Possible US envoy to Yerevan refrains from 'genocide' word

A U.S. diplomat who has been tipped as a possible ambassador to Yerevan acknowledged the 1915 deaths of over 1.5 million Armenians during a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday yet he did not term the events “genocide.”

“The characterization of those events is a policy decision that is made by the president of the United States and that policy is enunciated in his April 24 Remembrance Day statement,” John Heffern said in the hearing, Asbarez Armenian News reported.

President Barack Obama issued a statement on April 24 about the events in Armenia in which he called the 1915 events “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century”, but did not use the word “genocide.” In the statement, Obama said that “a full, frank, and just acknowledgement of the facts is in all of our interests.”

The president’s statement was met with concern by both Turkish and Armenian officials. One Turkish official told USA Today that Obama’s statement was “one-sided” and “distorts the historical facts” while the chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America criticized Obama for failing to call the events “genocide.”

New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez led Heffern’s interrogation and said the Obama administration’s failure to label the events as “genocide” subverts American moral standing with regard to genocide prevention.

“We have a historical knowledge of the facts that we accept would amount to genocide,” Menendez said at the hearing. “But we are unwilling to reference it as genocide. And if we cannot accept the past, we cannot move forward.”

Argentina, Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Russia, and Uruguay are among the nations that use the word “genocide” to describe these events. Britain, Israeli and the U.S. use different terminology.


/Hurriyet Daily News/