ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey warned yesterday relations with its ally the United States would be damaged if a US congressional panel votes this week to label a World War One-era massacre of Armenians by Turkish forces as genocide.

The Armenian issue has poisoned ties between NATO member Turkey and the United States in the past. In 2007, Ankara recalled its ambassador to Washington for consultations after a US panel approved a similar bill.

Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounted to genocide — a term employed by many Western historians and some foreign parliaments.

Ankara has said such a resolution would also hurt efforts by Turkey and Armenia to normalize ties.
“We want to believe that the Committee members will act responsibly and that they are aware that the acceptance of the bill could damage Turkey-US ties as well as the efforts of peace and stability in the South Caucasus,” Turkey’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Burak Ozugergin told reporters.

The nonbinding resolution, to be voted on Thursday by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, would call on US President Barack Obama to ensure that US policy formally refers to the massacre as “genocide” and to use that term when he delivers his annual message on the issue in April — something Obama avoided doing last year.

Obama visited Turkey last April, and his administration sees Turkey as a key ally whose help it needs in solving confrontations from Iran to Afghanistan.
Turkish lawmakers visiting Washington to lobby US lawmakers against the resolution said the Obama administration should do more to stop it.
When the issue last arose in Congress in 2007, then-President George W Bush and some Cabinet members explicitly warned against passage, and the measure never came to a vote on the House floor.

“My impression is that the (Obama) administration is not fighting against it very effectively,” said Sukru Elekdag, a lawmaker and former Turkish ambassador to the United States.