Playing politics with history is a dangerous game

This week, when the Armenian Genocide Resolution comes in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, members will be pulling out their primary sources and Ottoman history books to finally decide what happened between Armenians and Turks over 90 years ago. Why now?

Rep. Adam Schiff, a co-sponsor of the bill, explained his motives this way:

How can we take effective action against the genocide in Darfur if we lack the will to condemn genocide whenever and wherever it occurs?

Tying this resolution to the United States’ half-hearted response to the atrocities in Darfur is a stretch. This is not to say that the Turkish government doesn’t need to confront its historical amnesia. The legal proceedings against authors Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak for “insulting Turkishness” and the recent murder of Armenian editor Hrant Dink show that the country has a lot of work to do.

But the truth is, this resolution is not the way to go about it. It will only strengthen hardline Turkish nationalists and strain already tenuous relations between the United States and one of its most crucial allies in the Middle East, Turkey. If U.S. lawmakers are really adamant about assigning blame for the atrocities committed towards the Armenians in 1915 (estimates put the death toll at 1.5 million), I suggest they take a closer look at the inaction of their own predecessors. Or perhaps pick up a copy of Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell to get an extensive account of congressional apathy towards genocide throughout the 20th century. But when it comes to resolutions like this one, they should leave history to the historians.