BY YIGAL SCHLEIFER

(Eurasianet.org), March 9–Turkey watchers in Washington must have been feeling a sense of déjà vu after the March 4 passage by a congressional committee of a resolution recognizing the mass killing of Armenians during World War I as genocide.

The same House Foreign Affairs Committee adopted a similar resolution in 2007, leading Turkey to recall its ambassador to Washington and warn of a serious rupture in relations with the United States. A last-minute intervention by the Bush administration kept the resolution from coming up for a vote in the full House of Representatives.

Post-vote developments this time around are playing out in much the same way as in 2007. Ankara has again recalled its ambassador and has said its ties with Washington could be severely damaged, if the resolution continues on its way to a full vote.

“[For] a whole year Washington and Ankara are getting along very well, but come March storm clouds start forming,” political analyst Mehmet Ali Birand wrote in his March 5 column in the English-language Hurriyet Daily News. “We are watching the same movie over and over again. The only difference is that with each passing year the intensity increases.”

This year, the saga supposedly had a different plotline. The historic reconciliation framework that Turkey and Armenia signed last October was widely thought to take the legs out from under any effort to tar Turkey with the genocide label.

But analysts say a stalled reconciliation process, along with Turkey’s deep emotional reaction to the genocide issue, have, once again, created a potentially damaging situation for Turkish-US relations.

“We would not have been here, if the protocols had gone forward,” says Hugh Pope, Turkey analyst with the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based policy and advocacy group. “Turkey’s insisting on the conditionality, which was not part of the protocols, has led us to where we are today.” Pope was referring to a government demand that Turkish ratification of the reconciliation accords was contingent on movement on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenian forces.

The signing of the accords was initially hailed in Turkey as an important breakthrough. But Ankara seemed to put the brakes on the process after the protocols whipped up strong domestic opposition, as well as criticism from Azerbaijan, a traditional Turkish ally that is also a key component in Ankara’s energy policy. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

“Obviously there was an attempt by the Turkish authorities to try something else [other] than what they were doing for the last 95 years, and it failed,” says Cengiz Aktar, director of the European Studies Department at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University.

Now faced with another genocide resolution in Washington, Turkey appears to have returned to the same strategy that it relied on in previous years, one informed by a mix of deep emotional responses and political concerns. “It’s emotional because Turks are very much enraged to be portrayed as grandsons of people who committed genocide, especially when it happened during a time when tumultuous things were happing all over,” says Sinan Ulgen, Chairman of the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM), an Istanbul think tank.

“The second aspect [of the Turkish reaction] is the political and legal question; namely if such a bill is adopted in congress, that might lead to a situation where Turkey might find itself as a defendant in a number of legal cases in the United States, which is something Turkey doesn’t want to find itself in,” Ulgen added.

One of the important questions now is how far is Ankara willing to take things if the resolution goes to the House for a full vote — something that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has yet to decide on.

Brad Sherman, a Democrat from California, called Turkey a “paper tiger” and noted that, although France passed a resolution recognizing the genocide in 2001, trade between those two countries has since flourished.

Bahcesehir’s Aktar says he also believes Turkey’s threats are a “bluff.” But Ulgen predicted that “all bets are off” if Congress actually adopts the resolution, noting that the genocide issue is “an area where identity and emotion are in a sense superseding pure interests.”

“Turkey will certainly feel impelled to take retaliatory action against the United States,” Ulgen said. He went on to suggest that retaliation could “take the form of non-cooperation in terms of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly leading to restrictions on the use of strategic assets, like the Incirlik air base – areas where there is important cooperation.”

Another important question is just what happens to the stalled Turkey-Armenia reconciliation process?

“We are determined to press ahead with normalization of relations with Armenia,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on March 5 during a news conference in Ankara.

But analysts believe the fragile protocols may become a victim of political maneuvering in Washington over the genocide issue. “[Passing the resolution is] a bad idea. Even if it’s done with best intentions by the congressmen, what it will do is hand the process back to the nationalists on both the Turkish and Armenian sides,” says the ICG’s Pope.

Added Aktar: “Yesterday’s vote is the last nail in the coffin of these protocols, at least for the time being. I can’t imagine a Turkish government ratifying the protocols right now, even if the Armenian government unilaterally ratifies them.”

Copyright (c) 2010 Open Society Institute. Reprinted with the permission of the Open Society Institute, 400 West 59th Street, New York, NY 10019 USA, wwwEurasiaNet.org. or www.soros.org.

Photo credit: Tomas Maltby