Turkey was our good ally, our faithful ally in NATO, had fought with us side by side in the Korean War and so on and so forth. We had big — enormous — strategic interests in Turkey and therefore in deference to Turkish policy we simply did not talk about those times or events. Q: Did you- still talking about the early days when you were getting ready to go out there- did you chat with anybody else of your colleagues in various positions; did they bring this up or was this sort of-? We had a furtive lunch one day in which he told me what he knew about the question.
And his law professor had no answer and so Rafael Lemkin went out to try to find a way to make a crime of these things. The other person I spoke to before going was, of course, Elizabeth Jones, the assistant secretary.
I called on her along with the Armenia desk officer, Eugenia Sidereas. Now, there are reasons for it but you know, we kind of let the Japanese get almost a free ride on World War II, on the rape of Nanking and its behavior in China.

The dilemma is between the truth of the issue, which is now virtually unassailable when you look at what has been done in the last 20 years by historians and not all of them Armenian-American or Armenian. There are some very distinguished historians, such as Donald Bloxham in the UK United Kingdom and others who have made it clear that yes, what happened in did fit the definition of genocide, whatever the…I mean, it was done against the background of World War I, yes, there had been rebellions by some Armenian armed groups, yes, but if you look at that definition, the shoe fits.
But still, the dilemma here is between historical truth, which is still disputed by Turkey but by no one else, and our diplomatic equities. Q: First place, with Armenia, how close is- is Armenia really the- sort of the center of Armenians or is this sort of an offshoot or what? The historic dividing line was between those who were in the Persian world, and that included most of the Caucasus and those that were in the Ottoman domains.
EVANS: We did have visitors from America, not from France, but we…I remember one of the big Armenian community groups, the Armenian Assembly, sent a large contingent through Armenia, through Yerevan, in the fall, it would have been in October or November of , and I addressed them. And I might mention that that was the only time, in all the time I was in Armenia, that the question of the Armenian genocide arose.
It never…I was never asked by an Armenian journalist about the genocide but I was asked a question by a member of this traveling group from the Armenian-American Assembly. Now, I should say a word about the Genocide Convention, if I may, because it was during this time that I became better educated on what the Genocide Convention really says. And what I discovered is that most of us Foreign Service officers are woefully ignorant about what the Genocide Convention says is genocide. There are basically four conditions that have to be met. But in and , under the leadership of Marc Grossman, who had been Under Secretary of state for political affairs, there was organized something called the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission, and that group was an independent, track-two kind of group composed of some well-known Turks and Armenians and it was called the TARC.
David Phillips was the executive director of if and this Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission looked at the events of , looked at the Genocide Convention, and came to the conclusion that at least some of the perpetrators of those events did know that their actions would lead to the destruction of the Armenians of Anatolia and therefore to refer to those events as genocide was fully justified, and that journalists and historians and others would be fully justified to continue to use that term.
But, at the same time, the Genocide Convention could not be invoked ex post facto to — in a legal sense — bring anyone to justice. So, in short, what this commission basically decided was that historically it was a genocide but in legal terms to press that claim against the government of Turkey would be unsuccessful. And I think that was a fairly wise way of splitting the difference. All the perpetrators of those events are now, by definition, gone, most of the victims are gone. And I was…I made myself familiar with those findings, they were brought to my attention; I met with one of the people who had worked on that and I must say I thought this was a very reasonable way forward.
Q: Well then, was sort of the bureau pushing on all this or was this something that you all thought should be done? I mean, the EUR Bureau was just carrying on its daily business as it does every day, driven by the news on the front page primarily. There was no desire to unearth old history. But it was around this time that I was asked to make a speaking tour through the United States, particularly to communities where there was a dense population of Armenian-Americans.
So I was scheduled to make a tour, a speaking tour, in February , starting in New York, moving up to Boston and then going to the West Coast to Los Angeles, which is the biggest concentration of Armenians in the United States, and then to San Francisco. And it was right about this time in the beginning of late January of that my wife flew back to the United States to be with our daughter, who had discovered that she needed to get a divorce from her then-husband and she was emotionally a wreck. And so I had time to read that.
So I became more and more, as the date for beginning my speaking tour in America came closer and closer, I realized that I was facing a huge dilemma here.
So I set off for the United States not knowing how I was in the end going to respond to questions about the Armenian Genocide. That was a very brave thing for him to have done. I agreed with him from what I knew of that situation and his action emboldened me to endeavor not simply to be a bystander on a question of genocide but to stand up and say something about it.
Even though it was 90 years in the past I felt that someone needed to take a stand on this issue and call it what it was. I knew that this would cause difficulty for me, I knew that it was contrary to the policy of the State Department and yet I felt that I was caught in a terrible dilemma between knowingly distorting the facts of history or coming clean and trying to deal with the facts while explaining the reasons for our policy, and that was the trap that I — or those were the horns of the dilemma — that I faced.
Ambassador John Bass arrived in Ankara over the weekend. Here is his intro video. He also he served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Missions Tags: Frank J. Ricciardone Jr. USEmbassyTurkey pic. At that time, the WH released the following brief bio:. Ambassador John R. Previously, he served as the U. Embassy in Rome, Italy. He served in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and his overseas assignments include serving at the U.
Ambassador Bass received an A. Ambassador Bass had his confirmation hearing on July 15, He was confirmed by the U. Senate on September 17, Ricciardone, Jr. What is it like to take over as ambassador to Turkey, post-gaffe? News , John F. Oh, yeah? Ambassy in Ankara released the following statement: The U. LGBT men and women face fighting for equality in their home country or Iranian LGBT refugees in central Anatolia in Turkey wait an average of two years for nine months ago once family and friends found out about their relationship.
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