Friday, April 24, 2009

Radio Silence

CongoResources is on hiatus, a casualty of the current recession. I hope the link libraries will still be of use to readers until I return.

As I close shop--only temporarily, I hope--I note that Obama has just indicated he will not use the word "genocide" in his statement today on the Armenian remembrance. That's disappointing. So is the fact that the various genocide prevention and Holocaust memorial programs aren't making a big deal of this.

Various press accounts have suggested--without a lot of evidence--that Obama is helping to engineer what appears to be a fragile rapprochement between Armenia and Turkey, and that he didn't want to endanger that burgeoning relationship with language that would inflame the Turks. There's a plausible argument to be made that a certain pragmatism is in order, but the only people I would think in a position to make that call are the Armenians themselves, and so far I have not seen any evidence that they did so.

It will be interesting to see what Samantha Power says about this issue, given that she earnestly promised Armenian Americans that a President Obama would speak truthfully about the genocide. (I read elsewhere that she's just had her first child, so she should be given a margin of time to address the issue.) Still, if I had made the sort of promise she did, I would feel bound to tender my resignation. How else could anyone believe anything I would ever say again?