Marcel Berlins, Guardian: US genocide resolution is an ignorant stunt

[Judi Lynn]

US genocide resolution is an ignorant stunt
Definitions of genocide are difficult but one thing is clear: the US Congress has no business ruling on the Armenian claim
Marcel Berlins guardian.co.uk,
Monday 8 March 2010

Marcel Berlins guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 March 2010 Article historySo the foreign affairs committee of the US House of Representatives has passed a resolution (by 23 votes to 22) that the Turkish killings of Armenians in 1915 amounted to genocide. What business is it of theirs? I'm not judging whether their decision was right; I don't know enough to do that. My concern is that such ham-fisted intervention, and the publicity it received, demeans a crime which should be treated as the worst in the annals of human behaviour, and turns it into a political event played out by largely ignorant legislators responding to a campaign by a well-funded political lobby.

Thankfully, their presumptuous decision will not find its way into the statute book. President Obama doesn't want it to, just as an identical decision by the House of Representatives in 2007 did not become law because President Bush didn't find it politically expedient.

The word genocide and its original definition were crafted by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, in 1944. In 1948 the UN adopted the convention for the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, which defines it as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". (The defendants in the main Nuremberg trials in 1946 were not charged with genocide as such but a statement outlining their alleged war crimes accuses them of "deliberate systematic genocide – viz, the extermination of racial and national groups – against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories, in order to destroy particular races and classes of people, and national, racial or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others".)

The 1948 UN definition has come under critical scrutiny (for instance, can you intend to destroy "in part"?) with many experts offering different versions. But the gist remains the same.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/08/marcel-berlins-us-genocide-ruling

[Demeter]

1. Tell It To the Armenian-Americans

Solidarity. Not just for us Poles.

[Chulanowa]

2. It's our business for a very good reason

The more political and trade partners accept the facts of the Armenian genocide, the stronger the pressure for Turkey to finally accept its own history and deliver to the Armenians what is their due for the crime against their people.

The only well-funded political lobbies I see are the ones trying to prevent recognition of the Armenian genocide.

[Igel]

3. Waht the Turks did in 1915 is no business of the Americans,

is this guy's position. Right? Let's stipulate that had Turkish actions directly affected the US it would be the US's business. It's the lack of clear relationship that makes it not our business.

Why, then, is it that what the US Congress does in 2010, unless it has a clear relationship with Britain, is any business of the British, French, or South Africans that Berlins should state his opinion? After all, opinion-stating is so meddlesome.

Then again, since Berlins has a South African connection, why would South African apartheid be of any concern to Britain or the US? (Besides, of course, colonial claims Britain had on the territory.)

Of course, Berlins knows that he's more likely to have an effect in criticizing the US than in critizing Turkey.

Odd, actually. Berlins is originally from Marseilles, a city founded by Greeks from Asia minor. Moreover, it was a center for Greek nationalism before 1914. Of course, it was Greek nationalism and fear of independence of territories--with the possible fall of the central government--that lead to the Greek and Armenian genocides by Turkey, and the near extirpation of Greeks from Asia minor after a more than 2500-year-long sojourn by the relative newcomers to the land, the Turks.