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Committee session was ‘unserious, ridiculous,’ says minister
The 46-member House Committee on Foreign Affairs endorsed the resolution on Thursday, as the 23-22 vote sends the measure to the full House of Representatives. Despite the objections of the Obama administration, the committee chairperson, Democratic Rep. Howard Berman, urged fellow members of the committee to pass the resolution.
“The Turks say passing this resolution could have terrible consequences for our bilateral relationship, and indeed perhaps there will be some consequences,” Berman said. “But I believe that Turkey values its relations with the United States at least as much as we value our relations with Turkey.”
Speaking at a press conference in Ankara, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu labeled the vote “unserious and ridiculous,” as he obliquely referred to Armenia, saying that the way the vote took place also proved the inappropriateness of judging historical facts through parliaments.
“If one sole vote was not on this side, but on the other, then the course of the history would have changed. If a consultant whispered to a member of the House of Representatives to say ‘no’ instead of ‘yes,’ then the result of the vote would have come out differently. Can history be decided with such frivolity?” Davutoğlu asked.
In Washington, Murat Mercan, head of Turkey’s Parliament Foreign Affairs Commission, who traveled to the US capital to lobby members of congress and who observed the vote along with other lawmakers, and Turkey’s Ambassador to the US Namık Tan, who has been recalled to Ankara for talks, focused on the same point at a press conference held at the Turkish Embassy following the vote. “Whenever politicians intervened in history, they messed up. As I have said on many occasions, Americans love comedy movies and sitcoms. If you ask me, we have seen today the biggest sitcom and comedy among the performances of the last several years,” Mercan was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.
Berman extended the voting period more than once and stopped the vote as soon as a sufficient number of votes for the adoption of the resolution was obtained.
“My personal conviction is that we have seen a farcical comedy because the voting took so long, as the entire public saw. Actually, it was prolonged extremely and unnecessarily to take advantage of procedural loopholes. I think that pressure was imposed on some members who we assume did not want to attend the vote,” Mercan said.
Berman is a representative from California, which has a strong Armenian-American population. An Associated Press analysis posted from Washington over the weekend called the committee “pro-Israel.”
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