Ambassador-to-be dodges Armenian genocide question

28-JUN-06
Howard News Service
By MICHAEL DOYLE
McClatchy Newspapers


WASHINGTON -- America's next ambassador to Armenia is a verbal gymnast. He has to be, to keep his job.

On Wednesday, career Foreign Service officer Richard E. Hoagland tread prudently through his confirmation hearing.

He picked his way around the word "genocide" in describing the mass slaughter of Armenians between 1915 and 1923. The events were "horrific" and "well-documented" and "historic," Hoagland told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but the genocide word did not cross his lips.

"It's a tragedy; everybody agrees with that," Hoagland said, but "instead of getting stuck in the past and vocabulary, I would like to see what we can do to bring different sides together."

While the highly decorated Hoagland appears a shoo-in for the Armenia post, his reticence did not sit well with the three senators who showed up for his confirmation hearing.

"It's almost absurd to sit here, and you can't utter the word 'genocide,' " said Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota. "We have ambassadors who can't use a word, just a word."

In regions like the California's San Joaquin Valley, southern California, New Jersey and Michigan, well-established Armenian-American populations maintain both a tangible and symbolic stake in U.S.-Armenia relations.

"The local community follows with great interest events in Armenia and also U.S. government policy," noted Barlow Der Mugrdechian, lecturer in Armenian Studies at California State University at Fresno.

In particular, Der Mugrdechian said, activists have been tracking the fate of Hoagland's predecessor, Ambassador John Evans. The Yale-educated Evans ran afoul of his State Department superiors when he acknowledged the accuracy of the phrase "Armenian genocide."

"I informed myself in depth about it," Evans told an Armenian-American audience in Berkeley, Calif., in February 2005. "I think we, the U.S. government, owe you, our fellow citizens, a more frank and honest way of discussing this problem. I think it is unbecoming of us, as Americans, to play word games here. I believe in calling things by their name."

That was contrary to the Bush administration's policy of avoiding the term, out of deference to Turkey's sensibilities. Within a week, the State Department issued a statement from Evans in which he called his remarks "inappropriate" and said he "deeply" regretted them.

State Department officials have declined to characterize Evans as having been fired, but his Armenian tenure was clearly cut short. He became ambassador in September 2004, and Hoagland was announced as his replacement in May 2006. By contrast, his predecessors served three-year terms.

Hoagland previously served as U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan. He has considerable experience with some dicey parts of the world, including service as the lead Afghanistan analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. While in Pakistan in the late 1980s, he worked with the Afghan resistance.

(Distributed by Scripps-McClatchy Western Service.)

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.