Barkey: Turkey, U.S., Armenia play politics with word 'genocide'

Turkey, Armenia and the United States are playing politics with the meaning of the word genocide, Henri Barkey, the Bernard L. and Bertha F. Cohen Professor of international relations, wrote earlier this week in an op-ed column in the Washington Post.

Barkey’s column, “The Armenian genocide resolution is a farce all around,” was published Tuesday, March 2.

The U.S. House of Representatives, Barkey said, is considering a resolution that labels as genocide the 1915 massacre of more than one million Armenians by Ottoman Turks. The resolution will not only fail, he predicted, but it could also undermine President Barack Obama’s efforts to save a tenuous reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia.

Barkey also commented recently on the Feb. 22 arrests of 49 former Turkish military officers, the release of two of the officers, and the charging of 20 others with plotting to overthrow Turkey’s government. On Feb. 25, he was interviewed on the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer. On March 3, he published a column titled “The Sick Man” at National Interest Online.
 
Barkey, a nonresident visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is an expert on the international relations of the Middle East, especially Turkey, on terrorism and on international political economy.