotel Rwanda, spoke at Emory about the genocide he lived through in Rwanda in 1994. In just three months, more than one million of Rusesabagina’s fellow Rwandans were killed.

The United States and the rest of the West sat that atriocity out on the sidelines, even though we knew exactly what was happening. President Bill Clinton has said that not intervening in the Rwandan genocide was one of the worst decisions of his presidency.

Genocide has been a hot topic nationally because of a resolution in the United States House of Representatives that would officially recognize the slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War as a genocide. Even though support for the bill has waned in the last couple of days, last week it still managed to pass the House Foreign Affairs Committee. This infuriated Turkey, which strongly disputes the claims of genocide, to the point where they recalled their American Ambassador to Ankara.

This resolution is pointless. Shame on Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership for continuing to push a bill that could seriously impair American efforts in the Middle East.

For the first time in what seems like years, President Bush is on the right side of an issue, encouraging Congress to vote down the resolution.

Turkey is one of our strongest allies in the Middle East and this resolution will harm vital American-Turkish ties to allow the Democrats to pander to a small minority — Armenian-Americans — that conveniently makes up a good portion of Pelosi’s district. Much of the logistical support helping our troops in Iraq passes through or above Turkey and if we were to lose the ability to use Turkey in the war in Iraq, our soldiers could be put at risk.

Pelosi claims that Turkey’s status as an ally has protected them for too long, and that the United States must call what happened a genocide. This the Democrats’ attempt to regain the moral high ground: Calling something that happened 90 years ago a genocide?

If Pelosi and the leaders on Capitol Hill want to actually do something productive about genocide, I suggest they stop pandering and do something to stop genocide today. There is still a genocide going on in Darfur. What is Nancy Pelosi doing to stop it? She’s attempting to win political points by focusing on a worthless resolution about genocide that would hurt our efforts in Iraq and alienate one of our few remaining Middle East allies.

Bravo, Madam Speaker. You’ve managed to demonstrate another way in which the Democrats have squabbled the trust voters placed in them last November.

Benjamin Van der Horst is a College junior from Cincinnati. He is executive director of the nonpartisan political organization CSAmerica and the managing editor of the Emory Political Review.