When Barack Obama was elected to replace George W. Bush, who attracted protests not only in Muslim countries, but all around the world because of his violence-oriented, discriminatory policies, Ankara, like many other capitals, was relieved.
When he chose Turkey for his first bilateral visit and delivered his oft-quoted speech in İstanbul, spoke of a foreign policy mentality that would play nicely with Turkey’s new foreign policy and lent support to Turkey’s European Union membership process, the fondness for Obama increased further.
So far so good, but the adoption of the so-called genocide bill in the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, it seems, has put an end to the honeymoon, replacing hopes with doubts. Turkey’s reaction, manifested in the form of recalling its ambassador, an option which was not even considered during the Bush administration despite crises such as the Turkish Parliament denying permission to US troops to use Turkish territory in an attack against Iraq on March 1 and the hood incident, in which 11 members of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) were detained by US troops and hooded for 60 hours while they were interrogated on July 4, 2003, shows the seriousness of the situation. When Ambassador Namık Tan, who was appointed to replace Nabi Şensoy upon his resignation in December, will return is not known.
While this is not reflected in official statements, you can understand better the level of disappointment and reaction when you lend an ear to Foreign Ministry officials. Moreover, President Abdullah Gül’s statement that he “would not call Obama once again in connection with the genocide issue” is also indicative of Ankara’s reactions. So what is the cause of this reaction?
Foreign Ministry sources tend to attribute the failure of all Turkey’s efforts to ward off the bill to an executive order, known to many, which may be influential in this regard in Washington. The fact that they have received exactly the same response from all of the influential players in Washington they have referred to has further added to their doubts. A Democrat who was expected to vote in our favor but did not cast his vote although he attended the session is offered as more proof of this uniform response.
The logic that underlies this approach is this: “The committee’s adoption of the bill will urge Turkey to take action on the protocols. Turkey’s reaction can also be accepted. So let’s sit down and watch.” Turkish officials tend to believe that this was the main approach adopted by the Obama administration until voting day. “The adoption of the bill will adversely affect Turkey from a psychological standpoint. A negative attitude from the US administration will disrupt Turkish-US relations. This will in turn sabotage Turkish-Armenian normalization,” some argued, it seems, but they failed to make any change.
The main reason for recalling Ambassador Tan, who is supposed to explain Turkey’s theses to Washington by staying there, is the reaction felt in the face of the Obama administration failing to take the slightest action until the last minute. In order to understand why Turkey resorted to the action of recalling its ambassador -- which is generally used as a method when there is a need to send a strong signal to the interested party -- and why it has not sent him back to date, we need to underline two points. First, for the first time, a US administration chose to remain silent in the face of the claims. Second, the bill, which has been brought to the agenda many times before, was adopted before April 24, which is the critical date for the genocide claims.
For this reason, Ankara is as much concerned about what Obama’s attitude will be on April 24 as about whether the bill passed by the committee with a one-vote difference will be introduced to the full House. In this case, the reason why the Turkish Foreign Ministry recalled the ambassador and has not sent him back without receiving a clear signal is, according to Foreign Ministry sources, to prevent more dangerous steps from being taken and relations from deteriorating further. Although it has not received any such signal so far, Ankara is considerably optimistic about the result. According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the solution cannot be obtained with these methods, but with the implementation of the protocols. They are convinced that the protocols have not died and the Azerbaijani-Armenian issue, which is the main obstruction, could be quickly settled if there was the will to do so. They attribute the relative slowdown in the process by which foreign parliaments adopt genocide bills and the narrow margin by which the bill was adopted at the House committee to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2005 proposal to set up a commission of historians and the protocols.
It is sad to see that the protocols, which were supposed to facilitate Turkish-Armenian normalization and the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, have amounted to a problem. Yet, shouldn’t we criticize Armenia for voicing ratification of the protocols as a precondition for ending its occupation in Azerbaijan as we do Erdoğan for slowing down the ratification process and talking about deporting the illegal Armenian immigrants in Turkey?
Abdülhamit Bilici/Today's Zaman
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