Resolution lacks historical basis

House Resolution 304 constitutes an attempt to legislate history and to charge Turkish people with the crime of genocide without any legal evidence or impartial historical assessment.

H.R. 304, introduced on June 14 by Rep. Robert Dold, R-Ill., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., calls upon the president of the United States to characterize the World War I-era ethnic strife in the Ottoman Empire as “Armenian genocide.” The United States acknowledges the sole jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to draw conclusions on whether an ethnic atrocity constituted a genocide. No conclusion was ever drawn by ICJ or any other international court regarding the Armenian claims against Turkey.

The resolution lacks historical basis, as many renowned American scholars on the Ottoman history, including Bernard Lewis, Justin McCarthy, Guenter Lewy, Michael Gunter, Edward Erickson and others, reject the application of the “genocide” definition to the mentioned claims.

The Turkey-Armenia protocols, signed in October 2009 with support of the United States and international community, sought the establishment of an independent historical commission to study all atrocities of World War I.

If H.R. 304 was about fundamental human rights rather than interest-driven ethnocentric agenda, their sponsors also should have been concerned about Armenia's ongoing occupation of the fifth of neighboring Azerbaijan. The expansionist war launched by Armenia, condemned by the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly, resulted in close to 30,000 civilian deaths and displacement of more than 1 million Azerbaijanis from their homes.

Agshin Taghiyev

Iowa City